02/01/2019 Build your own Retro Arcade with Raspberry Pi and RetroPie OS

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11/29/2016 | BY MAKER.IO STAFF

Build your own Retro Arcade with Raspberry Pi and

RetroPie OS
November the 11th was the release day
of the Nintendo Classic Mini, which is a
replica of the original NES with up to 30
classic games all for $49. However, due
to high demand and limited produc on
they have become somewhat difficult to
get a hold of. But do not panic, we have
you covered with crea ng your very own
retro games console using a Raspberry Pi
and RetroPie OS courtesy of
PetRockBlock.

RetroPie allows you to turn your Raspberry Pi or PC into a retro-gaming machine. It

builds upon Raspbian, Emula onSta on, RetroArch and many other projects to enable
you to play your favourite Arcade, home-console, and classic PC games with minimum
set-up. For power users it also provides a large variety of configura on tools to
customise the system as you want.

Things you will need

You will need the following items before ge ng started:

Raspberry Pi Computer
8GB MicroSD Card and SD reader
USB Controller or Bluetooth Controller
HDMI Display
USB Drive with BerryBoot (op onal)

Ge ng Started

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(h you will need to do is head over to the RetroPie website download page
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where you can download the latest image (v4.1 as of 5th November) for your Raspberry
Pi computer. By far the easiest op on is to download the full SD image of the OS rather
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than installing (/en/maker)
on top of your exis ng OS. Select the op on which represents your setup
as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Select your Raspberry Pi Version

Once downloaded you will need to burn the image to your MicroSD card. On Windows
you can use WinDisk32Imager so ware and on MAC OS you can use Etcher. Either of
these will write the RetroPie image to the MicroSD card. Insert the MicroSD card into
your computer and select the drive le er in your so ware.

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Figure 2: Flashing RetroPie to a microSD Card
Build your own Retro Arcade with Raspberry Pi and RetroPie OS
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Figure 3: Process should take about 5 mins un l comple on

Next you will need to hook up the Raspberry Pi to an HDMI display, insert the MicroSD
card into the Raspberry Pi SD slot and also before you power up the device connect
your USB controller to the Raspberry Pi’s USB port. For this example, I used the USB
controller as shown in the below figure.

Figure 4: Connect your USB controller to the Raspberry Pi

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Login (h power to the Pi and boot it up. On first screen you will be required to
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setup your controller for the Emula on sta on menu and game bu ons, just follow the
on-screen bu on presses and select OK to save.
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Figure 5: Se ng up the Controller

Loading ROMs

There are a couple of different ways in which you can load your ROM files to the
RetroPie to be able to play your games. By default, the Emula onSta on menu will not
show any emulators in the menu unless you load some ROMs for that par cular
pla orm.

The first way I’m going to show you is using a USB thumb drive. First you will need to
insert your drive into your computer and create a new folder labelled “retropie”.

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Figure 6: Create a New Folder Called retropie

Plug it into your Raspberry Pi and wait for it to finish blinking the LED. Pull the USB out
and plug it back into your computer. Open the USB drive up and you should see all the
folders for the emulators where you can add your ROM files.

Figure 7: ROM Folder Created

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(h ROMs to the folder in which they sit in and then plug the USB drive back into
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the Raspberry Pi. Wait for the USB drive to stop blinking and then restart the
Emula onSta on from the main menu and it will find all of your ROM files. You should
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now be able to navigate the menu le and right and play your games.
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The second way to load your ROM files is using something called Samba, which is a
network protocol for sharing files. By default, Samba is enabled on the RetroPie OS, all
you have to do is connect to your network using either Wi-Fi or Ethernet cable.

To configure Wi-Fi using RetroPie all you need to do is open up the main menu and
select “WIFI” at the bo om. You will be presented with a menu which gives you op ons
to either connect to a WiFi network, disconnect/remove WiFi se ng or import
creden als from a config file. You will need to select the first op on, which will scan for
local wireless devices and prompt you to enter your WiFi creden als. Once connected
you can restart RetroPie for the changes to take effect.

If you are using a Windows computer, you can open up your computer folder and enter
the following address in the URL bar:

\\RETROPIE

If using MAC OS then you just need to open up finder and you should see RETROPIE network
device on the le hand side. If it doesn’t show up then you can also add it manually by
naviga ng to “GO” and select “Connect to Server” in the finder menu and adding the
following URL:

smb://retropie
Then hit “Connect” to establish a network connec on.

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Figure 8: Network Connec on to RetroPie

Se ng Up a PS3 Controller

The most recent versions of RetroPie include the packages needed for se ng up a PS3
controller. Connec ng over USB is Plug and Play, you just plug your controller into the Pi
while Emula onSta on is running and it should detect a gamepad to configure.
Connec ng a PS3 controller via Bluetooth requires installa on of a special PS3 driver
located in RetroPie setup.

Before boo ng the Raspberry Pi, make sure that a supported Bluetooth adapter is
connected. A er your Pi boots up, you need to enter RetroPie setup. You can do this
one of two ways:

Naviga ng to the "RetroPie" icon in the Home Screen, and selec ng it using whatever
key you mapped "A" to on your gamepad.
Pressing F4 to quit Emula onSta on and running the Retropie script from the
terminal. Once you're in the terminal, follow these instruc ons to run the
retropie_setup.sh script.

Once in the RetroPie GUI, navigate to the RetroPie Setup Op on. A terminal-like
window will pop up with a list of choices; navigate to the "Drivers" op on and select it.
Select PS3 Controller Driver, and then select Install. Once installa on completes, exit
RetroPie setup and return to the Emula onSta on Home Screen. Press "Start" to enter
the Emula onSta on Menu, and select Configure Input. Disconnect your PS3 controller
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(h Now hold the PS bu onBuildonyour
the controller down un l you see the lights on it
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flash sequen ally. The controller should now be connected via Bluetooth. Emula on
Sta on should now detect another gamepad connected. Hold any bu on down on the
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controller to begin configuring it.
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BerryBoot and PiDrive

If you’re an avid retro gamer then you would have collected thousands of ROMs like
myself, however as we know they will not all fit on a single 8GB or even a 32GB SD card.
Thanks to BerryBoot there is an op on to install RetroPie on a USB hard drive that
u lises its maximum space. Just recently this year Western Digital released a USB drive
specifically for the Raspberry Pi called “PiDrive” which works great with the RetroPie
build.

You will need the following:

Raspberry Pi
MicroSD Card 2GB
USB Hard Drive
USB Flash Drive for copying the latest RetroPie image

First you will need to download the BerryBoot bootloader files from their website,
making sure you select the correct bootloader for your Raspberry Pi version. Next you
will need to format your SD card so it is blank. You can download an SD forma ng tool
for both Mac OS and Windows from the SD Associa on website.

Once forma ed copy and paste the berry bootloader files to your SD card.

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Figure 9: Copy all bootloader files to your SD card

Next you will need to download the RetroPie image for BerryBoot from the RetroPie
GitHub page. Normally I would recommend you use the latest version but I had issues
with version 4.1 so I used the 4.02 version, which worked fine.

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Figure 10: Download the RetroPie BerryBoot OS
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Once downloaded, copy and paste the file to a USB flash drive, which we will use to
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install on your USB hard drive. Now insert your SD card into the Raspberry Pi and also
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plug in your USB hard drive that you will use to store and run your RetroPie OS image,
you will also need a mouse and keyboard at this point too. Insert your power cable and
boot up the Raspberry Pi. You will see a configura on screen where you need to
configure your local se ngs such as language, me, audio and network se ngs.

Figure 11: BerryBoot Configura on

In the next screen it will prompt you to select your USB hard drive to install the OS,
select the drive and hit “Format” which will take a few mins. On the next menu
BerryBoot will ask you to select an OS to install on the drive. As we have our OS image
on the USB flash drive we want to install it from there. Click “Cancel” to go back to the
main menu and hold down the mouse bu on on “ADD OS” and you should see s sub
menu which says “Install from USB”.

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Figure 12: Install OS from USB

Insert your USB flash drive and then select the RetroPie image to be copied to the USB
hard drive. Once completed you can now click “Exit” and the Raspberry Pi will reboot
with RetroPie.

Have fun!

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