Hi there,

I am Kazuya89, I am 31 and I am from Germany.

My gaming biography:

Back then in my childhood arcade games where pretty much nonexistent where I grew up, since arcade games where considered gambling in Germany and therefore not publicly available for children and teenagers. Therefore only a few cities had arcades but in small cities and villages they never existed.

Therefore I grew up with gaming at home. My first contact with games where the NES and the C64 of my older siblings. My first own console was the SNES followed by the Game Boy. I switched from Nintendo to Playstation. In my teenage years I switched to PC online gaming. In my 20s I first switched back to Playstation and then also to Nintendo since I have a thing for Nintendo franchises, handheld gaming and retro games.

My experience with retro/homebrew/emulation:

My first contact with emulation was GBA emulation for playing Pokémon romhacks. Then I started playing some old games from the 80s and early 90s I missed because they where before my time.

Besides that I started becoming interested in the retro-emulation-scene when the first popular Android handhelds emerged a few years ago. With a Pi 3 I first started using Retropie. In the years to come I made some basic builds with Retropie and Recalbox for me and my friends. Always basic configuration with some scraping, using a Nespi case and an 8BitDo controller.

At the moment these things interest me:

– Romhacks and fan translations.

– I still follow emulation handhelds. I have an RS97 as a cheap device for playing on the beach etc. where I fear for having a more valuable device unsupervised. If Anbernic finally releases a device with the specs of the RG351M but with the screen resolution/aspect ratio of the 351V, I am happy and I will buy that device as my go to device up until reliable Dolphin and PS2 emulation is possible for such devices.

– I also still follow Raspberry Pi emulation, which is why I registered here.

My project:

Before I never used a prebuild image. My main focus was having my own hand selected game library and with a focus on 8 and 16 Bit consoles and handhelds scraping and setting up wasn’t that big an issue.

Now my current project is building my ultimate Retropie Box with Raspberry Pi 4, Nespi 4 case and 8BitDo controllers. For that I again am using my own hand picked selection. But now I am going much more into detail and I am adding more devices I am not that familiar with. This means more ScummVM, ResidualVM, Amiga, Arcade, Dos, Adventure Game Studio, Ports like Super Mario 64, Openbor, Streets of Rage Remake, Super Mario War, Engines like Solarus, EasyRPG… Now I saw that Recalbox has lightgun support which I maybe also want to include. Also I want to customize a theme, have custom collections, Retroachievments, Bezels… you name it.

I now figured out that the setup for some of those things I mentioned above is much more work than just SNES. Therefore I started to appreciate prebuild images. But for now I didn’t find one that has everything I want so that I can just delete the games I am not interested in.

Therefore I would like to know if there are some advanced tutorials? I of course know about the Retropie Docs. But for having the definitive experience like those prebuild images have (but with my own games) it isn’t enough to use those docs. They don’t have a step by step guide for improving everything into detail, they don’t list what ports run smoothely, what’s available in etra packages and scripts…

I would be pretty happy to share my final build with you guys, If I am ever gonna get through with so much work. But I hope you maybe can help me to getting it done as fast as possible.