How to make your own Retro Console with a Raspberry Pi
Things needed for this project
For this project you will need:
- Raspberry Pi 4GB RAM
- Raspberry Pi 4 official power supply
- an HDMI display (tv works too)
- Micro HDMI to HDMI cable
- one or more controllers
- sd card (16GB or more)
Step 1: Flashing the SD card
To Flash, the OS to the SD card first download rpi-imager from the raspberry pi website and open the program.
Then press CHOOSE OS
Scroll down and press Emulation and game OS press it
Now Select Retro Pie
Then select the appropriate image for this tutorial its the RPI 4/400 image
Press CHOOSE STORAGE to select your SD card after you did that press write.
Step 2: Installing and Configuring Retro Pie
Insert the SD card into the SD card slot and plug in the raspberry pi and connect the display
If you did everything you should see this after 5 seconds (after the colorful image and all the text)
Connecting a Wired Controller
then there should be a text prompt that says welcome and press the A button on the controller to configure. Then you will have to configure each button if you want to skip a button double-press any button.
Connecting a Bluetooth Controller
If you have a Bluetooth controller it is a bit more complicated. First, you have to connect a keyboard and navigate to the retro pie logo then press enter. Go down to the Bluetooth section and connect your controller then you will be prompted to configure it if you want to skip a selection because your controller doesn't have that button then double click any button.
Step 3: Adding Games
In your file manager type \\ and then the IP of your raspberry pi if you don't know that raspberry.local works on some networks.
open the ROMs folder and in it open the folder named with the console that you want to emulate. Now you have to download ROMs from the internet or extract them from your own games. I cannot recommend any ROM sites in this article because they infringe on copyright laws but you can just search on the internet and find them easily. If you want many ROMs of one console you can download them from https://archive.org in the software section.
when you have your ROMs you can drag them into the console folder and then just restart your retropie and then you can play your newly added games
Final Notes
I hope you have fun playing your retro games and enjoyed this article. If you did please leave an applaud and if you didn't let me know why.
