Only a few envelopes left to send out, then there are 250 Retrodes out there in the wild, along with roughly 13,500 painstakingly handmade solder joints worth of plug-ins. I’ll keep some parts for warranty replacements and the occasional contest. All in all, the project meant lots more work than I had been anticipating, but at least I got away without major financial loss. Somehow I even managed to get a decent PhD along the way [Update Jan 28, 2011: and got married], so that’s not too bad either. With the business part taken care of, I now hope to focus more on the development side again (i.e., coming up with cool new stuff and improving on the existing, instead of writing apologetic e-mails to people whose orders got delayed by yet another week). The Retrode will always be work in progress, so if you have cool new ideas (or found something that doesn’t work), keep ‘em coming! My special appreciation goes out to the newly-founded team of developers who will keep the Retrode alive and kicking. If you think you’re qualified to participate (and you’d like to), apply to become a developer yourself.
My sincere thanks to everyone who made this project possible, be it through moral, technical, or financial support. (I won’t even try to list them all; yes, you are meant too)
Matthias
PS: I still have a handful not-quite-perfect units (technically flawless, but scratches on the case and such). If you missed the opportunity to get a regular Retrode but would still like one, make sure to subscribe to the newsletter to be notified when they go out for sale.
Hi,
Since it seems that the major pain is the assembly, would/could you sell some kit? sourcing a single PCB and the connectors seems quite hard for individuals…
Possible. I could prepare parts for 10-50 N64/GBx kits; would you take care of distribution? :)
I was more thinking of using services like seeedstudio that allows if I understood that kind of things…
Speaking of N64/GBx I’ve noticed that the schematics aren’t on the plug int adapters page. I imagine it’s just because you haven’t got around to it.
So the main problem is the effort needed for distribution?
If so, seeing how well the Retrode goes along with the Pandora gaming handheld, you could ask Michael Mrozek aka “EvilDragon” aka “Ed” from openhandhelds.org if he would sell adaptor and/or Retrode kits (where assembly/soldering would be up to the buyer) via his shop. As you probably know he’s very busy at the time, but since the Retrode and the Pandora, which as you know he is also selling, are like they’re made for each other, he might be interested. My guess is that by selling the Retrode in the same shop the Pandora is being sold in, he could even sell it at a slightly higher price than you did, that way he’d also get some money out of it. A higher price would still be better than the current situation (that is, than no new Retrodes at all).
Patient you must be, young Padawan :)
I always believed in you.
Will there be another batch, or can we expect these to go for thrice MSRP on auction sites?
Don’t know yet. One thing I know for sure is, should there be another batch, it needs to be 100% outsourced or my gf will chuck me out.
Now, we don’t want that.
Thanks, Matthias! I know it was a lot of work for you, what with studies, development, soldering, and business, but we of the Retrode community are very thankful for all the hard work you invested in this project. Looking forward to how things go from here!
Keep up all the good work. I look forward to you and other retrode devs making this device even cooler! (wait is that even possible…)
> (wait is that even possible…)
It is :-)