Jan 12, 2025 2 min read

Trying out RetroNAS

I'm playing around with RetroNAS today, which seems really interesting.

It does a few different things, but it's designed to be an all-in-one networking solution for Emulation and retro computing. You are intended to run it on a spare computer, Raspberry Pi, or in my case as a Virtual Machine on my existing home server.

I'm excited to see that it provides a somewhat easy to use method to share a ROM library across multiple devices. I already use my home server for this with some scripts that use rsync, but making sure the file paths are all correct and maintaining that over time, not to mention syncing the files around can be a pain. This will let you have one master ROM collection, then it has presets to present that collection to other devices, like my Mister, Analogue Pocket, etc. using the file paths that they expect. It's basically just using symlinks, but not having to maintain that myself is super nice.

The second thing it does is run old networking protocols, so you can connect to retronas from retro computers. Check out the sidebar of the wiki here to see what's supported, some of it is much much older than I would have expected, like 8-bit computers like the Apple II, ZX Spectrum, and some Atari stuff. I imagine all of those require some special hardware, but it's still pretty neat. I'd like to see if I can get this working inside emulated systems on my Mister FPGA.

It also has built in services that serve various purposes. I'm most excited about those that are designed to get the web working on older machines, like waybackproxy which looks similar to what I did at Reclaim Open for the 90s Living Room setup. There are others that are designed to make modern pages work on old browsers as well. I'm not sure yet on the advantages of self-hosting a proxy like this, but I'd guess reliability and speed are the main things.