You have a card full of games and a backlog you will never finish. Somewhere in there is an RPG you stopped playing because you got lost, and a platformer with one boss you could not beat. The walkthroughs exist. They are just on your phone, or in a browser tab you closed months ago.
I wanted them on the card, next to the games. So I built RetroMod Guides, a free tool that runs in your browser and does exactly that.
What it does
You plug your handheld's SD card into your computer and pick its ROM folder. The tool looks at every game, finds the best English GameFAQs walkthrough for it, and saves it as a plain .txt file next to the ROM. Game Name.rom gets a Game Name.txt beside it.
Because it is plain text, any handheld with a text reader can open it. Some devices can even show it over the paused game, which I come back to below.
- Your files never leave your machine. No server, no upload, no account. The browser reads the folder, matches the names locally and writes the files straight back to the card.
- It is polite. Existing
.txtfiles are never touched, and re-running the tool skips what is already done. Downloads run three at a time so archive.org is not hammered. - It only adds files. Saves, states and box art are ignored.
How to use it
- Put the SD card in your computer and open guides.retromodlab.com/app in Chrome or Edge.
- Pick the card's
Romsfolder. Picking the card root works too, the tool findsRomson its own. - Watch the matches fill in, per platform, with a count of guides found. Exact hits and fuzzy ones are shown separately so you can see what it was less sure about.
- Let it download, then eject the card and play.
Stock Anbernic, OnionOS and GarlicOS folder names (FC, SFC, MD, PS, GBA and friends) map straight to the right platform. Other devices that keep ROMs in per-console folders will probably work too. If a folder name is not recognised, the scan says so and touches nothing.
Where the guides come from
The walkthroughs are the plain-text FAQs from the GameFAQs archive preserved on archive.org. Each guide is fetched by your browser straight from archive.org. I host none of them, and the tool never copies them anywhere but your card.
Those guides exist because fans sat down and wrote them, often thousands of lines of ASCII, for nothing. And they are still around because volunteers at archive.org kept them. Thank you to both groups. The tool's index covers about 17,400 walkthroughs across more than 100 platforms, according to the site.
The hard problem: matching names
Downloading a text file is easy. Working out which text file belongs to Legend of Zelda, The - A Link to the Past (USA) [!].sfc is the interesting part.
ROM names are messy. Region tags, revision marks, dumper brackets, "The" at the front or the back. So the first step is to normalise both sides, ROM names and the GameFAQs index, into the same plain form. Many games match exactly at that point.
For the rest there is a fuzzy pass using a similarity score. It starts strict, and only then tries a looser second pass. Fuzzy matching has an obvious danger: Final Fantasy II looks almost identical to Final Fantasy III. So there is a digit guard. A candidate is only considered if its numbers match the ROM's numbers, which means a sequel can never quietly borrow the wrong game's guide.
There is also a third layer: a short list of hand-checked fixes. A few games are named differently in the index (a Japanese title, a "Metabee Version" suffix), and a few have no correct guide in the archive at all. In those cases I would rather give you nothing than a guide for a different game, so the list says "no match" on purpose.
On my own Anbernic RG35XX H card, the first run put 2,492 guides next to my games. That is one card, not a promise for yours.
Reading them on the device
Filling the card needs no mod at all. Reading the guide over a running game depends on your firmware, and the landing page has a device picker with the details for each one.
On the Anbernic RG35XX H, SP, Plus and the wider H700 family, stock firmware cannot show a guide over a game. You need cbepx-me's StockOS Modification, and when the first-run config appears you must switch Real Time Game Guide on. That is the step everyone misses, and it cannot be changed later without redoing the config. After that, the console vibrates when the game you launched has a guide, and L2 + R2 then Down opens it. RetroArch games only.
On a Miyoo Mini Plus running OnionOS, that is what Guide Watch is for: it buzzes when a guide exists and opens it mid-game.
Known limits
I would rather you know these up front:
- Chrome or Edge on desktop only. The tool needs the File System Access API to write files back to the card. Firefox and Safari do not have it yet.
- English guides only, and only for games that GameFAQs actually has a text guide for. Plenty of games have none.
- Matching is good, not perfect. Check the fuzzy matches if a particular guide matters to you.
- TrimUI and other devices are not supported yet. The card still gets its
.txtfiles, but I have no in-game reader for them.
Vote for your device
Not every handheld has an in-game reader yet. The landing page has a device vote, and the next port goes to whichever handheld the most people ask for. No account, no email. To stop one person voting fifty times it keeps a salted hash of your IP address and nothing else.
The tool is free, with no premium tier and no ads. If it saves you a trip to your phone, you can buy me a coffee.
Update, October 2026: the tool has grown since August. It now has a 3DS mode, which reads the games installed on a modded 3DS or 2DS card and saves guides for the Luma3DS in-game plugin. It has a DSpico mode, for cards with a _pico folder, with guides read in the DS-BIOS Pico Launcher (see the DSpico guide reader post). And it handles TWiLight Menu++ cards on DS, DSi and 3DS. The Nintendo Switch also has its own overlay, Guide Watch, which reads the same kind of .txt files.