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Development => Consoles => Topic started by: gameblabla on June 26, 2019, 02:09:35 AM

Title: My CFW for the Retrostone
Post by: gameblabla on June 26, 2019, 02:09:35 AM
Thought i would share to you this since i've been working on this for a while.

What is the Retrostone ? It's a 150$ handled device that aims at being basically a portable emulation machine.
It competes with the likes of the LDK/RS-97 on the lower end as well as home made projects like Raspberry pis etc...

However, the Retrostone 1 has one major flaw : the screen is composite only due to a Soc hardware limitation.
Another issue i had with the device was the firmware itself RetrOrangePi : it's bad.
It's overly complicated to use, its bulky & bloated, and it's very slow to use too.

This is the reason why after 2 months of working, i've released my Opendingux-like CFW for the Retrostone.
It tries to minimize the scaling when shown on the composite screen (although it still looks crap) and i've made sure to tweak the emulators and port them individually.

You can check out my CFW here :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zECS8kWkikE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zECS8kWkikE)

I also managed to improve the boot times from 1 minute and 30 seconds from RetrOrange Pi to 13 seconds (0.1 was 30 seconds) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCOK3-gZlsA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCOK3-gZlsA)
Title: Re: My CFW for the Retrostone
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on June 26, 2019, 05:10:38 PM
Interesting. Does CFW stand for Custom Firmware, by the way?
Title: Re: My CFW for the Retrostone
Post by: gameblabla on June 26, 2019, 05:22:02 PM
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on June 26, 2019, 05:10:38 PMInteresting. Does CFW stand for Custom Firmware, by the way?

Yup, what is stand it. That's maybe not entirely accurate btw because the Retrostone by default comes with no custom firmware but it's not (still) officially supported or recommended by the creators themselves yet.
Maybe he will change his mind though because my CFW allows commercial usage unlike RetrOrangePi.