You can easily transform your Raspberry Pi into an awesome little retro-gaming machine.

It supports up to 50 consoles! Such as:

• Nitendo 64
• Game boy
• Atari 2600
• Playstation 1 and 2
• Master System

You can found the full list here

This post relate my experience building a gaming console and it is a complement of the officials documentation. I Hope it will be useful for you!

Material

• Rasberry Pi (3b+ for me)
  • A heatsink is a really good idea
• Large SD card > 8go to store your games
• Raspberry power supply is recommanded
• Nice retro-gaming case (optional)
  • Ventilation fan (30mm x 30mm x 7mm) silent as possible
• Controller
  • USB snes
  • XBOX
  • PS3
• USB keyboard for configuration

Distributions

There is tree major solution to turn your Raspberry Pi into a multi-consol retro-gaming station:

• RecalBox
  • Easy to set up
  • Come with preinstalled games
• RetroPie
  • Most popular solution
  • Have a nice support
  • High level of settings
  • Raspbian based
• Lakka
  • light way

Theses image can be easily download and flash using etcher.

Note: RetroPie can be also installed on top of an existing Raspbian https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Manual-Installation/

I have test RecalBox and RetroPie, but sadly not Lakka for the moment, here is my feedback.

Recalbox

I have decided to start by trying Recalbox, well because… I have to start somewhere. After buying a brand new 64go sd card, I flashed the 18.07.13 / Raspberry 3 version.

Then spend my morning figuring out why it was not booting, trying with different sd cards, copying the image using dd, then I just randomly read that the Raspberry Pi 3b+ is not supported yet…

So I tried with the dev release, it boot well but I wasn’t able to launch games… (tester release…) Finally, I tried back the stable version with my good old RPi 3b, and I was able to play the preinstalled games.

Issues encountered

• RPi 3b+ not supported yet (and take me a long time to find the issue)
• Wiki not really update

Conclusion

Even with the lot of time I waste due to bad documentation, It is a really beautiful system and I am waiting for the RPI 3b+ support.

RetroPie

Not really happy of trying to make Recalbox work on my Rasberry 3b+, I moved to RetroPie following the well made documentation for the installation:

• Here is the download link for Raspberry 2/3 image.

Controller

On the first boot you have to setup the controller and my SNES Controller is seen as Xbox Controller, but it seem to be not a problem because you can skip buttons you don’t have.

The hotkey is use on shortcut to interact with the emulator, it allow to some extra feature as saving at anymoment. I recommand to set select as Hotkeys.

Emulator shortcuts:

Hotkeys	Action
Select+Start	Exit
Select+Right Shoulder	Save
Select+Left Shoulder	Load
Select+Right	Input State Slot Increase
Select+Left	Input State Slot Decrease
Select+X	RGUI Menu
Select+B	Reset

Set extra controller

When you plug a new controller you have to set it:

1. Open menu with start
2. Configure input

Note: If the start button is not working you can follow to procedure on issue chapter, to clear the input configuration.

Install emulators

Emulators are available as packages, to install them:

1. Set up internet connection (wifi or LAN)
2. Install basic package

  Configuration > RetroPie setup > Basic install

1. Additional emulator can be found in :

  RetroPie setup > Manage packages

Install ROM

The ROMs aka games are not provided with RetroPie. The can be found on internet.

Add ROM

1. Download the game form internet
2. Decompress the files
3. Add the files to the folder corresponding to the console

  /roms/<console>/

1. Reboot for update the game list
2. Scrape to add a description and a picture of the game in the menu

  start > scraper > scrape now > start

Note: some games require a BIOS (see: issues bellow)

Keyboard settings

To change the keyboard settings:

F4 to enter in terminal

sudo raspi-config
Localisation Option > Change Keyboard Layout > Choose Generic 101-key PC

Note: If you have swiss french keyboard as me choose German (Switzerland) then you can select French version

source

Troubleshooting

Boot in terminal after upgrade

After upgrading the system, it was booting in the terminal:

• Login: pi
• Password: raspberry

sudo ./RetroPie-Setup/retropie_setup.sh

then go to:

Configuration / tools > Splashscren - Configure Splashscreen

set Enable splashscreen on boot to disabled

source

Now, RetroPi launch if you login in the terminal to firectly boot in RetroPie:

RetroPie setting > Raspi-config > set  Boot Options to terminal without login

Reconfigure controller

Now if the start and select buttons are not working, got to:

Configuration / Tools > emulationstation > Clear/Reset Emulation Station input configuration

Then you will have to configure the controller at next boot.

source

Supertux game not launching

Reason: It require a desktop

Some Playstation game crash

Some Playstation games like Crash Team Racing crash because they require a BIOS file :

• Copy SCPH1001.BIN to /home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS

source

Safe shutdown with RetroFlag picase

The RetroFlag script provide a safe shutdown functionality:

1. Close emulator
2. Wait 3s
3. Shutdown

Install

For RetroPie

• Connect to the internet
• Enter in terminal F4

wget -O - "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RetroFlag/retroflag-picase/master/install.sh" | sudo bash