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Retro-Bit Super Retrocade with Capcom, Data East games


Flojomojo

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Glad I skipped this junk. Let's hope AtGames has a decent Flashback with SD rom support. The Atari Flashback Portable is not perfect but pretty nice and even awesome at the bottomed out $25 on-line price.

That is not a fair assessment of the situation.

This arcade-emu-Rpi-class box is actually decent, I am pissed because they fixed some issue but can't update the old units after having sold the item stating that the reason for the SD card is so firmware updates will be supported .... yeah right ... proof is in the pudding.

Also the way they used retroArch without permission is not good, the notForCommercial use clause is so obvious to be painful.

 

If they were to disappear tomorrow they would have deserved it in full.

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That is not a fair assessment of the situation.

This arcade-emu-Rpi-class box is actually decent, I am pissed because they fixed some issue but can't update the old units after having sold the item stating that the reason for the SD card is so firmware updates will be supported .... yeah right ... proof is in the pudding.

Also the way they used retroArch without permission is not good, the notForCommercial use clause is so obvious to be painful.

 

If they were to disappear tomorrow they would have deserved it in full.

 

The box is NOT decent if you can't update to the latest firmware. That is just criminal when they sold v 1.0 with the enticement of firmware updates. Hyperkin is nothing but a shameful quick turn money grabber. I hope they go bankrupt and never release another product. The entire retro gaming community would we better without these asshole retroArch stealing half ass junk dealers.

 

I was not happy with compatibility reports otherwise I might have bought one of these if the compatibility was better and firmware upgrades existed.

Edited by thetick1
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The box is NOT decent if you can't update to the latest firmware. That is just criminal when they sold v 1.0 with the enticement of firmware updates. Hyperkin is nothing but a shameful quick turn money grabber. I hope they go bankrupt and never release another product. The entire retro gaming community would we better without these asshole retroArch stealing half ass junk dealers.

 

I was not happy with compatibility reports otherwise I might have bought one of these if the compatibility was better and firmware upgrades existed.

I don't think RetroBit and Hyperkin are one and the same, are they?

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No they're not, but their handling of things are very similar in many respects. Hyperkin I'd say is worse of the two since they do like to borrow things without asking and then not bother to fix problems from their usage while feeling fine peddling less than well working goods like it's not a problem.

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  • 1 month later...

As was mentioned earlier, there are holes for the header pins for a serial line on the PCB right next to the SD card slot.

 

Using a TTL serial converter with 115.2kbps will give you a root console into some Android based image. Auto-mounts USB drives and SD cards; was able to use dd to dump the firmware image in a couple of minutes onto an SD card.

 

Are there different versions around? How to identify which version I have?

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As was mentioned earlier, there are holes for the header pins for a serial line on the PCB right next to the SD card slot.

 

Using a TTL serial converter with 115.2kbps will give you a root console into some Android based image. Auto-mounts USB drives and SD cards; was able to use dd to dump the firmware image in a couple of minutes onto an SD card.

 

Are there different versions around? How to identify which version I have?

Supposedly there are 2 versions, a 1.0 and a 1.1, the differences are in the list of games and tweaked emulators in the later version (for the better with less stutter and smoother video).

If your unit has the 5 games of 1.1 then you'll render a service to everyone to share the dump (unsure how to flash it onto older units like mine but better than waiting on the Retrobit guys as they don't give a shit).

The 5 new games in v1.1 are all arcades:

  • Act-fancer
  • Armed Police Unit Gallop
  • Crude Buster
  • R-Type
  • R-Type II

In v1.1 Cobra Command has been removed.

 

Link to the post with capture of their own pics on Amazon at the time of 1.1:

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/270703-retro-bit-super-retrocade-with-capcom-data-east-games/page-6?do=findComment&comment=4026536

 

Here's to hope you have v1.1 to share. :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

I wished I had a serial TTL cable to dump mine and share it.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Here's some pretty nifty information about the Super Retro-Cade. Hackers over at GBATemp found a way to make the system run Lakka, a RetroArch-like emulation suite with support for a lot more games than the SRC offers by default. The games that did run before run better, too!

 

https://kiblitzing.blogspot.com/2018/10/supercharging-super-retro-cade.html

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>Looks like some people are (temporarily?) bricking their units. I might wait til this is more dummy-proof.


Well, that was a by-product of going out of their way to overwrite the nand/flash to see if Lakka would work on native nand/flash. AFAIK the device should be pretty much brick proof--I can't be 100% sure, but it seems reasonable to think so--since the SD slot seems to have higher priority to than the built-in nand/flash. Having said that, it'd be a good idea to backup the nand/flash the first chance you get because that's always a good idea on any device. :)


I sent an email to Retro-Bit asking for source/more information on the hardware. I hope they give a better reply than one of retroarch's developers got.

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>Looks like some people are (temporarily?) bricking their units. I might wait til this is more dummy-proof.
Well, that was a by-product of going out of their way to overwrite the nand/flash to see if Lakka would work on native nand/flash. AFAIK the device should be pretty much brick proof--I can't be 100% sure, but it seems reasonable to think so--since the SD slot seems to have higher priority to than the built-in nand/flash. Having said that, it'd be a good idea to backup the nand/flash the first chance you get because that's always a good idea on any device. :)
I sent an email to Retro-Bit asking for source/more information on the hardware. I hope they give a better reply than one of retroarch's developers got.

 

Any chance to just share the 1.1 dump so we can update our own units and get the "fixed" emulators? (ideally they work better than 1.0)

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Any chance to just share the 1.1 dump so we can update our own units and get the "fixed" emulators? (ideally they work better than 1.0)

 

Unfortunately without the source*, I have no idea what they've done as far as changes (if anything) which means even though in theory all the Retroarch stuff should be licensed GPL or whatever license each core is licensed under, they may well have added their own proprietary code so it wouldn't necessarily be legal for me to distribute a dump even if I were to scrub out all the roms. This is the chief reason why I looked at Lakka and am going to look at RetoOrangePi to see if I can get a working better interface.

 

* I actually emailed them about getting the source a day ago. But, I don't really have any real confidence I'm going to get a useful reply.

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Unfortunately without the source*, I have no idea what they've done as far as changes (if anything) which means even though in theory all the Retroarch stuff should be licensed GPL or whatever license each core is licensed under, they may well have added their own proprietary code so it wouldn't necessarily be legal for me to distribute a dump even if I were to scrub out all the roms. This is the chief reason why I looked at Lakka and am going to look at RetoOrangePi to see if I can get a working better interface.

 

* I actually emailed them about getting the source a day ago. But, I don't really have any real confidence I'm going to get a useful reply.

Guess we're waiting for someone with a 1.1 unit to just "share it" then ... it's just a matter of time.

Given how easy you make it seem to just "flash it back" via a prepared SD I have no idea why they didn't release it themselves ... oh well aside the fact that I think they really don't care to support paying customers.

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  • 2 weeks later...

 

 

i think i got this as far as i could specially since i am only a newbie coder for android. too bad that injecting homebrew apps into this is too darn complicated for most folks :(

Holy crap, that looks awesome.

Care to share the incantation? (and how to undo it in case we want to go back to the stock image)

 

EDIT: I see, you're the "partner in crime" of the PSX_Specter guy (or the other way around) .... awesome

https://gbatemp.net/threads/super-retro-cade.519483/page-3

 

"1.0 had a psx core in the retroarch image. maybe we can launch ps1 games if we define a bios in the original retro-cade launcher cfg file. i will try that a bit later today.

1.1 has a pc engine core which if we install retroarch separately and map it to the /system/cores/lib will launch super cd-rom games provided you map a bios."

 

Any chance to share 1.1 with us poor mortals damned to the issues of fw1.0?

[it is stated that 1.1 is better wrt stuttering (smooth video) or alike, I'm sure Retrobit wouldn't mind have a way to update the firmware, they still sell the unit full price, unheard of for this kind of devices from a "secondary" provider].

 

EDIT2: if nobody told you already ... WELCOME TO AtariAge !!!!

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um Hi!

 

where to begin...

 

I really dont like the term "partner in crime" that was Jess Ragan being a bit umm i dunno, silly? lol.

The reality is that Kuwanger did the majority chunk of the work on how to boot linux and lakka as a proof of concept and PSX_specter showed people how to do get lakka stable enough to run on the device.I really have very little to do with anything the guys did, i just fiddled with the android portion of things (im a newbie programmer) and took a crash course of linux command lines that ultimately became handy when i learned how to use a uart cable.

 

The dashboard you see above is still a work in progress (still has some bugs i need to fix) and quite frankly probably not recommended for most people as it currently stands it requires writing directly to the nand to install everything (which is pretty safe, but you still would need to know how to backup and restore mmc via DD, through a command line interface in lakka aka Connecting a keyboard to super retro-cade and doing command line shenanigans)

 

"1.0 had a psx core in the retroarch image. maybe we can launch ps1 games if we define a bios in the original retro-cade launcher cfg file. i will try that a bit later today.

1.1 has a pc engine core which if we install retroarch separately and map it to the /system/cores/lib will launch super cd-rom games provided you map a bios."

this still remains a theory. I havent gone down that avenue. I quite frankly just took an easy route and use Explusalpha's emulators(the ones that are available for free at his webpage, and compiled the remaining ones from the source) I did get sega cd and pc engine cd games to run by using explusalpha emulators as the engine. The problem is that as amazing as retroarch is, documentation on how to launch a rom file from an external launcher is rather obscure and searching for it yielded rather mixed bag results. So when i ported the generations dash i just relied on explusalpha's emulators which work great and have well documented methods for launching games externally.

As for firmware sharing, I am sorry. I really do not want part of that mess, as it would involve copyright issues galore.

sorry I am sure none of those may have been the answers you were expecting. However if i get my launcher a little more tidied up i can release an apk for it (as it uses no propietary code, it was written by looking at basic android examples at stackoverflow, and it works well at that. lol)However i doubt anybody really would have an interest in connecting a uart cable and installing stuff via putty. if one thing that the nes classic and snes classic hax did right was that it spoiled people :P. It made the expectation of click and go and undo. This being a different piece of hardware doesnt quite work that way.

Edited by WD_GASTER
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  • 2 weeks later...

It looks like https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidGaming/comments/5r6jox/any_way_to_launch_roms_in_retroarch_from_home/ should be valid based upon a grep of classes.dex in gamelaunch.apk, but I've no real experience with it. On other platforms it's a little easier:

 

retroarch -L (path to core) (path to rom)

 

or optionally

 

retroarch -L (path to core) --config (path to custom config) (path to rom)
Basically stopped playing with the Super Retro-Cade while trying to get a nice interface working on an older laptop. Sadly, Recalbox is a fiddly mess (IMHO). Rather pointless, really, but it's still sort of interesting.
Edited by kuwanger
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su

am start -a android.intent.action.MAIN -c android.intent.category.LAUNCHER -e ROM
path to ROM
-e LIBRETRO
path to core
-n com.retroarch/.browser.retroactivity.RetroActivityFuture

 

this is actually very viable... issue being if this is defined through android studio code, launcher would need to be changed and recompiled depending on what titles you want to add...I wonder if its programatically feasible to compile an apk that loads an .sh script and letting you choose a snipet within the script. with each snippet launching a different rom... either way, great find my friend! I am going to fiddle with this to see if it goes anywhere.

Edited by WD_GASTER
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  • 2 months later...

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