The hardware is real

Very early days: this is a hobby project

RetroXR is built in spare time and is in very early development. Expect bugs, rough edges, and things that break outright. If you hit one, tell me. A report with a log is the single most useful thing you can send.

RetroXR turns emulation into something you handle. Instead of a menu, you get a room: a console on the floor, a CRT on the stand, cartridges on the shelf.

Spawn a system and a TV, run the A/V cable between them, push a cartridge into the slot and hit power. The picture comes up on the TV. Everything is physical: cables hang and swing, lids hinge open, discs sit in trays, and a cartridge has to go in the right way up.

Picking The Secret of Monkey Island out of the library, standing the computer on the desk, and playing it. It runs about a minute, with sound. Recorded in-headset on a Quest 3.

Duck Hunt, played with a light gun you point at the television, recorded in-headset on a Quest 3. More on how that works in the guide to light guns.

A GameCube and two Game Boy Advances on one link cable, with the console on the TV, each handheld running its own screen, all four machines emulated at once in the same room. Recorded on PCVR: several cores at once is more than a standalone headset comfortably carries.

What’s in the room

• 

  Consoles you plug in

  Spawn a system, seat a cartridge, run the A/V lead to a TV and hit power. Wire it wrong and you get a blank input, because that is what would happen.

• 

  Cores, downloaded in-headset

  Powered by libretro, so it plays what libretro plays: NES, SNES, Mega Drive, PlayStation, Saturn, Dreamcast, GameCube, Game Boy, DS, 3DS, PSP and plenty more. No setting anything up on a PC first.

• 

  A default core per system

  Some systems have several cores with different strengths. Pick the one each platform launches with, and set its options, without leaving the headset.

• 

  BIOS files, tracked

  The systems that need a BIOS say so, file by file, and mark which are required and which are optional, instead of failing to boot with no explanation.

• 

  A DVD player that plays discs

  Real disc menus and chapter navigation, driven by libVLC. Drop an ISO or a VIDEO_TS folder in, spawn a player and a TV, and wire them together.

• 

  A VCR for your own tapes

  Your video files become VHS tapes you push into a deck. Play, pause, rewind and fast-forward, and it renders onto whichever TV it is plugged into.

• Books you actually turn

  PDFs and CBZs are physical books. Grab a page by its outer edge and drag it across; release past halfway and the turn completes, short of it and it springs back.

• 

  Link cables that carry real data

  Run a lead between two machines and they talk. That covers Game Boys, PlayStations, Saturns, Game Gears, Lynxes, Jaguars, Neo Geo Pockets, WonderSwans and Virtual Boys, up to six PlayStation 2s on i.LINK, a GameCube to four Game Boy Advances, even a Game Boy to its printer. Every machine its own core, one wire between them.

• Mods, downloaded in-headset

  Browse mods hosted on mod.io from inside RetroXR and install them with one button. Mods are models and scenes for the room, never games. See mods.

• Add-ons you stack by hand

  A Sega CD under a Mega Drive, a 32X in its slot, a 64DD, a Jaguar CD, a Super Game Boy, a Sufami Turbo taking two cartridges at once. Build the stack and the right core is chosen for you.

• 

  One remote for all of it

  Point it at a TV, VCR, DVD player or tape deck and the right controls appear above it, including the disc’s own menus.

Running on a Quest 3

All of these were recorded in the headset, standalone, with no PC and no streaming. Each one is a machine spawned into the room, cabled up and played.

A GameCube running The Wind Waker, wired to a television in the room. The disc goes in, the lid shuts, and the pad on the desk plays it.

Wii Sports Resort, pointer and all, including the game's own “connect the Wii MotionPlus” prompt, which it will not get past unless the remote really is reporting motion.

The Virtual Boy on its bipod, red on black exactly as the hardware was. It is flat in this recording only, as the note below explains.

Ocarina of Time 3D on a 3DS, from picking it out of the library to playing it, touch screen included. The top screen is flat here for the same reason.

The two stereoscopic machines look flat in a recording

A headset capture is one flat image, so the Virtual Boy and the 3DS lose the very thing that makes them worth playing here. Both are genuinely stereoscopic in VR: the core renders a separate image per eye, and RetroXR feeds the left half to your left eye and the right half to your right. No parallax barrier, no sweet spot to hold your head in.

See Virtual Boy and DS and 3DS.

Bring your own everything

Copy ROMs across over a web interface on your local network and they show up in the menu, ready to spawn into your room, with box art and scanned manuals if you have them.

Already running RomM? RetroXR connects straight to your server. Browse your whole collection from inside the headset, pull down just the games you want to play, and let your saves sync back, with no cable and no shuffling files by hand.

The room does more than games, too. A working VCR and DVD player take your own video files, a CD player, tape deck and turntable handle music through a pair of speakers or a full 5.1 surround setup you wire up yourself. PDF manuals are books you can hold and page through.

This is early days

RetroXR is in active development, and it is honest to say so up front:

• Not every machine has a detailed model yet. A growing number wear a real shell: the NES, the Atari 2600, the PlayStation and its pads, the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, the Dreamcast, the Genesis 2 and 32X, the Game Boy Advance and e-Reader, the 64DD and the N64 controller, and most cartridges. The rest are clean procedural stand-ins: fully playable, deliberately minimalist. Models carry no trademarked logos or text.
• The rooms are early. They are somewhere to put your hardware, not finished spaces.
• Runs on Quest 2, 3 and Pro and on Windows, as PCVR or in a desktop mode with mouse and keyboard. Linux and macOS builds are experimental.
• Netplay is in, but it is very early. Treat it as a prototype rather than a feature.
• RetroXR ships no games and no BIOS files. You bring your own.

Want to help? See contributing, or come and say hello on Discord.

Get started

• Download and install: including a full walkthrough if you have never sideloaded onto a Quest before.
• Your first session: spawn a console, wire it up, and get a picture on the TV.
• Devlog: what is being built, and what just shipped.