What is retrobridge?

RetroBridge is a desktop app for people who own retro handheld gaming devices, the small consoles that run emulators and load games from an SD card. Instead of digging through folders of oddly named ROM files, RetroBridge plugs into the card, either directly or over Wi-Fi, and shows everything on it as a clean dashboard: every game identified by matching its actual file content rather than its filename, every save file matched to the right game, and box art shown for each title. Once you can see what is actually on the card, RetroBridge lets you build a curated list of the games worth keeping and share that list as a small file, so a friend can hand you their favorite twenty games instead of you sorting through thousands of ROMs you will never play. You can also back up and restore save files across different cards and devices, add or delete games, and sync a shared collection onto your own card in a way that can be undone. The app is described as device-first, meaning it works directly with the SD card in front of you rather than managing a big personal ROM library, and there is nothing to host, no account to create, and no scraping of outside game databases. RetroBridge works by recognizing the firmware running on a handheld rather than the specific brand, with hardware-tested support for OnionOS, NextUI, MinUI, and Knulli, and best-effort support for a few others. Adding support for a new firmware is done through a JSON configuration file rather than writing code. Builds are available for macOS, Windows, and Linux from the releases page, though macOS is the most tested and the others are still experimental. Since the builds are not code-signed, both macOS and Windows show warnings on first launch that need to be dismissed manually. The app is built with Electron, React, and TypeScript, and is released under the GNU GPL v3.0 license.