The Raspberry Pi has a variety of use cases, we’ve covered a few before, it could be
used to stream your Steam games, turn your speaker into an AirPlay speaker and much more.
This time we’re going to take a look into retro emulation and turn the Pi into a retro
gaming machine with RetroPie.
RetroPie allows you to turn your Raspberry Pi or any Debian or Ubuntu based machine into
a retro gaming console.
RetroPie can be installed onto an existing Raspbian installation, but for this tutorial,
I am going to be showing you how to get started with the pre-made images.
For this tutorial, you’re going to need to have a few programs downloaded and installed
onto your computer.
So you're going to need 7-zip or another archiving file manager and Etcher to write the image
to the SD card.
Previously, I've used win32diskimager but I think that Etcher is a nicer program to
use.
The first step will be to download the pre-made RetroPie image from the RetroPie website.
There will be links for everything in the description and also a full writeup of this
tutorial if you want to read it.
So you want to go to the RetroPie website and download the image, you'll want to pick
the appropriate version.
If you don't know which one you have, you can boot up your Raspberry Pi into Raspbian
and depending on how many Raspberry icons you see will be which one you need to download.
If you see one Raspberry icon, get the Raspberry Pi 0/1 and if you have four icons for the
Raspberry Pi 2/3 you'll want to download this one.
Since I have the original Raspberry Pi, I'm going to be downloading this one here.
I'd just recommend saving it to your desktop for simplicity and I will be right back once
this has downloaded.
So now that it has downloaded, we have the file here and we just need to unzip this.
What you can do is open it up and then just drag the image file out onto your desktop.
So now that we have the image file extracted, we just need to write it to our Raspberry
Pi SD card and then we can boot up into RetroPie.
So this is where Etcher comes in.
We're going to open it up and now we want to select the image, so, click "Select Image"
and then just click the Raspberry Pi image there.
Now you'll want to get your Raspberry Pi SD card and make sure that's plugged into your
computer and you'll want to make sure that there's nothing on this SD card that you want
to keep because writing the image will wipe the card.
Click change here to make sure that you've got the right device selected to write to
because you don't want to write to the wrong one.
Then, once you've double checked that just click "Continue".
Then you can click "Flash".
Click "Yes" to anything that might pop up and there you go, it's going to start writing
the image to the SD card and then once it's done we will put the SD card into the Pi and
continue from there.
Now that the SD card is written, put it into your Raspberry Pi.
I’d recommend a wired controller and also a USB Wi-Fi adapter if you’re going to be
putting the Pi somewhere that doesn’t have Ethernet if you have a Raspberry Pi 3 it already
has Wi-Fi built in.
So now we're just starting up RetroPie for the first time.
It's just going to configure a few things and then it's going to take us to the controller
configuration screen.
Now we're at the welcome screen, you just want to hold the button on your controller
or keyboard, if you're going to be using a keyboard you're going to configure that how
you want.
If you're going to be using a controller we're just going to be using the suggestions and
following the diagram that RetroPie has created which I will show all three of them on the
screen, just pause on the appropriate one or they're also in the article.
So I'm just going to configure this now.
Now you can see if you miss one, just keep going, it's a bit finicky.
Now I'm just going to go back up and do the one that I missed.
There we go, and press OK.
There are a few hotkeys that you'll want to know which I'll show on the screen as well.
Probably the most important ones that you're going to want to remember are the exiting
and save shortcuts.
So Start and Select for exiting and select and right shoulder for saving as with retro
games and consoles, autosave wasn't exactly a thing as ROMs are read-only memory and to
exit the game you would turn off the console.
So for emulation, you'll want to remember those.
So now I'm going to show you how to set-up Wi-Fi.
If you don't want to use Wi-Fi, just skip to the time shown on the screen.
If you do want to use Wi-Fi, so you can use Wi-Fi to transfer games to your Pi we can
configure it in a few ways.
So if you have a keyboard, you want to go to the configuration on RetroPie and go down
to Wi-Fi and then you want to go to "Connect to Wi-Fi network" and then you want to select
your network and put in your Wi-Fi password.
If you don't have a keyboard plugged in, you can create a text file on the SD card and
that's going to be the method that I'm going to personally use.
What you want to do is turn off the Raspberry Pi and then take out the SD card and put it
back into your computer.
So now that the SD card is plugged into the computer, you want to ignore any formatting
messages like this, so just click cancel.
Then you want to open up Notepad and then we need to put the Wi-Fi network info into
the text document.
So you want to type this in but replace NETWORK_NAME with the name of your network and then replace
NETWORK_PASSWORD with the password of your network.
Then you want to save this file to the "boot" partition of the SD card, which should show
up here.
Then you just want to save the text file as "wifikeyfile.txt".
Then click save.
then you can close this and unplug your SD card and boot up the Pi again.
Okay so now the Pi has been booted up again with the SD card, you'll want to go to the
RetroPie configuration and go down to Wi-Fi and you'll want to go to "Import Wi-Fi credentials
from boot/winkeyfile.txt".
It will connect.
There you go, now you can go on to "Exit" and we can get to the good part, which is
actually transferring the ROMs to the Pi itself.
So, first of all, you'll want to make sure that the ROMs you're planning to copy over
are actually compatible.
So you'll want to check the supported systems list.
I won't be showing you how to get ROMs yourself, but Google is definitely your friend.
There are a few ways to transfer ROMs to the Pi; USB, SFTP and SMB but for this tutorial,
I shall show you the USB and SMB methods.
So we'll get started with USB transfer, and what you're going to want to do is create
a folder on your USB stick called "retropie" and plug it into your Raspberry Pi.
If your USB stick has a light on it wait for the light to stop flashing as RetroPie sets
up the folders that you can copy to.
If it doesn't have a light, give it a minute or so, or 5 if you want to be safe.
Or, use another transfer method.
Once that's done, you can unplug the USB from the Pi and plug it back into your computer
and then you can copy the ROMs to their respective folders in "retropie/roms", so your SNES ROM,
for example, would go in the "snes" folder and so on.
Once the copying is done, unplug the USB stick from your computer and plug it back into the
Raspberry Pi – it’s now going to copy the ROMs to the Pi’s SD card.
Once again, once the light has finished flashing you can unplug it.
As before, if you don't have a light on the USB stick, just give it plenty of time to
copy everything over.
Now you can restart EmulationStation by pressing F4 on the keyboard if you have a keyboard
plugged in.
Or, if you're using a controller press "Start" and then go down to "Quit" and then choose
"Restart EmulationStation".
SMB or Samba, I think, is much easier and simpler than the USB transfer method.
Your computer and Raspberry Pi will both need to be connected to the same network via Ethernet
or Wi-Fi.
That's all you need.
Open up Windows Explorer and type in "\\RETROPIE" and this will take you to the RetroPie folders.
Then if you go into "roms" you can see all of the different folders that there are.
We are going to be putting a ROM in the "atari2600" folder as Pacman is probably a lot easier
to play on the Pi than going into the lof and getting the Atari out the loft.
So that's what we'll do.
That's all you need to do to copy a ROM over, that's it, it's already on the Pi, it's sorted.
If you're on a Mac, you'd open up Finder and you'd go onto the "Go" bar at the top of the
screen and go onto "Connect to server" and then you'd put "smb://retropie" and do exactly
the same.
Now you can restart EmulationStation again by pressing F4 on the keyboard or "Start"
on your controller and then go to the "Quit" option and "Restart EmulationStation".
That's it!
You now have a retro gaming console which you can play all of your favourite classics
on.
Some games may not run at full speed depending on how old your Pi is and if you have overclocked
it or not, so 3D games may struggle, but 2D titles should run just fine.
That's been it for this video, thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one.