New RetroFlag NesPi 4 review (raspberry Pi4)

james.miller

james.miller

james.miller

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A few days ago RetroFlag released a new NesPi case, this time for the pi4 (hence the name) and it fixes the biggest complaint i had about the NesPi and NesPi+ - the front mounted ethernet port :rolleyes: - and this time it has a working cartridge slot which can be used to mount 2.5" ssd drive. It's now a bit bigger but that's no bad thing in my book.


I think it looks brilliant :)

Apologies if it's already been posted. I would search but..you know..search is broke lol.
 
For anyone who’s looking to buy one, the physical case is great, 7mm SSD only, fits together reasonably well and looks the part, unfortunately it goes down hill from here.

  • The fan noise is louder than I suspect it needs to be and constant, it also doesn’t stop, even if you use the Retroflag shutdown script, which had a pretty glaring typo that Retroflag took way longer for them to correct than you would expect. It still doesn’t function as apparently intended and you’re potentially better off using one of the forks, the latest suggested fix to get LED/shutdown/reset/fan to work includes changing the key map to US.
  • The USB3 to SATA bridge really sucks. For whatever reason Retroflag decided to ignore existing wisdom of using an ASMedia chipset with decent UASP support and instead picked the one solution that has been shown to suck. How anyone ever tested this and didn’t notice, I don’t know, it would be stupidly obvious on first SSD boot or with the most basic IO benchmark. That leaves disabling UASP via Quirks.
  • PSU wise most (all?) of the kits available at present have a US PSU, an adapter to EU 2 pin is supplied, and the obligatory EU to UK adapter gets you up and running, some sellers are now including them, others aren’t. I had tried a 3rd party 3amp PSU, but it gave me issues when peripherals were plugged in, my XBO pad worked (has its own battery pack), my MadCatz fight stick wouldn’t even register, switching to the supplied PSU worked OK.

With hindsight, it’s cool looking and everything, but I would have had a better experience if I had bought a FLIRC, it would have been silent and an extra 256GB microSD or decent USB3 flash drive would have resulted in a similar bill, a cheap UGreen caddy (ASMedia chipset) would have been similar and given a better result and skipped a lot of the agro.
 
I have just ordered a new Pi4 for my arcade cab and was tempted to buy one of these but decided against as it would be inside anyway.

Thought it looked cool though.
 
It does look cool and it’s way nicer than the previous versions, but it’s not without issues, and most of them are glaringly obvious, which makes you wonder how it got to market like this. In your case (literally), it doesn’t make much sense, you can use a cheap USB to SATA bridge if you want to use an SSD or as you potentially have a full size cab to play with, just use an external mechanical drive, but I would suggest a used SFF PC probably makes more sense for that kind of build anyway, and they’ll come with internal storage options.
 
Yeah i was more interested for a standalone than to use in the cab.

The reason i prefer a Pi4 in a cab is that i will just using for arcade so it doesn't have to have the performance of a SFF PC. There are numerous pre built images that cater for what i need rather than having to set it all up on a Windows Based OS. Also the power saving of a Pi over a SFF PC is quite substantial especially if i have it on all the time in attract mode.

I have a couple of PCs that are built that i am looking at using for more focused console emulation.
 
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