RetroAchievements

If you’re into earning achievements in retro games, Cocoon Shell has you covered. It connects to RetroAchievements (RA) so you can browse achievements, check your progress, and see trophy badges — all without leaving the launcher.

How does it work? The actual achievement tracking happens inside your emulator (usually RetroArch with achievements turned on). Cocoon connects to the same account to show you your progress in a nice visual way.

Getting Set Up

  1. If you don’t have one yet, create a free account at retroachievements.org.
  2. In Cocoon, go to Settings → Integrations → RetroAchievements.
  3. Enter your Username and API Key.
  4. Cocoon will check that everything’s good, and you’re all set!

Linking Your Games

For Cocoon to know which achievements go with which game, it needs to match your game files to the RetroAchievements database. This happens during scraping:

  1. Go to Settings → Library & Data → Scrape.
  2. Make sure RetroAchievements Hash is turned on.
  3. Run a scrape.

Cocoon will create a unique fingerprint for each game and match it against the RA database. Once matched, you’ll start seeing achievement info for those games.

How Achievements Show Up

Once a game is linked to RetroAchievements, Cocoon shows your progress in a few places — you don’t even have to go looking for it.

The Trophy Badge

When you highlight a linked game, a gold-and-orange trophy badge appears in the corner of the hero view. It shows a trophy icon and your progress — something like “12 / 30” (12 unlocked out of 30 total). It fades in with a smooth animation as you browse.

Trophy badge on the hero view showing unlocked/total count

Detailed Achievement Info on the Hero

Press A on the hero’s info area (or expand it on a single-screen device) and you’ll see a full RetroAchievements section with:

  • A header showing the trophy icon, “RetroAchievements” label, and your progress count in blue
  • Your most recently unlocked achievement displayed as a card with its badge icon, title, and description
  • Up to 3 more recent unlocks shown as smaller badge icons next to it

Detailed RetroAchievements info in the expanded hero view

This gives you a quick recap of what you’ve earned without opening a separate screen.

The Full Achievements Screen

Want to see everything? Open the full achievements view:

  1. Highlight a game on your grid.
  2. Press YAchievements.
  3. You’ll see all the achievements for that game:

Achievement list showing unlocked and locked badges with descriptions

  • Achievement badge icons (unlocked badges are bright, locked ones are grayed out)
  • Titles and descriptions
  • Point values
  • Unlock dates for achievements you’ve earned

Press Y inside the achievements screen to switch between a grid view (just icons — great for a quick visual overview) and a list view (full details for each achievement).

What Platforms Are Supported?

RetroAchievements covers a huge range of retro systems. As long as the platform is supported by RA and your emulator has RA integration, it’ll work with Cocoon. This includes:

  • Nintendo: NES, SNES, N64, Game Boy, GBC, GBA, DS, Virtual Boy, Pokémon Mini
  • Sega: Genesis, Master System, Game Gear, Saturn, Dreamcast, Sega CD, 32X
  • Sony: PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2, PSP
  • Atari: 2600, 7800, Jaguar, Lynx
  • SNK: Neo Geo, Neo Geo Pocket
  • And more: PC Engine, 3DO, ColecoVision, Vectrex, WonderSwan, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Arduboy, and many others

Tips & Troubleshooting

IssueWhat to try
No trophy badge on my gameMake sure you’ve scraped with “RetroAchievements Hash” enabled. Not every version of a ROM is in the RA database — “No-Intro” verified sets tend to work best.
Achievements show but no progressYour emulator needs to be logged into RA separately with achievements turned on. Cocoon only displays the data — your emulator does the actual tracking.
”Invalid credentials” errorDouble-check your username and API key. The API key is different from your password — find it in your account settings on retroachievements.org.
Matched to the wrong gameThis is rare since matching uses file fingerprints. Try a different version of the ROM.