Retroid 5

I’ve dabbled in retro gaming a couple of times. I have a Raspberry Pi 3B (I’m pretty sure?) (in a bitchin’ case) running RetroPi somewhere, and this past holiday season I setup an RPi 5 8GB, again with RetroPi, to host some Castlevania sessions and to play old school classics like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Xevious and Raiden.

But now ... A random news article about the impact of Trump’s tariffs bumbling on retro gaming hardware vendors prompted my idle investigation and adding some $60 or so RG35XX devices to my Eternal Shopping Cart™, and then a chance encounter with a friend at a bar where he was raving about a similar device, and I decided to get serious and pull the trigger. Research led me to seriously consider the Retroid 5, which can boot into Linux and has a full Android stack as well. (It’s probably overkill for the games I want to play on it today, but it leaves open the door for newer stuff down the road.) So that’s what I picked up, apparently in the hours before they shut down sales to the U.S. entirely.

Getting started guide video.

I’m still learning my way around this thing, and I don’t have time to really dive in and load games etc. yat the moment. But I did get Obsdidian up and running with a connected dock adding my 24" monitor, mechanical Tokyo60 keyboard, and Keychron M3 Mini mouse, as peripherals. Sweet.

Using the Retroid 5 as an Android workstation

Since I’m still waiting patiently for the BYOK, maybe this can be a good on-the-go minimal distraction writing tool? I have Obsidian installed... Might also play around with something like KEGS for some sweet, sweet Apple IIgs action.

I also picked up the official dock and with that as a base connected to my Marantz/Sony AV gear, etc., I don’t really need the Raspberry Pi 5 setup with RetroPi anymore...‡

 

‡ Freeing that Pi 5 to maybe now become an AI device, either running the stock CPU/GPU with an NVMe PCIe SSD (Transcend 1TB MTE400S M.2 2242)  in the Official Pi PCIe to M.2 HAT, or maybe the Hailo-10H Generative AI Acceleration Module; or I might just “do it right” and wait to pick up an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super? Decisions. But I digress.