Retro Remake Status Update Email Message - April 9th, 2026
The contents of the email that Taki sent via the Newsletter Email, below:
Hello,
This is an important update about your current SS1 order. By this point, you should have received a tracking update from us with one of the following labels:
- Wave 4 + Dock
- Wave 5 + Dock
- Wave 6 + Dock
If you are unsure which one applies to you, please log in to your account and check the tracking number applied to your order. The rest of this update will explain what that label means and when you can expect to receive your order.
The Journey so Far
Many of you didn’t get our last update since it only applied to batch 1 orders, but I will give a small recap to bring you up to speed. Late last year, we started a trial production order of 100 units of SS1 based on our 1.2.1 motherboard revision. At that time, we projected that we would start shipping in the middle of November if there were no issues. We ran into production issues with the mold and a great deal of necessary hardware debugging on the new motherboard, which delayed the first wave of shipping until the end of December.
While we were debugging the 1.2.1 boards, we designed a second revision to improve the consistency of the board and to bypass some component shortages. That new revision went into production in the middle of December and finished SMT just before the end of that month. Like the order before it, this revision started out at 100 units as a precaution. After the initial tests of the revision were completed, I scaled up production on a second order of 1.2.2 into the 4 digits due to how far behind we were (the original plan was to double each subsequent wave until everything was produced).
We shipped that first set of 100 (wave 2) in the middle of January, and we shipped the follow-up order near the end of January (wave 3). We used the first two waves to improve our assembly process and testing methods. SS1 has many functions and features, and each one of them needs to undergo testing before we can ship an order. I’ve filmed some short videos showing this off, but we started out with two testing stations capable of testing every feature, and ended up scaling that to 12 by wave 3. The first two waves of SS1 were produced with four full-time shipping staff, myself included, and several other full-time employees helping out (finance, CS, procurement, etc). By Wave 3, we added 12 additional part-time staff to help assemble, test, and pack SS1 orders. This was a daunting task that, among other things, included having to train complete novices how to not only use MiSTer FPGA, but also how to use an oscilloscope to measure the analog signals coming out of SS1.
Before we started assembling wave 3, our office was completely maxed out on available space with all of the shells, motherboards, daughter boards, connectors, and other parts for SS1. At that time, I decided to rent out the office on the other side of our original one to use it for SS1 production. We broke the wall to connect the two offices near the end of January, with renovations wrapping up at the end of February.
While 1.2.2 was a huge improvement over the first revision in terms of debugging time, it still required manual tuning per motherboard to meet our standards. We found meaningful ways to improve the motherboard to alleviate these bottlenecks and improve assembly speed by swapping to connectors and components that are easier to assemble at scale. We started production on a small trial order of 200 1.2.3 boards in the middle of January and validated them in the middle of February. After finishing Wave 3, and with no desire to repeat its difficulties, I ended up doubling the volume of Wave 3 with a second order of 1.2.3 boards before the trial order finished production. Thankfully, that revision ended up resolving all of the pain points we experienced in producing the first two revisions.
Throughout March, we shipped the first chunk of Wave 4, which included all of the aforementioned 1.2.3 motherboards. All of that assembly and testing happened in the new office; even though the space is much bigger than what we had for Wave 3, we didn't end up making any big improvements in getting units out the door at a faster pace. If anything, Wave 3 was faster due to difficulties in scaling up the total number of part-time staff needed to manage the larger volume of units after the national holiday. To fully utilize this space and increase speed, we would need ~24 part-time staff to join us for two months straight. The problem is that it takes a long time to train those people, and there really isn't anything compelling them to show up each day. Even if I wanted to throw money at the problem, it's also basically impossible to hire them as full-time staff with the requirements of three-year contracts and everything else that comes with it.
After we finished the first part of wave 4, I started looking at other options to scale, and I was lucky enough to stumble upon an assembly factory across the street that is used by a major computer manufacturer. They have hundreds of workers in their factory, with close enough proximity for oversight (~4-minute walk), and they can easily remove one of our largest bottlenecks. After meeting with them in the middle of last month and working out a plan for them to assemble future batches, I put all of the remaining SS1 orders into mass production.
After those orders were placed, we started updating tracking information on the remaining orders with the production wave (this was necessary to have updated information in the shipping backend). The good news is that there was a delay in getting all of these status updates out, so most of that production is already done. But we aren’t out of the woods yet.
Current Status
As of today, all of the remaining Founders Edition SS1 motherboards are in our office (wave 4 + dock tracking). Half of batch 2 is in the SMT stage, with the other half finishing PCB production (wave 5 + dock tracking). The rest of batch 3 that isn’t part of wave 5 is currently in PCB production (wave 6 + dock).
So what’s the problem?
The problem is almost all of these SS1 motherboards need a SuperDock to complete the shipment, and unlike SS1 which has already completed three major revisions, several mold improvements, and has a refined assembly, testing, and packing process in place, the SuperDock is still very young with only a single production wave completed at this point (a 100 unit trial order that finished last month). After completing the first wave of SD units, we found several improvements that needed to be made to the PCB to make it easier to assemble, as well as some PCB changes needed to make the board compatible with parts that have shorter lead times. The mold also requires some minor changes to improve the assembly process.
Because we are far behind schedule, the next wave of SuperDock production is over 1,000 units based on the 1.2.2 motherboard (the same as wave 1). We also produced the 1.2.3 revision of this board at the same time as a trial order with 200 units. It is estimated that we will not need any other revisions to the board, but even if we do, it only takes several days from start to finish to produce a SuperDock motherboard with components on the board. For SS1, that process takes 18 days or more on average. Both of these sets of motherboards are already in our office waiting for SMT. We are just waiting on a mold revision to finish, which is scheduled for next week. As long as there are no issues with the 200 trial order of 1.2.3, the subsequent order will be the entire remaining amount in one production batch.
Originally, batches were supposed to be shipped sequentially—i.e., all of Batch 1 needed to ship before shipping Batch 2, etc. For orders with a SuperDock bundled with an SS1, that is still true. For orders without a SuperDock, that's no longer possible. For context, many customers split a SuperDock into a separate shipment to get their SS1 faster. The nature of this last leg of the journey means that once we start running, we cannot stop until we are done. This means that the pipeline of assembled devices coming from across the street needs to be continuous, we need continuous work for part-time workers so they keep coming every day and don't impact our testing or packing efficiency, and we need to get stuff out the door as fast as possible because we cannot store all of the remaining orders in our office at the same time while we wait for SuperDocks.
In practice, this means that it is entirely possible that a wave 6 order that only contains an SS1 and nothing else will ship before a wave 4 that includes an SS1 and a SuperDock in the same order. I can assure you that we won’t ship SD + SS1 orders out of the original priority batch list, but that’s no longer the case for single-unit orders now that we have so many SS1 units and we need to keep things moving for the aforementioned reasons.
As always, you can split out an order if you want, or you can refund a SuperDock if you want to get your SS1 faster. We offered this to Founders Edition customers last year, and most of the units we have shipped thus far were from those who split out an order. As I write this, I am sitting near three industrial warehouse shelves filled with fully assembled and tested Founders Edition SS1 units that are waiting for a SuperDock to be shipped. If those orders didn’t have a SuperDock in the same order, I could ship them all tomorrow.
It’s an unfortunate situation that I am not happy about, but we are doing our best. We are still a very small company that only had about 5 employees when this product went on sale last year. We’ve since tripled full-time staff, had over 15 additional part-time staff working at the same time at some points in the process, and doubled our office size to get this product to you as fast as possible. With the highest quality possible.
Final Important Points
If your address has changed since the time you placed your order, this is your last chance to get it updated before your order ships. If you already requested an update and received a confirmation at any point since your order date, you should be good to go. We synced all of the addresses on Shopify with our shipping backend when we updated your tracking numbers.
If you have DHL selected as your shipping service and you live in a region with 4PX service, you may be asked in a follow-up e-mail to switch to 4PX with a refund of the difference. DHL’s costs have increased by almost 20% in the last two months due to global issues, and it means we lose $10 on average for every shipment that goes out. There are even some Middle East countries where we lose over $80 when we ship with DHL, based on the original shipping fee. It’s not sustainable, especially for earlier SS1 orders.
I don’t anticipate that I will have enough time to sit down and write another update like this unless something catastrophic happens. If there are any smaller changes, I will post updates on the store shipping dashboard, the Retro Remake subreddit, or the SS1 community Discord channel as a pinned message.
Best,
-Taki