N64 mini... kind of ...

CiDeRmAn

So, with the E3 just around the corner it seems that, from a Ninty point of view at least, we are focused on the new and the remastered for the Switch, as well as possible hardware refresh announcements.

So, a surprise then, with Hyperkin announcing they'll have their own N64 clone to show at the show, the Retron Ultra HD, with HDMI out as standard.
Obviously, this is going to be playing your original carts and Everdrives, but it looks very interesting indeed.
More interesting to see if it has a method to marry the unforgiving modern flat panel display with the often muddy anti-aliasing of the N64, maybe games are patched on the fly.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/next-big-thing-andrew-steel/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PRbKGuIC_w

Star Lord

Nothing too mini about that tbh, but it does look good!
If it was able to upscale the games, and possibly eliminate/reduce the fogging in some of the games, that'd be great (Looking at you in particular, Turok games!)

Inviere

The video certainly suggests the video output is vanilla, which means beyond horrible aliasing on modern tv's unfortunately. Maybe there's time to get some filtering going on, but the only way N64 games look remotely decent is with their internal resolution bumped at least x2, with a nice crt shader over that too. To do all that needs some respectable processing power though, and it remains to be seen if this hardware is capable enough to do it.

RobbingBandit

Sony's PlayStation Classic died a death due to lack of dual shock and the crappy games offered and the price etc etc

Nintendo need to include the wiggley N64 stick and a rumble PAC feature in any controller for an N64 mini I'd guess these factors and the Rare and other licensed games out of reach is what's holding back any talk of this.

CiDeRmAn

RobbingBandit wrote: »

Sony's PlayStation Classic died a death due to lack of dual shock and the crappy games offered and the price etc etc

Nintendo need to include the wiggley N64 stick and a rumble PAC feature in any controller for an N64 mini I'd guess these factors and the Rare and other licensed games out of reach is what's holding back any talk of this.

At least with this you can play any N64 games you like!
I must get one of those modern N64 controllers, the original ones just haven't aged well

Inviere

sugarman wrote: »

Its just using a Mupen64 emulator.

That in itself isn't bad, provided the processing power is there to get the job done. Unfortunately, in the above video, that bug he talks about only rears its head on lower powered arm devices because they have to have certain settings disabled. It's same to assume, because of this, that this product won't be any way impressive. You can see the horrible aliasing, it obviously doesn't have to power to do the N64 justice.

Here's what I'm talking about. Below are two images, same game, same emulator. Look at the horizon. One is at the stock N64 resolution, the other, has the internal resolution bumped up significantly. The Hyperkin thingy won't be doing this, and will output at sock resolutions (inside a 1080p container most likely for HDMI, but the game itself won't be upscaled).