By Nick Monroe
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There will always be the gamer that stands sentinel, gazing towards their CRT TV, living it up with their aged library with Nintendo 64 controller in hand. I’m friends with a couple of these type of people, and constantly I get heaps of recommended games. I am far from being able to just throw money at these consoles, let alone find the space for them. That’s where emulation comes into play. A great experience can still be had on these old games through emulation, and a Raspberry Pi is a great tool for getting the job done, localized entirely on the machine. By using this single-board computer and a nice free operating system called RetroPie, your good to go.
To see what consoles can be emulated with the software, you can check in the website’s documentation page here: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/
To start, lets list off what you will need to have on hand to make your home brew console:
- Raspberry Pi 3 is preferable for the more difficult to emulate games
- SD card reader
- SD card, 8 gigabytes minimum, but more space would be preferable
- A USB stick to transfer your ROM’s with, ideally featuring a LED
- USB controller
If your savvy in your shopping, this will come to something near $80, much less if you have any of these items already.
I followed the recommended installation tutorial on the RetroPie website here: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/First-Installation/
I found the tutorial to be more than sufficient, but I did come across a critique in the process. While the application once set up is quite well polished from my time with it, I found that binding the actions of your controller to be really, really poorly done. Compare binding controls in RetroPie to binding controls in almost any video game, and you will see that its lacking. It also doesn’t support a keyboard in the standard sense as a workaround, so make sure you bind your keys properly. Otherwise, follow the tutorial to the t, and you’ll be ready for a great emulation experience.
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