Super Retro-Cade

[kuwanger]

EDIT: The instructions don't work. The uEnv.txt file is slightly different than described on my unit, looking like this:

Just tried with Orange Pi Lite 2.2.2. uEnv.txt by default looks like:

bootargs=console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0 boot=/dev/mmcblk0p1 disk=/dev/mmcblk0p2 consoleblank=0 quiet
bootcmd=load mmc 0:1 0x43000000 sun8i-h3-orangepi-lite.dtb; load mmc 0:1 0x42000000 KERNEL; bootz 0x42000000 - 0x43000000

Following step 4 to resize, it's the same. Then 5 and 6 turn it to:

bootargs=console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0 boot=/dev/mmcblk0p1 disk=/dev/mmcblk0p2 consoleblank=0 quiet tty retroarch=0
bootcmd=load mmc 0:1 0x43000000 sun8i-h3-orangepi-pc-plus.dtb; load mmc 0:1 0x42000000 KERNEL; bootz 0x42000000 - 0x43000000

I can also confirm this boots to a terminal. I'm not sure what step you're tripping up on, but you should be able to get at least that far with the instructions I provided.

It sounds like maybe you didn't let lakka install before modifying the uenv.txt (step 4)?

Nah, uenv.txt isn't altered during the resize. The point of doing the resize first is so you can edit the uenv.txt and copy over the new firmware at the same time. The other reason is I'm not sure if it's the retroarch service that kicks off the resize or something else, so it's simpler to go with what I know works--the default uenv.txt will do the resize properly. Looks like he ended up have a uenv.txt that's chopped off partly that's the problem.

The firmware you wish to flash to the device can be on an external USB drive. or your lakka SD card.

That's an idea. I didn't include such instructions and went with the ext2explorer because I didn't want to confuse people into accidentally deleting the wrong partition. :/ I imagine a fat32 usb drive would be the actually easiest approach for Windows users.

 

[ArugulaZ]

THANK YOU. Yep, that seemed to do the trick! I'm running Codename Viper right now with the crisp graphics it probably should have had in the first place. I had to switch directories to reach the new firmware before I installed it (you may recall that I couldn't put it directly on the root directory), but once I did that the install went pretty smoothly. Thanks again. I wasn't eager to pay sixty dollars for a replacement unit.

 

[ssybesma]

I can't help just yet with the android/original firmware/update part, but if you want to try lakka...
1.) Download this lakka build: le.builds.lakka.tv/Allwinner.orangepi_lite.arm/Lakka-Allwinner.orangepi_lite.arm-2.1.1.img.gz
2.) Extract the contents and write them to your sd card with win32 disk imager.
3.) Open the sd card on your pc and open uEnv.txt, then change the line that contains "sun8i-h3-orangepi-lite.dtb" and change it to read "sun8i-h3-orangepi-pc.dtb"
4.) Insert sd card into your super retro cade and turn it on. Lakka will resize the filesystem, reboot, and should ask you to set up your controller.

Hello PSX_Specter,

I'm dead at step number four (just a Lakka prompt but I can use the keyboard to bring up the setup program if I knew what it's name was).

I happened to use the latest version of orangepi_lite.arm which is now 2.2.2, and I did make the change to the uEnv.txt file as indicated ("sun8i-h3-orangepi-lite.dtb" did
appear as you indicated and I was able to change it to "sun8i-h3-orangepi-pc.dtb" and save to the SD CARD that the Lakka image was copied to with Win32 Disk Imager).

All that happened on boot was it resized the filesystem and rebooted as you said would happen...just that it never asked to setup any controllers.

Right now, just sitting at a prompt...

Lakka:~ # _

I did "ls -al" on many different directories to search for a setup/configuration program but didn't find one.

What should my next step be to force the setup/configuration program to come up?

Thanks!

 

[ssybesma]

PSX_Specter,

What did you mean by installing Lakka before modifying uenv.txt?

You were quoted a couple messages up from here, but maybe I'm taking out of context?

The instructions said to modify it on the PC and then boot the RBSRC from the SD card which is what I did.

BTW, my unit already has firmware version 1.1 so at least I don't need to flash anything.

Was hoping to use Lakka for connectivity, keyboard access and as my game launcher.

Thanks!

 

[Wolfenprey]

Hello people, at first: Sorry if my english, or maybe "engrish" it´s or seems terrible. You know, not my first language... :/

I followed this thread, for around some days, because i have a little device that mounts the same exact, main board, but it´s not a Super Retro Cade, (maybe some day i can buy one, i havent had enough luck to see one on my country, at a decent price).

The device i have it´s an little console from our friends of China, that i bought on an offer on a famous chinese online store months ago, because why not, and because i got a good price. I have two orange pi too, one lite and one PC Plus, and reading this thread, i just tried a lakka image on my device, and, MAGIC, it boots. I dismounted the thing, and discovered that the same board, same specs are inside, Android with a custom launcher, and some random roms with random and strange thumbnails. The model of my console is a "Coolbaby RS-93" (sigh), you can find some info on YT, and see the entrails, the same as the Retro Cade. There is another model with the same case, but runs on another board and SOC, "Coolbaby RS-34" i think, the "good" one is RS-93.

My point here: i´m pretty sure the Retro Cade Firmware can work with my machine, (no, i will not ask for it, i´m not such a tech boy, and know about the legal issues), Lakka works so well, im testing it a lot, and works better than the original chinese firmware. (GBA emulation on my device its abismal! rest of the supported emus, mame, genesis, snes and nes, works so well,but all with that stupid bilinear filtering enabled....)

Well, i want to try to backup the firm, and play a bit without destroy everything, i know this thread seems a bit dead, but just wanted to share this, maybe someone can find it useful, and can try things with that device model if somebody have one!.

Thanks!

 

[WD_GASTER2]

I will buy an rs-93. if its an allwinner device booting lakka, I can probably port android to it (if it atleast has 512mb of ram) from there options and homebrew would expand significantly.

 

[Wolfenprey]

I will buy an rs-93. if its an allwinner device booting lakka, I can probably port android to it (if it atleast has 512mb of ram) from there options and homebrew would expand significantly.

Well AFAIK, board inside the RS-93, it´s exactly the same as the Retro Cade, but, with a chinese firmware with a couple of random roms. It seems to have 256mb of RAM, if i remember well. I will take another look inside lakka for be sure and share the specs if you want.

 

[WD_GASTER2]

Well AFAIK, board inside the RS-93, it´s exactly the same as the Retro Cade, but, with a chinese firmware with a couple of random roms. It seems to have 256mb of RAM, if i remember well. I will take another look inside lakka for be sure and share the specs if you want.

if you are able to take pictures that be great. I ordered mine but may take up to 20 days. hate ordering stuff overseas.
can you take a screenshot of what happense when you press select + start in the middle of a game being emulated?

You see the question is what type of android LRD did they use for this. if they didnt half ass it, with any luck we could get retroarch (an updated version) with network support (with a usb ethernet adapter) bearing that, a clean android image could be made from it as well if thats what its running in the backend as well.

 

[tjsmith3]

Is there a way to get my super retrocade to recognize the genesis mini controller?

 

[Wolfenprey]

Ok sorry for the wait. This is what you can see:



This is the menu... With an sd card inserted with some roms, that you have to put as "001.xxx.zip", "002.xxx.zip" etc. Dont know how to make appear an thumbnail or screenshot as image in menu.



Pressing "SELECT+START" promts you to save or cancel, and then exits the game.



Detail of the "warning" when you start a game, it seems to use some sort of retroarch cores for sure. That appears on nes, snes and genesis/megadrive games, not on arcade/mame ones.

If i connect a keyboard with multimedia keys i can up or down the volume and see the typical android prompt of volume control. Cannot close or go away from the launcher. It detects mouse too, but, cannot make anything, you can see the cursor pointer on a corner of the screen but cannot move or use it.

If you need more things, i´m ready.

if you are able to take pictures that be great. I ordered mine but may take up to 20 days. hate ordering stuff overseas.
can you take a screenshot of what happense when you press select + start in the middle of a game being emulated?

You see the question is what type of android LRD did they use for this. if they didnt half ass it, with any luck we could get retroarch (an updated version) with network support (with a usb ethernet adapter) bearing that, a clean android image could be made from it as well if thats what its running in the backend as well.

 

[WD_GASTER2]

LOL. thats android running retroarch!
This is exciting news. if they are using a generic image, it could be stripped of all the copyrighted junk and maybe a distributable image could be done that allows homebrew! (since this would use no copyrighted front end like the retro-cade!)
All conjecture at this point but man I would need to dump an image (i have to wait for my nonsense to arrive in the mail )
wonderful news all around if its the same hardware as the retro-cade we may get a bootable image for both devices!
I might PM you with some more questions.

 

[Wolfenprey]

LOL. thats android running retroarch!
This is exciting news. if they are using a generic image, it could be stripped of all the copyrighted junk and maybe a distributable image could be done that allows homebrew! (since this would use no copyrighted front end like the retro-cade!)
All conjecture at this point but man I would need to dump an image (i have to wait for my nonsense to arrive in the mail )
wonderful news all around if its the same hardware as the retro-cade we may get a bootable image for both devices!
I might PM you with some more questions.

Perfect! If i can help, i will do it. Just be afraid of my shifts at work, i ever do nights, sometimes i can be "slow" to response! :/

 

[WD_GASTER2]

it should just be a few more days. I am tracking my package and its here in LA now. so just a bit longer

 

[Wolfenprey]

it should just be a few more days. I am tracking my package and its here in LA now. so just a bit longer

Perfect! I´m tempted to try your custom firmware for the Super Retro Cade, but maybe i just wait ;D

 

[Deleted member 502272]

I Just stumbled on the Japanese versions. Looks Like the Generations IV released on July 5th 2018.
Is there ever going to be a newer version of this unit released?

 

[OMC1979]

I have started a new thread for Super Retro-Cade users who don't want to use a CFW.
Super Retro-Cade: OFW users
I hope you'll find it useful or at least interesting.

 

[yuppicide]

Mostly tried this out. You'll need an 8GB+ (16GB+ prefered) microSD/SD and a USB keyboard.

1) If using Windows, download and extract ext2explorer:
2) Go to to
3) Click Get and follow the steps to get the "Allwinner Orange Pi" image, "OrgangePi Lite" and write the image using the instructions provided from lakka.tv on the microSD/SD.
4) On the Super Retro-Cade, boot once to allow the auto-resize of storage (it'll take a while)
5) Back in WIndows, on one partition is "uEnv.txt". Use Notepad++ or similar and change the first line to read: "bootargs=console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0 boot=/dev/mmcblk0p1 disk=/dev/mmcblk0p2 consoleblank=0 quiet tty retroarch=0" (ie add "tty retroarch=0" to the end) to enable a terminal and disable auto starting retroarch service
6) On the second line change "sun8i-h3-orangepi-lite" to "sun8i-h3-orangepi-pc-plus.dtb" -- this will allow the nand to be visible.
7) Use ext2explorer (run as administrator) to access the second partition and copy the firmware there.
8) SD back in the Super Retro-Cade, let it boot up. You should end up with a Lakka# prompt in the corner. It should auto mount the nand/emmc/whatever to /storage/roms/<different partition names>
9) With the USB keyboard connected, you'll need to umount all the nand partitoin stuff: "umount /dev/mmcblk2p*"; it'll complain about all the stuff not actually mounted.
10) You should already be in storage. If you type "ls" you should see your firmware listed.
11) If (10) is true, you should first backup your current firmware with "dd if=/dev/mmcblk2 of=firmware_backup.img bs=1M". When done, "ls -l firmware_backup.img" and it should be ~3.7GB big.
12) if (11) is true, you can try writing over a new firmware. This is the destructive bit, and not something I've verified (but it should work). If things go wrong, you should be able to follow step (14) to recover your Super Retro-Cade. Having said that, if you want to take the risk and presuming you named your firmware "firmware.img", use "dd if=firmware.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=1M".
13) You might want to run "sync" first. But definitely run "shutdown -h now". You should see a "reboot: System halted". And that point, turn off the Super Retro-Cade, take out the SD card, and reboot and see if the firmware works.
14) If something went wrong and presuming you made a backup, power off the Super Retro-Cade, follow steps 8-10, and then do "dd if=firmware_backup.img of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=1M".

I can't stress enough that I haven't verified any of this, but it should be as straight forward as the above. AFAIK, so long as you have a good firmware you should be able to boot from the SD slot and restore a firmware. Personally, I'm not interested in risking it.

I downloaded the file. I flashed it to my SD card. I booted up and nothing ever happens. Black screen. Lakka says I should see a logo? I never have.

I know the SD card works in the system because previously I loaded some ROMS on it as a test and it worked fine.

Anybody know what to do?

 

[kjetil_f]

Hi, guys. This seems quite interesting. But can anyone dumb this down for me a bit? I would like to access this device so I can dump/copy the already installed ROMs. What would be the easiest way to achieve this?

 

[kjetil_f]

7) Use a keyboard connected to one of the USB ports and look in /storage/roms/. mmcblk2p1-... is partition one with the android system. mmcblk2p7-... is external/interal SD in Android parlance? Games are in mmcblk2p7-.../media/GAME. You can't simply add games there because the list needs updated somehow (possibly mmcblk2p1-.../data/com.cx.gamelaunchxc/files/gamelist.db).

Sorry for hijacking this old post, but I'm a total noob when it comes to this kind of stuff. As far as I understand all the preinstalled games and assets can be found inside " mmcblk2p7-.../media/GAME" How can I make a copy of the ROMs to my SD card so I can use them on other devices?

 

[FAST6191]

Sorry for hijacking this old post, but I'm a total noob when it comes to this kind of stuff. As far as I understand all the preinstalled games and assets can be found inside " mmcblk2p7-.../media/GAME" How can I make a copy of the ROMs to my SD card so I can use them on other devices?

The user that posted this died a couple of years ago and the other doing stuff has not been here since July. Don't know who else was particularly invested in this but you are free to ask and someone else lurking might know.

Are the ROMs that hard to come by vs whatever I might find on the billion ROM sites/torrents/whatever out there? It was mentioned in a later post they differed to the no-intro set ( https://no-intro.org/ collect and redump things to be the purest out there, some package them up into sets and you might find those on various ROM sites) but I don't think we are dealing with new and interesting bug fixes (we saw those, and new translations, when things appeared on the wii and the virtual console there) as much as maybe a few tile hacks to not mention it being supported by Nintendo, maybe red crosses for health packs converted to something else and other such minor legal boring nonsense.

Looking at the post then this is a *nix based system (possibly Android based which is a distant descendant) as was mentioned and terminal access was gained which makes life easier if you know what is going on.
*nix is the term often used as it encompasses everything, though in reality the vast vast majority of things will be Linux based as most alternatives are far less free and far less developed. Substitute Linux wherever you see that and for the most part you will not go wrong, and your searches will probably bring up more useful information.
Everything on *nix runs through the file system at some level and at its base there are set directories that few mess with/are common to all of them, and general philosophies that unite things. It is odd to deal with at first but compared to Windows which is a complete mess and probably always will be it makes it better in the end for a lot of things like this.
https://linuxhandbook.com/linux-directory-structure/ hopefully covers the structure to make things a bit clearer.

For copying data from places to the SD card a basic command was given in
https://gbatemp.net/threads/super-retro-cade.519483/page-6#post-8580871
If on Windows the SD card will likely not be formatted to something stock windows recognises, to that end get a Linux machine if you have one (you can download a CD/make a USB and boot off that), or get a tool that views the various Linux partitions and formattings (in this case it seems to be the older but still popular ext2 format). https://www.howtogeek.com/112888/3-ways-to-access-your-linux-partitions-from-windows/ has a few choice methods, though for simple file grabbing then ext2manager will probably do rather than something more exotic.

A slightly more in depth discussion of the directories was given in an earlier post
https://gbatemp.net/threads/super-retro-cade.519483/#post-8310711