For retro gaming fans who go the extra mile by actually getting copies of old consoles to play vintage cartridges, RetroTINK’s line of upscalers have been indispensable to play their decades-old machines in modern TVs. It’s the main reason why we included their previous flagship (the 5X Pro) in our retro gaming gifts roundup. With most people now using 4K TVs, though, that device’s 1440p output does leave it a bit lacking, which is precisely why the outift’s now releasing the RetroTINK-4K.
That’s right, RetroTINK’s newest upscaler can now output to a full 4K resolution, allowing your NES, Sega, and GameCube games from yesteryear to play with their original visuals on a modern 4K TV. No need to rely on your TV’s upscaling engine to enlarge it from 1440p – this one delivers the game visuals as the original developers intended right out of the box on a modern 4K panel.
The RetroTINK-4K is a small box with a full set of analog inputs for audio and video in both the front and back, allowing you to hook it up to any vintage game consoles originally designed for CRT TVs, although it also comes with a VGA and HDMI input for plugging in more recent consoles and devices you want to upscale to 4K. Around the back also sits an HDMI output for connecting it to your 4KTV. According to the outfit, it can accept all standard consumer video inputs from 240p up to 1080p, as well as inputs from retro PCs and arcade boards, including EGA, VGA, SVGA, XGA, and UXGA. The system will also let you make custom profiles to handle inputs currently not in the built-in definitions.
It offers four standard output modes, namely 4K (3,840 x 2,160 pixels at 60 Hz), 1440p, 1080p and 480p, although you can also define a custom output resolution by simply fiddling with the machine’s settings. For people using HDR OLED TVs, it can even output Rec. 709 to Rec. 2020 color-corrected HDR visuals to make those old games look absolutely pristine.
The RetroTINK-4K’s scaling engine also offers plenty of customizations, allowing you to scale and crop your source to your individual specifications, with adjustable aspect ratio correction (4:3 and 16:9), filtering modes, motion adaptive deinterlacing, and all sorts of other settings. Suffice to say, this thing was built for absolute nerds who want to fine-tune their retro game visuals exactly to their liking. Miss those ugly imperfections from CRT TVs? Not a problem, as this thing has CRT simulation effects, including scanlines, phosphor masks, and even beam misconvergence, in case you want to make your game as scuffed as it looked on a troubled CRT panel from 1985.
There’s an SD card slot for loading configuration files and saving profiles for different game consoles, allowing you to save that awesome setting you spent the good part of two hours fine-tuning. Other features include a Cyclone V 5CEBA7-series FPGFA hardware, up to 120 fps outputs (only available for 1440p and 1080p), eight-channel LPCM audio output, and an included remote for adjusting settings while you’re chilling on the couch.
The RetroTINK-4K comes out in early December, priced at $750.