RetroTINK 4K Review: A Must-Own For Retro Gaming Diehards

comingsoon.net:

There are a few schools of thought when it comes to playing retro games in the present day. Some argue that the games from yesteryear were meant to be played on an old-school CRT, with concerns regarding their bulky designs and aging, decades-old electrical components chalked up to the cost of doing business. Others contend that retro games are perfectly serviceable when paired with an inexpensive scaler and a flat panel display, with no care paid to how these titles look when hooked up to a modern TV.

And then there are those in the middle. Sure, some of us might play old-school games on a consumer CRT or professional-grade monitor, but there’s also the undeniable allure of kicking back on the couch and booting up your go-to childhood favorite on a massive 4K screen. Of course, such lofty goals have largely been out of reach. While there are plenty of analog-to-digital scalers and line multipliers on the market, none have been able to leverage the power of high-res, high-refresh rate, HDR displays — that is, until now.

Enter the RetroTINK 4K, the latest product from Mike Chi — a well-known figure in the retro gaming scene, responsible for a handful of high-quality scalers and transcoders that have dominated the market for the past few years. His latest device might, on the surface, seem like a refinement of his previous products, but it’s anything but. As it stands, the RetroTINK 4K (or RT4K, for short) is the most robust, versatile, and fully-featured video scaler I’ve ever used.

Ironically, the RetroTINK 4K’s main selling point — scaling games up to higher resolutions — is arguably its least exciting feature. For starters, the RT4K supports just about every input type imaginable: HD15/VGA, SCART, RCA, S-Video, and