Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
While there are quite a few game console emulator software choices out there, be-
cause the Raspberry Pi is an ARM-based system (as opposed to x86-based), the best
option is called RetroArch. Although building RetroArch for the Raspberry Pi was ini-
tially complicated, Florian Müller has created a tool called RetroPie that automates
almost the entire process.
Florian also provides
prebuilt images containing finished RetroPie setups
.
RetroPie needs to have some additional software installed on top of the Raspbian
image to work properly, so you should start off by running:
$ sudo apt-get install -y git dialog
Then you can pull down a copy of the latest RetroPie setup software from GitHub:
$ git clone --depth=0 git://github.com/petrockblog/RetroPie-Setup.git
This will create a directory called
RetroPie-Setup
. Change into that directory, set the
main setup script to be executable, then run it as root:
$ cd RetroPie-Setup
$ chmod +x retropie_setup.sh
$ sudo ./retropie_setup.sh
This will load a clean text interface to set up the RetroPie suite. You can install either
from prebuilt binaries or from source. Installing from source (option 2) will give you
the absolute latest versions of all of the emulators and game runtimes, but it will take
quite a bit longer (and is a bit more complicated to do). Installing the binaries (option
1) is faster (though it still takes a while), so we recommend you go down that path. It
will go out and download all of the files it needs to setup the various supported emu-
lators and runtimes, and when it finishes, it will write out a debug log of everything it
did.
When this finishes successfully, you need to select the
SETUP
option from the main
menu (option 3). If you plan on using this as a dedicated video gaming station, you
should consider starting the Emulation Station on boot (option 4), as that will provide
a nice frontend to all of the gaming options. You can also enable a nice splash screen
to display on boot (option 6), but that is entirely eye candy.
Option 7 might be useful to you. You can configure the sound output from the emu-
lators to go over the HDMI connection, the analog audio connection, or automatically
detect what is in use.
