Life of Tech

NUMBER 70 (Approx.)

Well a rather unassuming box arrived a couple of days ago, apparently stating in an email I received that it had been handed to the resident (me), however I was at work at the time and once home I was informed by the neighbour that it had been left on the doorstep and they had taken it in.

No matter how unassuming the box was it had rather familiar words on the side in a rather familiar font "Made in China". I couldn't wait to open it but thought I should take some photos as I went along.

A Brown Box

The number 70 the title of this post refers to is number 70 in the collection of handheld consoles I own, most running Android, this one is a Retroid Pocket 4 Pro.

Retroid Pocket 4 Pro

Not only did the package include the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro but to my surprise it included a clear grip and a case.

Clear Grip

Case

Emulation is quite a big passion of mine and has been for many years, one of my favourite emulation experiences was E.M.M.A.(Emulated Machine, My Amiga) which I started in November of 2016. Other passions of mine are computers, consoles and handheld consoles the oldest of the handheld consoles is from 1981 (not an emulation machine though).

So back to number 70, the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro and the task of gaming emulation ahead of me and the Android 13 operating system that is on it, so I need a microSD card (which size) for game ROMS and it was at this point I started the search for a card and after a ten minute search I found an unused 512GB card.

Now to choose which systems will be best to emulate, no point in trying PS3 or Switch as these would be out of reach of the hardware and on the other end of the spectrum is Gameboy and Gameboy Colour these systems would be better suited to hardware with a lower specification.

My first thought is the Playstation series, so let's start there with the Playstation Portable (PSP), Playstation and Playstation 2. My collection of PSP ROMS are 128GB alone and Playstation ROMS are 232GB so no space for Playstation 2 so lets have a rethink. How about another handheld console for example my collection of Gameboy Advance games are 11.4GB so I'll put those on, my collection of Mega Drive (Genesis) are 723MB and has some good games so I'll throw those on, NEOGEO ROMS are 10.1GB, TurboGrafX ROMS are 341MB, Dreamcast ROMS are 36.5GB and SNES ROMS are 3.79GB, I think I'll call it quits at that.

I knew I didn't want to emulate any computers as most expect a keyboard which the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro doesn't have and a virtual on screen keyboard would have to be used which I'm not particularly keen on.

Console	Stand Alone	RetroArch Core
Playstation Portable	PPSSPP	PPSSPP
Playstation	Duckstation	SwanStation
Gameboy Advance	Pizza Boy	mGBA
Mega Drive (Genesis)	MD.emu	Genesis Plus GX
NeoGeo	FinalBurn Neo	Final Burn New
TurboGrafX	PCE.emu	Beetle PCE
Dreamcast	ReDream	Flycast
SNES	Snes9x EX+	Snes9x

Or I can use RetroArch which would cover all of the systems, I have used RetroArch on other handhelds so this is the route I will take, all my ROMS are saved on an external hard drive so all I have to do is attach this to my laptop and insert the microSD card into a card reader and copy the required folders from one to the other, rather time consuming but worth it.

Now over to my Retroid Pocket 4 Pro and insert the microSD card and turn on, now to install RetroArch, to do this we need to go to the RetroArch website and download from there as it's not available on PlayStore.

I'm going cheat a bit in my blog here and point you to an extremely good set up guide by Russ at Retro Game Corps which informs you of all the set up information you need from RetroArch through to individual emulators for consoles and computers.

Once RetroArch is setup you can access your ROMS from there but I prefer to have a graphical front end and there are plenty to choose from, such as Daijisho (Free), Emulation Station, Beacon Game Launcher, Plain Launcher (Free) and Reset Collection (Free), and my choice which is just my preference is Daijisho. Joey's Retro Handhelds has a great Daijisho Setup Guide and I would advise following this.

Hope this leads to some happy gaming for you out there and if you love Number 70 then you'll love the remaining 69 of which Number 1 is, chronologically, from 1989 which is my Atari Lynx.

Enjoy

Michael