🦙 RetroDreams Spring 2025 Update – Shipping, Support, and What’s Ahead
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Hey everyone,
It’s been a while since our last big update, and we’ve been deep in the trenches—shipping boards, refining docs, helping troubleshoot, and planning what’s next. Over the past day or two, we’ve shared a full set of updates with our Discord community. Here’s the full roundup for everyone else:
📦 Shipping Progress
We’ve now shipped around 90% of ITX Llama board orders, and we’re doing our best to get the rest out as quickly as possible. Thanks again for your patience—we’re handling fulfillment in small batches to ensure everything is tested and working before it leaves our hands.
If you’ve already received your Llama:
✅ Check the letter inside your package—it includes a QR code to the Getting Started guide.
📘 We’ve made major improvements to the documentation, and while it’s far from done, it’s getting better every week.
👉 docs.retrodreams.ca
🧳 Case Orders
All official ITX Llama cases are now fully manufactured—but we’re still waiting on one final part before we can ship most of them. If you asked us to hold your board until the case was ready, we’ll be pre-assembling the case as a thank-you for your patience.
By default, the cases will still ship as DIY kits, so if you’d prefer yours unassembled, just let us know!
🛠️ Real-World Use: What We’ve Learned
Now that boards are in the wild, we’ve learned a lot from your builds, your questions, and your bug reports. A few recurring themes:
- Power Supply quirks – Low-quality or unstable PSUs, especially ones with high minimum load requirements, have caused problems.
- Boot media problems – Counterfeit or unreliable USB/SD cards continue to trip people up.
- BIOS settings – One common culprit: enabling "USB as fixed disk" may cause Windows 98 instability.
- AGP card issues – Since the Llama requires an AGP GPU, users have sometimes run into bad caps or failing cards.
So far, not a single issue reported has turned out to be a board defect. Every case we’ve looked into was caused by external factors.
🤝 A Community-Powered Project
We want to say a huge thank-you to the community members in our Discord, who’ve helped test boards, hunt bugs, tweak BIOS settings, and troubleshoot issues. And an equally big thanks to our families, who’ve pitched in on everything from firmware flashing to final packaging and shipping.
This project started small—but it’s grown into something we’re proud of. And it wouldn’t be possible without you.
📬 What’s Next
We’ll be announcing Batch 3 preorders very soon, along with preorders for our new case expansion units. Batch 3 will include a fix for the analog mono sound issue and improvements to our fulfillment process. Stay tuned—we’re almost ready.
💬 Want even more detail?
We shared the full series of update posts in our Discord—including community feedback, support tips, and troubleshooting advice:
👉 https://discord.com/channels/1287103919071432829/1329119226937741362/1360673729327140914
Thanks again for being part of RetroDreams. If you’ve made it this far, you’re part of the family. We’re just getting started.
🧡
—The RetroDreams Team