I used to live in New Zealand and had a glorious gaming room filled with every retro console you could think of. Super Nintendos, Megadrives, Saturns, exotic consoles like the WonderMega, and shelves full of rare games. Giving all that up was one of the prices I paid for my new life in asia. There’s a certain hole in my heart left by the loss of my retro games and I’ve been looking for a replacement. Something small I can put in a back pack while I bum around asia and plug into a hotel TV. Then I heard about the RetroPie.
The RetroPie is a Linux distribution designed to play old video game roms on the Raspberry Pi series of mini computers. You buy a Raspberry Pi, an SDram card, a case, and a controller, but most bluetooth controllers will work. Let’s start with the Pi.
The Raspberry Pi contains everything you need in a computer in a little package. The best model, the Pi 3, has 4 usb ports, ethernet, bluetooth, wifi, and 1GB of ram. Not a lot of memory by todays standards but enough for emulation. You’re going to want a Pi 3 instead of a 2 because it’s 50% faster. I bought my Raspberry Pi from Aliexpress. You can also get them from Amazon. Expect to pay around $35 for one.
Next thing on your shopping list is an MicroSD card to store your operating system and roms. 32GB is a decent size, 64 or 128 will give you enough room to store lots of disk images of consoles like the Mega CD or Playstation.
So what about your case? You can just leave your Pi bare, but a case is much nicer. I got my NES style case off AliExpress. If you search around you can find miniature Super Nintendos, mini Sega Megadrives and the such like. The cases have little holes for the Raspberry Pis ports. You can even get really funky and 3D print a mini version of your favorite obscure retro console.
Some cases come with little heat sinks to stick on the Raspberry Pis chips, if not find some to buy. AliExpress is again a good place.
Then we come to your controller. You can just use your Xbox One or PS4 Controller, wired or in bluetooth, or any generic USB or Bluetooth controller, but a much cooler option is get a bluetooth version of a retro controller. Being a bit of a Super Nintendo fan boy I got myself a 8BitDo SNES controller. It’s out of production and isn’t much use for playing N64 or Playstation 1 games, but when you’re playing SNES it really adds to the nostalgia. Like Pokemon I intend to catch them all. Going to get a bluetooth NES controller, a Megadrive one, the lot. This is an advantage over the official SNES Mini, we’re wireless.
One last thing to buy, your power supply. Raspberry Pis are powered off micro USB like most Android phones. Find yourself a beefy 2.5 Amp power supply. The cheap mobile USB PSUs you find at 7/11s may not be up to the job. Then your hdmi cable and you're set!
So we got our Pi, our MicroSD card, our cool case, power supply, heat sinks and SNES or Megadrive contraller. How do you put it all together? Next article we’ll build our RetroPie and finally get to play some games!!