It's a bit of a boom time for retro gamers looking for souped up versions of the original Nintendo Entertainment System hardware. After decades spent dealing with cheap, compromise-ridden Famiclones and janky emulation-based hardware, we now have two competing lines of high quality, highly authentic, HDMI-compatible NES reproductions.

Bad-looking case, great-looking games















We reviewed the first of these, the Analogue NT, earlier this summer and were impressed with its case construction and its crisp, lag-free graphical output, even as we balked at the more than $500 price tag. But we're even more impressed with the RetroUSB AVS, a system that provides much better value, performance, and features in many ways.

Out of the box, the AVS certainly doesn't win any awards for case design. The boxy plastic trapezoid mimics the color scheme and button design of the original, boxy NES from 1985. That might be a nice nostalgic nod for some, but overall it makes the system look and feel like a cheap antique toy, especially compared to the smooth aluminum lines of the Analogue NT.

Open the AVS' flip-top dust cover and you'll find NES games slide into the system's slot horizontally. Combined with a somewhat fiddly connector, this makes it exceedingly awkward to both insert and remove cartridges. While Japanese Famicom games are much simpler to push in and pull out vertically, those cartridges stick up in a way that makes the dust cover impossible to close fully. If you're looking for a revamped NES to show off in your entertainment unit, this isn't it.

Inside the case, the AVS isn't built on top of the actual, Nintendo-made Famicom chips that power the original Analogue NT. But the AVS also isn't built on the low-grade, error-prone Nintendo-on-a-Chip hardware that powers most cheap Famiclones. Instead, the AVS is the first NES clone built with a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) at its heart. Rather than emulating the NES' workings through software (or specially manufactured cloned hardware), that FPGA can essentially rewire itself to mimic the functions of the well-documented chips inside the NES at a very low level.

The result is perfect compatibility with all your old NES and Japanese Famicom cartridges (at least if the dozens of games I tested are any indication) as well as controllers and expansions like the Famicom Disk System. You could call the compatibility better than perfect, in many cases, because the graphics and sound are now piped through an HDMI connection that provides extremely sharp 720p pixels, bright, crisp colors, and excellent sound recreation (as always, though, games designed for the Zapper light gun or R.O.B. robotic controller won't work on a flat panel HD display). Through the AVS, your old NES cartridges look even better than the "official" emulated versions you can sometimes buy and download on the Wii U.

The AVS also isn't marred by the noticeable lag of a passthrough HDMI device like the XRGB Framemeister or by the poor graphical effects that come from plugging a stock NES' composite cables directly into an HDTV (this video from the manufacturer shows how the native HDMI on the AVS compares to actual composite NES hardware on the same TV.

The only real complaint about the AVS' graphics is the lack of customization options offered in the system menu. You can stretch and smush the raw pixels to a variety of aspect ratios and add in a few levels of CRT-style scanlines to make the picture look slightly more authentic, but that's it. You can't play around with the color palette as you can on the Analogue NT, nor can you add in the sort of retro-styled graphical filters that are available on many PC emulators.

Bonus features

The AVS makes up for those deficiencies, though, with a few handy features that you won't often find in the competition. There's a built-in cheat system, for instance, that lets you input up to five Game Genie or Pro Action Replay codes, and/or pick popular, pre-selected codes from a list that's populated as soon as you plug in the game. You can set a handy button combination to turn those cheats off and on in the middle of gameplay, as well. And there's internal support to emulate the "turbo button" effect of some third-party NES controllers.

The AVS also takes advantage of its FPGA-based hardware to do things that were never possible on stock NES hardware. Take "extra sprites" mode, for instance. The original NES' PPU only had the power to output eight moving "sprites" per horizontal pass of the CRT scanline. This led to the system's well-known "flickering" issues when games tried to push past that limit.

Turn on "extra sprites" mode on the AVS, though, and the system uses the FPGA's extra pixel pushing power over a stock NES to allow for up to 16 sprites per line, reducing or even eliminating flickering in many games. Some games reportedly won't work with this mode enabled (since they were designed to take advantage of this timing vagary in the first place). When it does work, though, it's a noticeable improvement over the way those games look on the original hardware.

Then there's the online scoreboard, which seems to be a completely unique feature of the AVS. By plugging the AVS into a PC or laptop via USB, the system can connect to specially designed score-tracking software (plus, the power-sipping hardware can run entirely off the power from this USB connection). That software serves the dual purpose of monitoring the AVS' memory (for any external cheat devices or ROM hacks) and detecting and uploading the final scores to a centrally maintained database on NintendoAge.com.