MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hey everyone! So I just got the Retro Castle 2024 digital IO board with the case.

It works fine, although I have a problem with Wi-fi and Bluetooth dongles.

Each of 4 usb ports works fine (usb keyboard, wired controllers), but some Wi-fi and Bluetooth dongles for some reason don't work. I tried noname 600mbps Wi-fi dongle from AliExpress and Asus BT500. I've never been able to get Asus BT500 to work, however the Wi-fi dongle worked in a selective manner: at first I thought the problem was a poorly assembled case (and the low profile adapters had poor contact with the usb ports), so I've rebuilt the case a couple times and once I was able to get the Wi-fi dongle to work. Currently, both adapters don't work in any of 4 usb ports and, most importantly, both worked flawlessly when I previously used Mister with its 7 port usb adapter. I also have Orico Bluetooth 5.0 adapter which strangely works flawlessly on Mister with Retro Castle digital IO board in any USB port and the bluetooth icon is immediately detected by the system once Orico adapter is plugged in.

This is 100% not a power issue as I tried Ugreen 20w PD adapter, Baseus 65w gan power adapter and even default de10-nano power adapter through usb-c converter with no result.

My DIP switches are in their default position. I also ran update_all, so I got all the latest linux updates. I even made clean Mister install on SD card with no result.

Do you guys know what may be the solution?

do they show up in dmesg or lsusb?

I had 3 different with both my RetroCastle builds and never had any issue. Did you use the ones MisterAddons tested and recommends?

Thanks everyone for the replies! Sorry for not getting back to this thread sooner. Nevertheless, I found the solution to this problem and would like to share it and hopefully this will help someone in similar situation.

I contacted RetroCastle seller on AliExpress and he replied "Our new io board uses a high-current USB port, which is not compatible with some Wi-fi dongles. The main reason is that the copper contact point in the usb port is widened".

He also provided this link on tested and compatible dongles:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... 4edfplIstQ

I tested myself these popular dongles, ASUS USB-BT500 (bt 5.0) and TP-Link UB400 (bt 4.0). Can confirm that Asus doesn't work on RetroCasle io board and TP-Link does.

Although, for Mister newer version of Bluetooth doesn't necessary mean "better" as what matters is the chipset. It seems that all bt 5.0 dongles are based on somewhat poor Realtek chipset opposed to well-wprking CSR8510 in bt 4.0 dongles, including TP-Link UB400.

This thread kinda confirms this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/allbenchmarks/ ... h_latency/

neogeo81 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 26, 2024 7:19 am

I had 3 different with both my RetroCastle builds and never had any issue. Did you use the ones MisterAddons tested and recommends?

I guess that this issue with high-current USB ports and limited compatibility with dongles occurs only in 2024 versions of RetroCastle io boards, seemingly both digital and analog