Starting January 4th, 2021, we will be phasing out our physical Raspberry Pi and Flashcart (Terraonion, Everdrive, etc) physical collections from our site. Please note, you’ll still be able to buy the digital versions of these collections, download them and flash on any microSD card of your preference, we will just not sell the microSD cards pre-loaded anymore, including covers, box, instructions and such.
The reason why we are doing this is two-fold. First, the Post Office: We’ve been dealing with a number of issues concerning the Post Office the past few months. Even though we support the work of our Postal Workers, they are overwhelmed since the COVID-19 pandemic started, therefore their service is not at par with other, more expensive carriers such as UPS, FedEx and DHL. International shipping is also an major issue, since we ship worldwide, it’s taking sometimes 2 to 3 months for customers to receive their packages.
We like to offer free shipping to our customers and we also purchase a lot of parts and media from several different suppliers, from Amazon to B&H, NewEgg, eBay and suppliers in China, and delivery of these goods have been give or take in terms of delivery times. Sometimes the delivery of a Mini Console purchased on our website is delayed for 15 to 20 days because we are missing something as simple as a cooling fan or a controller.
It’s a lot of stress and a lot of time wasted on this, so since our rollout of the digital distribution has been a huge success, we decided to focus only on the digital delivery of the microSD card images, starting January 4th, 2021.
It is very important for you to know, though:
1. We are still honoring and will ship normally any and all orders for physical items done on or before January 3rd, 2021, at midnight.
2. We will still keep our Hard Drives and Mini Consoles on the site for the time being
3. We will still be offering our full-access package for digital collections, and all new stuff and updates will be available for all customers that have already purchased this package and purchase them in the future also.
4. Customers that purchased physical with digital free versions until January 3rd, 2020 will still have full access to their digital updates and versions.
This very important change will allow us more time to work on new and better collections to be distributed through digital means. Some of the collections we have planned to be out pretty soon are:
1. Complete RPG Collection for Raspberry Pi 3B/3B+/4/400 – Will include from old text-based adventure-rpg games to Japanese RPGs from all systems that work on the Raspberry Pi.
2. Complete Beat ’em Ups Collection for Raspberry Pi 3B/3B+/4/400 – A collection of all Beat ’em Up games from the Arcades to the latest consoles the Raspberry Pi can emulate.
3. Complete Shoot ’em Ups Collection for Raspberry Pi 3B/3B+/4/400 – The dream of many gamers, all Shoot ’em Up games on a single Raspberry Pi collection. It will have horizontal, vertical, run and gun, bullet hell, classic and all shooters you can imagine.
4. The Soccer Collection for Raspberry Pi 3B/3B+/4/400 – The world’s most popular sport, enjoy a come together of all footy games from all platforms into one place! If you are a Soccer fan, you can’t miss this one!
5. The Complete Computers Collection for the Pi 400 – Amiga, Amstrad, Spectrum, MSX, X68000, Atari 8-bit, Apple II…. you pick the computer you prefer. All of them will be in this collection designed for the Pi 400 only, with full support for Mouse and Keyboard.
We might offer these new collections in physical form in a limited capacity after release, for those that like to collect our items in physical form.
After January 4th, 2020, you’ll only be able to get microSD cards pre-loaded from us if you purchase a mini console. We will offer combos of our mini consoles with particular cards from our collection, to give customers options. These products will start to be added to the site this week.
We are still studying the possibility to offer a Raspberry Pi image customization service where you pick a card, select the systems you want, and we build a card tailored just for you, from 32GB up to 512GB. This will be a premium service with extra costs for the time taken to customize. For larger systems such as the PS1, customers might be able to pick the games they want. Other large systems might be split, such as SEGA CD with picks for Japanese, Europe and US titles separately, and US games split in regular games and FMV games. Some people love FMV, others hate it, you’ll be able to pick what you want on your custom microSD collection. Also these cards will have include 4 or 5 themes you can pick from to display your collections.
We are very excited to include all these new items and for what the future reserves for us. However, new stuff will only be available when they are ready. We will not do pre-orders on anything this time. We’ve done that in the past and it was not good when we had to cancel collections or we took way too long to have a collection ready to be shipped or downloaded.
Want to be on the up & up on what’s going on at Retro Mini Store? Want to get promotions or be notified about new products? Don’t forget to subscribe to our mailing list: