Today we're going to be taking a look at the Retro Duo a video game system that plays NES and Super Nintendo games from Retro-Bit. This system also plays Sega Genesis games with a special adapter, the RetroGEN. And this adapter also works with your original Super Nintendo but with a small work around. It actually doesn't use the A/V out within the Super Nintendo instead there's a little piece on the back where you hook it up and it bypasses the system all together. But if you combine it with the Retro Duo you don't need to do the bypass thing at all it just goes right through the system. In the box you get the console, two controllers, an AC adapter, some AV cables and an s-video cable as well. The Retro Duo is a very small system and actually pretty light too and considering that it's running two systems at the same time the size of it is just kind of remarkable. The system is fairly simple. It's got two controller ports, a reset button and a power switch that toggles between an 8-bit and 16-bit mode. The system outputs a standard definition signal using the AV ports at the back but it can also output an s-video signal which is slightly sharper than what an AV port would give you.
So like we said the console comes with two controllers and they're both Super Nintendo replica pads. Now they're fine controllers and there's really not much wrong with them but we did have one problem with the down arrow on the D-pad on both of the controllers. That really didn't prevent us from playing any of the games but it just felt a little bit soft and wasn't always responsive. Regardless though the controllers worked pretty well and if you really didn't like them you could just switch them out for original Super Nintendo controllers or a different controller from a different manufacturer. Everything is totally fine as long as they’re for Super Nintendo. The only thing you can't use is an NES or Sega Genesis controller. The buttons get remapped for Sega Genesis if you're playing a 6 button game and it works pretty well. The only weird problem about using a Super Nintendo controller while playing a Sega Genesis game is that it just feels kind of weird like sacrilegious or something. But I got used to it.
We played a bunch of NES games and every single NES game we tried worked fine including third-party games that otherwise wouldn't have worked. Then we tried out Super Nintendo and every single Super Nintendo game we tried also worked. This included games that used Super FX chips like Star Fox. They worked great just like they would have worked on the original SNES. We even tried out the Super Gameboy with a bunch of different Gameboy games and everything we tried worked fine. Then we tried out the RetroGEN adapter and this adapter works great with a bunch of games like Sonic the Hedgehog 2, The Lost Vikings and even X-Men. And we tried it out with Sonic & Knuckles which by itself worked but when we put a game on the top using lock-on tech well that didn't work. Sonic 2 with Sonic & Knuckles just shows a black screen which kind of sucks. There's a couple of other Genesis games that have additional components in the cartridge that also don't work like Virtua Racing. Really don't know why that one doesn't work but it doesn't so that's unfortunate.
So that's the Retro Duo. It's a fairly simple system but it gets the job done. It ran every NES game we threw at it, every Super Nintendo game and most of the Sega Genesis games we tried with the RetroGEN adapter. And if you really want a system that's going to replace those three, unless you're doing something special with the system like playing Duck Hunt, this thing is going to be a really cool replacement or just a neat little addition to your console collection.
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