retrokix — Retro consoles you can drive.

Bring your keyboard, your gamepad, and your AI. They all work together.

retrokix is an emulator you can talk to. It plays Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES, and Super Nintendo games in a window with sound and a keyboard — and in the same session, it exposes the framebuffer, memory bus, and input as an HTTP API any coding agent can reach. Use it to speedrun Pokémon Emerald with Claude Code looking over your shoulder, or to test a neurosymbolic policy against 17,000+ hand-crafted GB + GBC + GBA + NES + SNES environments where the level designers were genre masters. Same emulator, same session, same API. Whether you're the player or the algorithm, you're in the loop together.

Three commands

$ pip install retrokix
$ retrokix download "pokemon emerald"
$ retrokix play emerald

Pokémon Emerald, in a window, with sound. The wheel ships a prebuilt mgba_libretro.so; no cmake, no apt-get, no $RETROKIX_CORE_PATH.

The game hub

$ retrokix serve
retrokix hub on http://127.0.0.1:8420

Open the URL: a fame-ranked grid of every owned ROM plus the top 24 unowned titles per console. Click an owned tile → it opens in a new tab, playing. Click an unowned tile → it downloads from the bundled archive.org mirror with a live progress bar, then opens in a new tab. Type in the search box: every keystroke filters across all 17,000+ ROMs in the bundled No-Intro index. The hub spawns one retrokix play --no-sdl subprocess per launched game on its own port (libretro core crash kills one tab, not the hub) and reaps children with no active viewers after 60 seconds idle.

The cooperative loop

Launch retrokix with both the keyboard surface and the HTTP API:

$ retrokix play emerald --listen --plugin retrokix.plugins.emerald_party
retrokix HTTP API listening on http://127.0.0.1:8420
  plugin route: GET /plugins/emerald_party/party
  plugin route: GET /plugins/emerald_party/slot/{idx}

Open another terminal — yours, or your coding agent's:

$ curl -s localhost:8420/plugins/emerald_party/party | jq '.slots[0]'
{ "species": 280, "level": 11, "hp": 33, "max_hp": 33,
  "exp": 853, "friendship": 113 }

The plugin decoded Torchic's encrypted party slot for you. Want to know which menu the player is in right now? Take a screenshot in one atomic round trip:

$ curl -s -X POST localhost:8420/action \
    -H 'content-type: application/json' \
    -d '{"steps":[{"screenshot": true}]}' \
  | jq -r '.screenshots[0]' | base64 -d > /tmp/now.png

Now you, or the agent, can look at /tmp/now.png and decide what to do. The agent presses a button by sending the next action. The human can keep playing — both inputs combine via set-union, neither blocks the other.

That's the loop. The agent watches, thinks, sometimes nudges. You keep your hand on the keyboard. Together you write the next plugin, discover the next memory address, build the next algorithm.

What you get

• 17,000+ ROMs across GB + GBC + GBA + NES + SNES in a fuzzy-searchable bundled No-Intro index, ranked by Wikipedia 12-month pageviews with a 0–5 star column in retrokix browse. retrokix download pulls from the public archive.org mirror.
• One HTTP API exposing the framebuffer, full memory bus, input, cheat codes, save states, and an atomic /action for multi-step agent plans.
• Plugins that publish their own endpoints under /plugins/<name>/.... The agent can write plugins for itself.
• State tracker — supervised memory inference. Learn game memory by labeling, not by reading per-game wikis.
• Macros, save states, cheat codes for the player who just wants to play. ~6,700 cheat codes vendored from libretro-database; no network at runtime.
• GPU shaders (crt-lottes, custom WGSL) when you want pretty.
• Browser stream — retrokix play --listen then open http://localhost:8420/stream in any browser. Pristine raw RGBA frames over WebSocket plus a separate audio WebSocket for live PCM. Add ?mode=controller for an on-screen GBA-bezel with D-pad
  • A/B + L/R + Select/Start + TURBO, dock-layout that flips between portrait and landscape. Play from a phone, a laptop, or any window in between. Pass --no-sdl to skip the SDL window entirely — the browser tab becomes the console.
• Game hub — retrokix serve boots a small FastAPI app that serves a fame-ranked tile grid of your owned library plus the top 24 unowned per console, with full-library search across all 14,000+ bundled titles. Click to launch (new tab); click to download then launch. One subprocess per active game, idle reaper cleans up after itself. Same visual language as /stream.
• One pip install, one MPL-2.0 license, Linux x86_64 today.

Discovery toolkit

The AI-research / collaboration surface. Each entry links to its own docs/ page.

• HTTP API — /frame, /buttons, /memory, /step, /action (atomic multi-step), /capture_state (record labeled snapshots), /stream + /stream/ws (live browser viewer with optional on-screen controller), /plugins/<name>/... (per-plugin namespaces), /plugins (active plugin listing).
• Plugins — Python files that hook the play loop AND publish HTTP routes. The bundled retrokix.plugins.emerald_party is the canonical example: a cookbook page walks through how it was built.
• State tracker — capture / compile / refine flow. Label what's true (hp=22, scene=overworld); retrokix intersects labels across captures and infers where each value lives.
• In-process Controller (automation.md) — the headless-script counterpart to plugins. Same scripting power without an HTTP round-trip.

The play surface

For the human-first reader. Each entry links to its details.

• Play window — SDL with sound, keyboard, save states. Hotkeys are documented in docs/cli.md. Headlines: Ctrl+1..9 saves a slot, Shift+1..9 loads, Left-Shift is 8× fast-forward, F12 screenshots.
• Controllers — plug in any USB or Bluetooth pad (XInput, DualShock/DualSense, 8BitDo, Steam Controller, generic clones — SDL's GameController DB recognises them all). Multiple pads + the keyboard + the HTTP API combine via set-union. Hot-plug works. Layout in docs/cli.md#gamepad.
• Browser play — retrokix play <rom> --no-sdl boots the runtime headless and pops a browser tab to a GBA-bezel viewer with on-screen controls. Touch / pointer drives the D-pad + A/B + L/R
  • Select/Start + TURBO; keyboard shortcuts mirror the SDL play loop's defaults (arrows + X / Z / A / S / Enter); audio streams live over WebSocket and plays through an AudioWorklet in the page.
• Cheats — retrokix cheats <rom> lists; retrokix pin <rom> F1 max-money binds; F1-F9 toggle in-game. Pins persist per ROM.
• Macros — record a button sequence with Ctrl+R, bind to any letter / digit / F-key, replay anywhere in-game.
• Shaders — retrokix play <rom> --renderer=wgpu --shader=crt-lottes via the optional [gpu] extra. Full guide in docs/shaders.md.
• Save state slots survive restarts. Per-ROM, in ~/.retrokix/saves/<rom-sha1>/.

Architecture

flowchart TB
    subgraph clients[" "]
        direction LR
        kbd([Keyboard])
        http([HTTP client<br/>script · LLM · shell])
        browser([Browser tab])
    end

    subgraph cli["retrokix CLI (Typer)"]
        play["retrokix play"]
        serve["retrokix serve<br/>(hub)"]
        other["search · download · state · macro · pin · …"]
    end

    sdl["SDL renderer<br/>window + audio + input"]
    api["FastAPI server<br/>/frame /buttons /memory /step<br/>/action /capture_state /plugins/…<br/>/stream + /healthz"]
    hub["Hub app<br/>/ landing · /api/search · /api/library<br/>/games/launch · /downloads/{id}/events<br/>+ idle reaper"]
    children["one child play --no-sdl<br/>per active game"]
    rt["EmulatorRuntime<br/>step · framebuffer · memory · save slots<br/>thread-safe via RLock"]
    plugins["Plugins<br/>Python @on_* handlers + @p.route()"]
    lr["LibretroCore<br/>~300 LOC cffi shim"]
    so["mgba_libretro.so · fceumm_libretro.so · snes9x_libretro.so"]

    kbd --> sdl
    http --> api
    browser --> hub
    play --> sdl
    play -.--> api
    serve --> hub
    hub --> children
    children --> api
    sdl --> rt
    api --> rt
    plugins --> rt
    plugins --> api
    rt --> lr
    lr --> so

    classDef ext fill:#eef,stroke:#33a,stroke-width:1px;
    classDef core fill:#fef9c3,stroke:#a16207,stroke-width:1px;
    class kbd,http,browser ext;
    class so core;

• EmulatorRuntime is thread-safe via an RLock. /action and /capture_state hold the lock for their full duration; the SDL play loop blocks for the few ms each action takes, then resumes.
• The SDL window, the FastAPI server, and plugin HTTP routes are independent clients of the runtime. They don't know about each other beyond the lock.
• LibretroCore is a ~300-line cffi wrapper around the libretro ABI. Swapping in another libretro core (vba-next, gpsp) is mostly a one-line config change.

Install

pip install retrokix                # default install
pip install retrokix[gpu]           # adds wgpu renderer + CRT-Lottes

One command on Linux x86_64. Other platforms fall back to the sdist and need $RETROKIX_CORE_PATH set. Full coverage in docs/installing.md.

Status

• Stable. v1.3.0. Works on Linux x86_64. macOS / Windows / ARM are PR-welcome.
• Multi-console. GBA / GB / GBC via mGBA (the same bundled core plays all three), NES via FCEUmm, SNES via snes9x. The runtime picks a core from the ROM extension; retrokix browse shows a per-row console badge and merges every library.
• MPL-2.0. Same license as the underlying mGBA core. The bundled FCEUmm core is GPLv2 (see cores/LICENSE.FCEUmm) and the bundled snes9x core is under its own permissive non-commercial terms (see cores/LICENSE.snes9x).
• No ROMs bundled. retrokix download pulls from the public No-Intro mirror at archive.org. Use it for games you own; respect your local laws.

Roadmap

Past releases: see GitHub Releases.

Credits

• mGBA by endrift — the GBA emulator core doing the actual heavy lifting. MPL-2.0.
• FCEUmm — the NES core we ship for .nes ROMs. GPLv2.
• No-Intro — the canonical ROM-naming and SHA-1 reference for both consoles.
• archive.org — hosts the No-Intro snapshot we point at by default.
• libretro-database — the cheat-code corpus we vendor.