A working development card is useful.

A project that can be reproduced from scratch is much more valuable.

To test that, I started with a separate 32 GB microSD card and a fresh Raspberry Pi OS / Debian 13 Trixie installation.

I intentionally did not clone the original RetroBridge system image onto this card.

Instead, I rebuilt the environment from the public project documentation and third-party dependencies obtained from their upstream sources.

The clean build included:

• Raspberry Pi OS / Debian 13 Trixie
• MHS35-compatible 480×320 touchscreen support
• ADS7846 touch input
• Python/Tkinter
• DOSBox
• VICE
• Debian open-roms
• trs80basic
• Rust
• SDL3
• EWM
• RetroBridge EWM 1× display patches
• RetroBridge launcher scripts
• Trixie-specific boot/autostart integration

Then I tested the complete appliance.

Clean-build validation results:

480×320 display — PASS Touch input — PASS Apple-1 — PASS TRS-80 Model I — PASS Apple II — PASS IBM PC — PASS Commodore 64 — PASS Boot-to-RetroBridge — PASS

That was one of the most important milestones in the project.

It showed that RetroBridge was not dependent on one carefully preserved development card or on undocumented configuration that had accumulated over time.

The public build path could reproduce the appliance from a clean operating-system installation.

For me, that is the difference between a working prototype and a reproducible project.