Hello Mashtec. I picked up my 353M last week and it reminded me just how fantastic Retro Arcade is. Thanks again. I think its a perfect combination of games, scraping, fontend and OS working in harmony.
Have you considered updating for something like Retroid Pocket 5 with Rocknix and adding some additional 6th and 7th Gen Consoles?
@MashTec thank you for the reply and @waeggy123 thank you for the lengthy response :) What i would say is if it was easy everyone would be doing this! I've spent some time setting up Rocknix on my RP5 .Still, despite my best efforts its not quite the same. Shaders, scaling, hotkeys, controller mapping for different emulators, scraping, ROM re-naming (and ROCKNIX makes this a hell of a lot easier than Android). Then I pick up Retro Arcade on my RG353M and its such a fantastic console like experience. So thanks again!
Some inspiration
@SlOgAn thanks for the Retro Arcade compliment đ¤
In general the Retro Arcade project is a community project. Everyone with some tinkering skills and a bit of know how to set up a custom firmware is welcome.
MashTec brought up the idea to keep this somehow alive and initiated the Retro Arcade Project, asked many people to help. Together we could update Retro Arcade to another level but for us it was just a single fun project and we learned a lot from it. Especially new friendships were formed đ¤ during the last few years.
Even when Retro Gaming is the passion of us, daily life took over so much space.
In the past we had the plan to support Rocknix as well, but ArkOS (Ubuntu based) was always more tweakable. So we observed really quick some limitations.
It is true that MashTec and I thought about it several times to bring a further update, but what would be the real benefit?
The games would be the same, the boxart wonât change, just few additional games will be added for the newer consoles which is from our point of view not really Retro anymore.
For us Retro gaming is starting from âPongâ (Arcade) to PS1 maybe one day PS2 đ. Also the handheld community started with the Anbernic RG350 and there was and still is a long software development time for all the Rockchip 3326 (and 3566). A fact why we mainly supported these devices.
With the H700 line it is really difficult to get Retro Arcade running properly. Just Knulli is capable but by far not tweakable enough (even with some inputs from the developer).
MuOS would be great, but this is crazy time consumable, especially with the risk to kill all the settings when updating.
Android devices especially Retroid devices are honestly really powerful and All-in-One handhelds. They support so many systems.
I was setting up once an almost complete Retro Arcade clone on Android with Retro Game Corps Shaders and Overlays settings, Emulation Frontend with Epic Noir Theme like we used in Retro Arcade.
Then the next issue came up to keep all settings on the SD card and transfer it to another device.
Conclusion: it wasnât working, even the Game Library needed to be added new.
thatâs why Anbernic is cloning the Android firmware of their device.
We could do the same, but it is by far not user friendly and we would risk to brick a device which need to be restored which is not feasable.
A game collection e.g. can be done by everyone⌠just need to add the folders to your frontend like EmulationStation and play. Easy thing.
Rocknix on android devices (now to finally answer your question) would be the only possibility to get Retro Arcade running, but this will require a lot of time since we have both less experience with newer emulator settings.
The actual Rocknix release is great and allows more things out of the box which would make few things easier, but then we would come to another point which is still critical. Beside the copyright stuff we observed limitations with image sizes and downloads.
Torrents were not shared enough, Gdrive slow downs, Mega is to expensive, archive org is super slowâŚi tested the french 1fichier which is working good, but above 100GB everything need to be zipped in smaller packages which will cause troubles when extracting with certain extractors and different settingsâŚso, how should we share a 256GB image in a low cost and efficient way?
This was a question which we had with Retro Arcade and with Retro Arcade vNext it would be even a bigger problem next to our limited time.
What i can offer right now is sharing experience and knowledge to start your own project đ.
We are always here to help đ¤
Hi Slogan,
nice to hear from you and thanks for your post.
Iâve thought many times of bringing the image to newer handheld devices. With support for more consoles like PS2 e.g.
Unfortunately i donât have time for my hobby right now. So no new versions coming the next time. Sorry my friend.