There have been many blog posts written about setting up a game emulator using the Raspberry Pi, however with the release of the Raspberry Pi 2 and its amazing speed I wanted to see just how much better game play is on the latest board. This quick run through shows how I created my system so I could play some of my favorite classic games and how I got around the minor issues I encountered. What you will need is the equipment listed below, a game emulator along with game files (ROMs). Please note that you are not legally allowed to create a ROM (Digital Copy) of a game unless you own a physical copy of the game. I have limited myself to games that I personally own a copy for my demos.
Equipment
83-16530 Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
83-16319 Raspberry Pi 2 Case
83-16536 Micro SD Card
28-17985 Power Supply
24-14785 HDMI Cable
83-16530 USB Mouse
83-14600 USB Keyboard
83-14647 HDMI equipped monitor or TV
831-3058 WiFi Dongle
USB Game Controllers
The equipment listed above has links to MCM Electronics which is an element 14 sister company and ships to North America. For other regions please see equivalent items on the element14 website
Setting It All Up
1. Download the RetroPie Image
- Download the RetroPie Project SD Card Image from the RetroPie Website (Use version 2.5 for a Raspberry Pi 2)
- Save the image to your computer hard drive
2. Install the RetroPie on the SD Card
- Download Win32DiskImager
- Select the RetroPie image file that you downloaded onto your computer hard drive and select the drive letter that your SD card is assigned (e.g. E:\)
- Confirm you have the correct details and click on Write
3. Booting up the Emulator
- Insert the micro SD Card into the PI and connect your mouse, keyboard, network cord, monitor and power supply (also game controller if you have one)
- The Pi will now boot up and into RetroPie
- Press f4 which will take you to command line
- Type sudo raspi-config
- Select Expand File system and accept until you’re back to the main screen
- Go to Advanced Options->SSH and enable it (Mine was already enabled)
- Go to overclock, select Medium
- Finally, select finish and then select yes to reboot
- Once you restart you will be taken to the main screen which will show your loaded emulators
4. Adding ROMS to Your Raspberry Pi Emulator
- Connect your Pi to your home network and go to network in windows explorer
- In the list you should find a device called RaspberryPI, double click it
- Look for the ROMS folder, this is where you store your game files based on game emulator
- Make sure your ROMs are unzipped before you load them into the proper directories
5. Play Games!