Turn your retro cartridges into ROMS legally

[longy999]

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A new gizmo called Retrode is on the way to market that allows you to plug in your actual Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo cartridges and controllers, before playing them on a PC, tablet or smartphone. It seems that the USB connected device extracts the relevant ROM data onto emulation software and hey presto! Your retro games are playing on almost any device.




The fact that it's emulating the ROM from a physical cartridge in your possession is the key, and it's possible to use the device to make a back-up of your software as defined by the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988, though any distribution of that back-up would be highly illegal.

It's due out on 23rd January and will set UK buyers back a little over £70. It might be on grey legal and moral ground, but what do you make of it?



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEeXaFFUGrU

[Original Boss]

Thats really good to bad i already have loads downloaded on my laptop otherwise this would have been great!

[longy999]

Thats really good to bad i already have loads downloaded on my laptop otherwise this would have been great!


This would have been better several years ago when we couldn't just run the roms on our 360's and stuff. Still, might be good for those who have a bunch of cartridges tucked away but no retro console to play them on.

[CloudStrife7x]

that is pretty cool, nice video shared longy, too bad i won't need this i already have a lot of Roms on my pc as well lol

[Serious_M]

Awesome to know about this , but it is to late now

[longy999]

Awesome to know about this , but it is to late now


This would have sold like hot cakes in the late 90's, now, probably not so much. I'm more surprised that someone didn't make something like this before, seems a bit outdated now that we can run roms on pretty much what we want now anyway.

[8Ball]

Should have made it also work backwards, they could get away with such a feature since the whole idea is to re-invent the wheel anyway, might as well let you flash those legal backups you made (what backups? lol) onto some carts.
Isn't it easier to just own the cartridge and download the rom anyway? I still have the carts for some games around the place, then again i couldn't care less about legality.
The emulation may prove superior to using one of the console clones however, there might be a small market for this with the modding scene who make portables and whatnot, otherwise its fail and ridicuosly late to the party.