RAOfflineProxy

RAOfflineProxy lets you earn RetroAchievements with no network. It caches a game’s achievement data while you are online, serves that cache to RetroArch while you are not, and queues anything you unlock offline to send the next time you reconnect.

It is meant for trips, commutes, and anywhere the Wi-Fi is bad or absent.

Casual only, and experimental

Achievements earned through this pak are casual unlocks. Hardcore play is never proxied: if you have Hardcore enabled, games launch directly with no involvement from this pak, exactly as they would if it were not installed.

It is also built on the Linux support in misantronic/RAOfflineProxy, which its authors describe as alpha. It is qualified on the Miniloong Pocket 1, but expect rough edges.

Before you start

1. Sign in to RetroAchievements under Settings → Accounts.
2. Launch one game online, so the pak learns your account token. Nothing works offline until it has one.
3. Open RAOfflineProxy and turn the service on.

Turning it on

The pak has two separate controls, and they do different things:

• Service starts or stops the proxy right now.
• Start with Leaf decides whether it comes back on its own after a reboot. It does not start or stop anything by itself.

Turn on both if you want it always available. Both are also in Settings → Services.

Preparing games for a trip

Playing a game online caches it automatically. Anything you have not played online has nothing cached, so it will not have achievements offline. You usually find that out once you are already away from a network.

To prepare in advance:

• Prepare Recents and Favourites covers everything you have played or favourited recently. This is the one to run before you travel.
• Prepare one game browses your library by console, with a search, so you can prepare a specific title.

Preparing downloads achievement data for each game, a few requests at a time so it does not hammer the RetroAchievements servers. The progress screen updates live. You can leave it and the work carries on in the background; stopping is a separate, explicit action.

Some ROMs will report No RA data. That means RetroAchievements has no entry for that exact dump, not that anything is broken; a different release of the same game may well be recognised.

Why there is no “prepare everything” button

Preparing a game costs a few requests to RetroAchievements. A full library on this device is around two thousand games, which would be well over an hour of continuous requests against a service that is free and community-run. Recents, Favourites, and per-game keep it proportionate.

Playing offline

Once a game is prepared, play as normal with the network off. Achievements unlock, and the ones you earn are queued locally and signed.

When you reconnect, the queue is sent automatically, once each and in order. You do not need to open the pak.

What it does not do

• No Hardcore. Upstream does not support offline hardcore unlocks, so neither does this. Hardcore games launch unproxied instead.
• No leaderboards offline. Submissions are refused rather than queued, because a leaderboard entry sent hours later is not the same entry.
• Not a way to earn achievements you did not earn. The queue is signed and hash-chained, and is only ever replayed to your own account.

If something looks wrong

• Nothing is cached for a game. It was never played online and never prepared. Prepare it while you have a network.
• Achievements did not appear after reconnecting. Open the pak; the flush happens on its own once connectivity returns, and the run status shows what is left.
• The pak says the service is not running. Turn it on from the Service row.