Welcome back. This post describes my adventure in setting up RetroPie to play some of the games I used to play as a child, and also to expose my children to the older games, which in my opinion, are way better than modern games. In most modern games, graphics are the priority and sometimes, the game play is forgotten; well, older games are all about the game play. they were truly fun and captivating. No Internet, no distractions, just you and the game.<\/p>\r\n
Well, let’s start, first I had to select the most appropriate Raspberry PI, I ended up selecting the Raspberry PI 400. The reason is simple, some of the games I used to play were on Commodore 64, which some needed a keyboard. So the Raspberry PI 400, with its built-in keyboard makes the perfect choice for me. However, for you, if all you need is console playing, the Raspberry 4 or 5 would be just fine. No keyboard will be necessary, once is setup.<\/p>\r\n
Now let’s go through the setup, I am not going to guide you step by step on how to install RetroPie, there are many guides on the Internet for that, instead, what I will do is tell you my selection and my hiccups along the way.<\/p>\r\n
First let’s describe the software and hardware components you need to set this up:<\/p>\r\n
First thing is to burn the downloaded image onto the new SD Card, following are the steps:<\/p>\r\n
Most interaction with Retropie is done via controller, if the controller is via USB either wired or dongle, it should work immediately, all you have to do is map the buttons and follow the startup wizard, once you do it a few times, it becomes easy.<\/p>\r\n
After the controller is setup, the next thing to do is setup network connectivity. If you are using a wired connection, this step is not requires, you should dbe connected already, if you are using WiFI, then you will have to set it up. Assuming the controller is setup, bring up the go to the RetroPie selection, if you don’t have any roms setup yet, it should be the only option available, choose Setup WiFI from the menu and follow the steps. RetroPie docs describe the process way better I can ever describe, check the docs here<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n If you are a Unix person, enabling SSH access will be for you. It will allow interaction with RetroPie via SCP or SSH. You can use SSH\/SCP to put roms on the device, or perform setup steps. It’s very useful. To setup SSH access, follow the official steps here<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n Now we need to update RetroPie to the latest packages. This is where things can go south. I highly recommend to backup the sd card before continuing with the Update section. There are many ways to do a backup, too many to describe here, but it entails to dump the content\/image of the sdcard to a secure place. In the event things go wrong, you should be able to restore the image to the sdcard and be back to a working state. RetroPie docs describe a couple of ways to perform a backup, check it out here<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n Updating RetroPie is something you want to perform often. RetroPie is a combination of different parts, there is the OS, which is updated like any other Debian derivative, there are RetroPie main, optional, and experimantal packages, those are updated with the RetroPie Update script.<\/p>\r\n Updating RetroPie is where things will no as planed. So unless you are really familiar with the process, make sure you have a backup before continuing.<\/p>\r\n Let discuss updating the base operating system. You will need a terminal session either via SSH or by exiting emulationstation bu pressing F4 on the keyboard. Now that you are at a terminal session, type the following two commands:<\/p>\r\n sudo apt update Confirm with “y” and Enter to start the OS update, once done, you will have to reboot your Raspberry PI. You can reboot the raspberry pi by typing the command sudo reboot, or if you are in emulationstation, just press the menu button on the controller, I use the start button for that, choose Quit, and choose Restart Device.<\/p>\r\n Once the device is rebooted, you will need to access the retropie setup script, which is accessible via the RetroPie menu in emulation station or by using the following command from a terminal session:<\/p>\r\n sudo ~\/Retropie-Setup\/retropie_setup.sh<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n RetroPie docs describes the process in details on how to update all the components of RetroPie. Follow it here<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n Assuming everything goes well, you have a fully functional RetroPie installation, ok but wait! Where are the games? Well this is where you would transfer the ROMS to the device. Again, RetroPie has documentation on how to transfer ROMS for the appropriate console to RetroPie. Follow the process here<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n If you wondered why ROMS are not delivered with retropie is because, most games are protected by copyright laws. So finding and uploading the roms is left to the user.<\/p>\r\n Once you favorite games are transferred to the device in the proper destination, they should just show up in Emulation Station, all left to do, is to play them.<\/p>\r\n There are additional setup and tweaks that you will find required based on the consoles\/games you choose. The tweaks are beyond the scope of this article.<\/p>\r\n The last thing I mention is to setup images, thumbnails, descriptions, and videos for your games, in order to do that, screenscraping is required. I will probably write an article about screenscraping because the built-in one is not that great, but you can use it to start. I use Skyscraper application to perform all my screenscraping tasks for RetroPie.<\/p>\r\n Well, I hope I made your adventure a little easier, thank you for reading and good luck and I hope you will have lots of fun playing retro games.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Welcome back. This post describes my adventure in setting up RetroPie to play some of the games I used to play as a child, and also to expose my children to the older games, which in my opinion, are way better than modern games. In most modern games, graphics are the priority and sometimes, the … Continue reading “My Retro Video Games Adventure with Retropie”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unix"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pipeawk.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pipeawk.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pipeawk.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pipeawk.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pipeawk.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/pipeawk.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":477,"href":"https:\/\/pipeawk.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions\/477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pipeawk.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pipeawk.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pipeawk.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Update RetroPie<\/h3>\r\n
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sudo apt upgrade<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n