Building a Mini Gaming Console with Retropie

Cynthia Taylor
Aug 25, 2017 · 3 min read

Status: Completed

Description: Create a full fledge SNES emulator utilizing a Raspberry Pi board and RetroPie.

What is RetroPie?

RetroPie allows you to turn your Raspberry Pi or PC into a retro-gaming machine. It builds upon Raspbian, EmulationStation, RetroArch and many other projects to enable you to play your favourite Arcade, home-console, and classic PC games with the minimum set-up. For power users it also provides a large variety of configuration tools to customise the system as you want.

RetroPie sits on top of a full OS, you can install it on an existing Raspbian, or start with the RetroPie SD image and add additional software later. It’s up to you.

Parts:

  • Ethernet Cable or Wi-fi Dongle
  • Raspberry Pi Board
  • Micro SD Card
  • HDMI Cable
  • USB Battery pack or Wall Charger (2.5A recommended)
  • USB Controllers
  • Monitor/TV
  • Raspberry Pi Housing

Skills Required:
Basic Knowledge of Developer Boards (headers, languages, etc), basic setup (driver compatibility, etc) and how to flash software, debug, etc.

Summary of Work:

Caught a friend building this on Instagram and thought it’d be a fun project to take on. I had already purchased a Raspberry Pi 2 to have on hand for various projects, but didn’t have any specific plans for it at the time. The documentation for this project is spot on which was one of the key reasons I decided to do this project.

If you’re used to flashing images to put Developer or Beta OS builds on an Android or iOS device, you’ll be very familiar with the process for pushing Retropie to the micro SD card. (And equally grateful at how simple it is in comparison.)

Win32 Disk Image can be temperamental.

The whole system loaded on the first try. :)

Longest boot screen ever!
It’s ALIVE!

Configuration for the system is very robust with a lot of options for additional features. I’m VERY impressed with the software and it’s now goal to (sometime in the future) contribute to Retropie’s Github.

There’s configuration options for Xbox/PS-style controllers too which got me really excited!

Finished Product:

The case is slightly warped as it’s a 3D print. I figure some acetone and velcro will fix the fit issues and still allow access to the board.

Now comes the really hard part…figuring out what games I want to load. :D

For more projects like this, check out my website: cynthiatayloronline.github.io!

)
Cynthia Taylor

Written by

Android QA Engineer, UI for UN Volunteers, Disability:IN NextGen Leader, EA & Universal Orlando Alumni

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