A fraction of the cover art RetroForge matches and drops onto your card — automatically, one click.
One-click cleanup for your retro-gaming cards. RetroForge scans your ROM collection, fills in box art, descriptions, genres, and cheats, fixes broken gamelists and damaged files, tidies filenames, and gets your card ready for any frontend — all from one desktop app.
Cross-platform standalone builds for Windows, Linux, and macOS. No install, no setup — point it at your card and press one button.
I made RetroForge for no-WiFi handhelds — the R36Max / R36Max2 and the whole family of budget clones (R36S, RG35XX-style). A lot of them have no WiFi at all, and even the ones that do can't realistically scrape box art on-device. So every game shows up as a bare filename with no cover. The sane fix is to prep the card on your PC and flash it — but I couldn't find a tool that did the whole job in one shot, with no accounts and no fuss. So I built one. It works for any card and any frontend, but that's the itch it was made to scratch.
Cover art and game metadata are now delivered encrypted (AES-256-GCM). The app fetches each encrypted image, decrypts it in memory, and writes the plain picture only to your own card — the hosted links reveal neither the game title nor the image itself, so the library can't be scraped or mirrored without the app. Art looks exactly the same, with no added wait, and nothing about your collection is ever uploaded.
Grab the latest build from the releases page:
| OS | File | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | RetroForge.exe | Portable — runs from anywhere, no installer |
| Linux | RetroForge-linux.AppImage | Portable AppImage |
| macOS | RetroForge-macos.dmg | Standalone app |
- Download the build for your OS and run it — nothing to install.
- Point it at your ROM folder or SD card.
- Press Card Perfect for one-click, studio-quality cleanup — or open Advanced to run any single tool yourself.
Card Perfect runs the whole pipeline in order: quarantine unreadable files, repair broken gamelists, download and adopt box art, fill descriptions and genres (auto-translated to English), add cheats, tidy ALL-CAPS filenames, and prune empty clutter. Everything is reversible — nothing is deleted, backups are made before edits, and quarantined files can be restored by moving them back.
- Cover art and metadata are now encrypted (AES-256-GCM). Links no longer reveal the game title or the image bytes, so the art library can't be scraped without the app. The app decrypts in memory and writes the plain image only to your card — the art looks identical, with no added wait. Metadata was already encrypted; now the pictures are too.
- "Fix my card" home screen — a guided 2-step flow: choose your card, press one big Card Perfect button. Plain-language copy, reassurance built in.
- Simpler navigation — three tabs: Fix my card · My games · Advanced. Every power tool now lives under Advanced, so newcomers aren't overwhelmed.
- Friendly first run — a clean empty-state in My games points you straight to Card Perfect.
- Much faster scanning — a full 90 GB / 93k-file / 16.5k-game card now scans in about 2 seconds (down from roughly 3 minutes).
- Safety net — the app refuses to run destructive steps on anything that isn't a ROM card.
Box art, descriptions, genres, and cheats are available for a wide range of systems, including:
- Nintendo — Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES / Famicom, SNES, Nintendo 64
- Sega — Genesis / Mega Drive, Master System, Game Gear
- Sony — PlayStation (PS1)
- Arcade — MAME, CPS1 / CPS2 / CPS3
- Others — Atari Lynx, ColecoVision, and more
RetroForge also builds the correct folder layout for popular handhelds and
frontends — ArkOS, Rocknix, muOS, Knulli, ES-DE, Batocera, RetroPie, and
others — and writes .m3u playlists for multi-disc games.
- Card Perfect — one-click, end-to-end cleanup of an entire card.
- Box art — downloads cover art for every matched game.
- Descriptions & genres — fills missing text and normalizes genres to English.
- Cheats — adds RetroArch cheat files where available.
- Repair — fixes broken gamelist XML, quarantines corrupt/unreadable files, and can run a filesystem check to recover a damaged card. Nothing is deleted.
- Clean names — turns ALL-CAPS filenames into proper titles (keeps II/III, NBA, RPG, and the like).
- Tidy up — removes empty folders and boot-slowing clutter, all reversible.
- Export — writes gamelists and media trees for ES-DE, Batocera, RetroPie, and more.
Box art, snaps, and title screens for the whole retro back-catalogue — matched to your games by name and dropped straight onto the card. Here's a wall of real covers it pulls (a small slice of what's on tap):
RetroForge is completely free. No account, no sign-up, no license key, and no telemetry. It pulls art and metadata from its own hosted library with nothing to configure, and it never reports anything about your collection back to us.
RetroForge is free and always will be — but the CDN and the coffee behind it aren't. If it saved you an evening of scraping, a tip keeps the project alive:
