Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
let's assume for a moment that you're not independently wealthy. Your Raspberry Pi
can emulate most of these old gaming consoles for you!
The original video game consoles were good for their time, but by today's standards,
they're nothing but slow and weak. The NES had a 1.79 MHz CPU (that's an M, not a
G), with 2 KiB of onboard memory. Today, most of these hardware consoles have been
fully reverse-engineered, and pure software implementations have been written that
can emulate them almost perfectly.
All that's left to worry about is the games. Even if you still have the media lying around,
your Raspberry Pi didn't arrive with any slots designed for those old game cartridges
and discs. Instead, those software emulators are written to read ROM files, which are
imaged copies of the games, taken from their original media and saved to a file.
Downloading the ROM files from the Internet for the games that you want to play is
the simplest way to get started; however, its legality is questionable in a lot of juris-
dictions. There are other alternatives, such as the Retrode gaming adapter , which is
a USB device that has native slots for Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo (SNES)
games, as well as native connectors for the controllers of both systems.
This hack assumes that you have ROM image files for your games. Depending on
where you are, ROMs may have some legal issues. For the purposes of this hack, we
will simply assume that you possess legal ROMs.
As for controllers, Linux supports almost any USB joystick that you can find. For the
full nostalgia experience, you can purchase original gaming controllers converted to
use USB connectors and USB connectors that will provide a native port for the original
controller.
Using an NES/SNES Controller Through the GPIO
It is possible to connect an NES or SNES controller directly through the Raspberry
Pi GPIO, but you'll need to build and use a RetroPie GPIO Adapter. There is a com-
plete writeup (with hardware specifications, schematics, and software) here:
http://blog.petrockblock.com/2012/10/21/the-retropie-gpio-adapter/
First you need to turn your Raspberry Pi into a gaming supercomputer. Start with a
fresh Raspbian install, which works best for this purpose. Update all of the compo-
nents:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade -y
 
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