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 — 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.

What’s in the room

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  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, 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.

• 

  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 — no PC, 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. Flat in this recording only — see the note below.

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 — no cable, 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 and tape deck handle music, and 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:

• Most consoles and controllers are clean procedural stand-ins rather than detailed replicas — fully playable, deliberately minimalist. Only a handful, like the NES and the Atari 2600, wear a real shell.
• Every room is a placeholder — somewhere to put your hardware, not a finished space.
• Tested on Quest 3. There is also a Windows desktop build with mouse and keyboard.
• 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.

Help wanted — especially modelers

The biggest gap in RetroXR is art, not code. Every grey box is a console someone could model properly, and the rooms are barely started.

If you model, this is where a contribution goes furthest — a single good room or console shell changes the whole feel of the app. Two rules, both firm:

• Models must be free of trademarked text and images.
• They must be licensed so the project can ship them.

Not a modeler? Bug reports with logs, documentation fixes, and testing on hardware other than a Quest 3 are all genuinely useful.

Come and say hello on Discord, or open an issue on GitHub.

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.