Skip to content

The Apps

Wrangling the Apps🔗

After unboxing and following the initial Retroid-provided setup, I installed the following:

  1. Emulation Station Desktop Edition (ES-DE), paid, but extremely reasonable (~$5)
  2. Obtainium
  3. RetroArch (AArch64) Nightly Config via Obtainium App Configuration
    • use the filter function to find the RetroArch configuration
  4. Primitive FTPd via F-Droid
  5. LocalSend via F-Droid
  6. Tailscale via F-Droid

What do these apps do?🔗

  1. Emulation Station Desktop Edition: serves as the Android Launcher and Emulator Frontend. This application will curate the ROM collection and launch RetroArch when a title is selected.
  2. Obtanium: is a handy utility to installing Android App directly from the source.
  3. RetroArch: is the muscle. While RetroArch is a capable frontend, ES-DE will be providing that functionality. RetroArch will instead be used to install and configure the different emulator cores.
  4. Primitive FTPd: is a lightweight and free SFTP server. Useful for getting files to the device without removing the SD Card.
  5. LocalSend: is a cross-platform utility for sending files to devices on the same network. Very reminiscent to Apple's AirDrop but available on nearly every platform.
  6. Tailscale: is a godsend for those that dabble with self-hosted stuff. Tailscale is a software-defined, mesh, virtual private network. Put simply, any device connected to a shared Tailnet (Tailscale Network) can communicate to with one another without exposing the device to the public internet. This allows me to access RomM from my RPC.