A few weeks back, we were all excited about the RetroN 4 , a prebuilt franken-console that promised to play all your retro console games on an HDTV. Hyperkin was supposed to unveil their new console at the Midwest Gaming Classic last weekend, but the company decided to jump directly to the next iteration of its system with the RetroN 5.

What's new about the RetroN 5 is that it has an additional Famicom slot to play all your Japanese 60 pin cartridge games, in addition to its support for Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis as well as Mega Drive cartridges, and all types of Gameboy games up to Advance.

The best thing about the RetroN 5 is that it will upscale all your 16- and 32-bit classics to 720p onto your HDTVs through an HDMI connection. It also has two controller ports for your original NES, SNES, and Genesis controllers, as well as its own wireless Bluetooth controllers.

Hyperkin

But the RetroN isn't just a box to play your original game cartridges; the system can also employ some emulator software features. It can store your in-game save states onto a SD card, speed up games, and make your controllers remappable and usable across multiple platforms--so you'll be able to play any version of Street Fighter properly with a six-button Genesis controller.

As a legal means of emulations, Hyperkin's systems seem on the up-and-up because emulation isn't illegal, extracting games into ROM files is. With the RetroN 5, you play using the actual cartridges.

Hyperkin says it hopes to release its console for less than $100 sometime in July according to the announcement video.

[Hyperkin via Geekosystem]

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