I’ve been lightly fiddling with emulation for the past couple of years, mostly going with pre-loaded setups that I can tweak to my liking – had one of those Kinhank cheapies that was a fun intro to Retroarch/EmulationStation till it crapped out, still use a Raspberry Pi 4 for the TV (which needs a little more tweaking now that I’ve learned more; been slowly applying CRT/LCD shaders appropriate to each core these days, but I’m having an incredibly loud fan issue and it’s bumming me out), a Retroid Pocket 2 that an Etsy seller railed me on (that thing is really pretty and neat as heck, though, I’ll likely sell it here), and then a Retroid Pocket 3+ that I hadn’t had time to look at much till recently. I’ve been slowly downloading (slow because Internet Archive, bless that thing) my own romsets and keeping them on a 4TB gaming hard drive, and finally took the bulk of this last weekend to get the RP3+ set up from scratch on my own – though I’ve picked up a lot about Retroarch’s settings and things casually via the pre-loaded stuff, this was the first time I got into placing BIOS files, setting my own frontend and the like, all that bespoke stuff. You really do need a whole-assed weekend of focus to lay the foundation for the first time, but I feel that it carries over easily after that – the skills are so transferrable, I even went ahead and got a simple Retroach setup on my PC so I can access my entire ROM library straight from that HD.
Think I finally settled into a good place on this one. I’ve got a 256GB SD in there alongside the internal storage, so I have plenty of full libraries for more lightweight systems (all Game Boys, Sega pre-Dreamcast, the good Ataris, Nintendo up through the 64, PC Engine, and so on), about 7K arcade games (working through dupes), and a more selective library of CD-rom systems, like Dreamcast, 3DO, PlayStation (still 700+ of those) and so on. I’m using the Daijisho frontend (wish Onion was available, but Retroid runs straight Android, which has its perks). I even found a theme that I enjoy, and though Daijisho is still a bit too text-busy for my liking, I like it enough that I’m really looking forward to further updates. There’s a lot to love about it, especially that it can run as a general home app for Android, which really makes the device feel like a dedicated handheld (with some Android perks when you want to look for them – it’s actually fantastic for Steam Link, a big unexpected bonus as someone who doesn’t like to game at my desk, and the only remote play experience I’ve ever had that feels native, likely thanks to the excellent small screen and local connection).
Everything up through Dreamcast/Naomi has been butter, and I know this thing can play great PSP and a sizeable chunk of PS2 and GameCube, too (which I haven’t touched aside from playing the opening of Wind Waker for the novelty of it). I love to browse libraries, and this has been the perfect buddy for that, though I’m looking forward to using it for deep dives into lots of fan-translated stuff and old games I’ve always meant to get to (Baroque, here we come). I actually like the look of most games on this screen without period-apt shaders (which, again, I use on the TV; just a different experience to look at raw pixels sometimes), but a simple dot filter on handheld systems is especially enjoyable. Feels right.
As someone who really likes to curate, I’ve been spending most of my time updating the image previews of all of my libraries. I find it extremely soothing, therapeutic even, to find games with missing cover art, pop into the game for a bit to see what’s up (sometimes they still have abbreviated rom file names, so you have to check), and then Google Image Search some nice, HQ art. I’m spending a lot of time doing that and most of my libraries now have complete art in some form, but I am anxious about doing that part all over again if this thing ever shits the bed or I upgrade down the line. So I think my next big emulation project will be to learn how to make my own transferrable solutions (DAT or XML files?) for that – might swing back by with some questions that’ll be dumb for lots of you who are way more versed in emulation. I’d even love to make art libraries that others could use, and maybe even stream that experience. It’s quaint over here, especially compared to some of what ya’ll are doing, but I feel like I finally broke the seal and am enjoying myself a lot.
