8BCraft Forum

In day 1, it is clear that the Retrostone 2 is a large cut above the original Retrostone. The screen looks great and the clear blue design is sharp. The unit has a nice weight to it that feels quality.

The push-in power button is an improvement and provides a much more professional and quality feel to it.

The control buttons themselves feel good with the right amount of resistance.

I tried some games on various systems and it was a great experience. A few issues with the software which is still in a Beta stage so that is expected. I couldnt figure out how to connect with wifi, couldnt scrape, and at one point there was a permanent left arrow input which forced me to reconfigure the controller.
I tried NES, Megadrive, SNES, Playstation, and Sega CD. All were good.

Adding ROMs was a breeze.

I did not try the headphone jack yet.


My only complaints with the hardware so far are minor:

-It powers on when I connect it to a charger
-volume wheel is upside-down of what is typical (up is lower, down is higher).



Overall, as long as the software follows suit, I would give this unit a very high score initially.

This is my 1st single-board portable gaming-system and I love it so far ~
I love linux, and love the fact that you can boot to desktop inside the system; the only things I want are to change font of the menu-box of retropie (I found a github thread saying this is solved, but need to look into it)
And make a custom boot splash screen? I added one, and it showed for a second, but then a 2nd splash-screen with retrorangepi/mushroom character shows up, and orande space-invador,,, I'm sure it's easy to switch out, I just don't know how~
Pretty much what I wanted was a gameboy that plays Zelda-3 and custom user-made Pokemon rom-hacks~ just need to find some good multi-player games for controller-ing~ <3

I don't want dissueade or discourage continued development, but if all RestroStone 2 improvements efforts stopped, I would still be happy with my purchase. For me, the Retrostone 2 is doing everything I wanted from it.

Glad you enjoy it !

About the power-on when cable is connected, I know it's annoying. It's default behaviour of the chip. I actually been looking for a solution to remove this behaviour. The AXP209 PMU (power management unit) datasheet say it should be possible. But we have not found how yet... And Allwinner could not reply how to do this on linux. So we'll have to dig more.

About the wheel being upside down it's hardware so it can't be changed now. I didn't knew there was a conventional direction, but yes you're right the other way around would have made more sens.

My main target now is to make the HDMI on-the-fly switch working. I think it will really be awesome.