Retropie

[kainemaxwell]

Has anyone here built a retropie system with a raspberry pi yet?

[jperryss]

Has anyone here built a retropie system with a raspberry pi yet?

I actually built one this past weekend for a friend but have been too busy to really tinker with it. Disclaimer: I normally play on a CRT.

I tested NES, SNES, MD, and mame4all on my two flat-panel TVs and found there to be enough lag to be annoying. It seemed better on my 23" monitor but there was still a bit of lag.

Using the composite output on the Pi instead of HDMI might give different results. I don't have the right cable to test with but I plan to try it on my CRT as soon as I get my hands on one.

It's a decent toy for what it is and hard to beat for the $70 or so it costs including a couple of USB SNES-style controllers, but the lag is a dealbreaker for me.

[Steve W]

I have the hardware but I haven't pulled the trigger yet after seeing how much effort will go into getting the software running. I ran into problems just trying to format my Micro SD card (turns out my Mac Mini has an odd bug with it's built-in SD card slot that won't allow me to format it properly) and I gave up for the night. I haven't gone back to it since. That's the reason why I never had MacMAME set up on my old laptop, the configuration was so archaic and annoying it didn't seem worth it. I'm getting even more cranky in my old-ish age, I don't want to spend four hours configuring something to get it to work.

[jperryss]

I have the hardware but I haven't pulled the trigger yet after seeing how much effort will go into getting the software running. I ran into problems just trying to format my Micro SD card (turns out my Mac Mini has an odd bug with it's built-in SD card slot that won't allow me to format it properly) and I gave up for the night. I haven't gone back to it since. That's the reason why I never had MacMAME set up on my old laptop, the configuration was so archaic and annoying it didn't seem worth it. I'm getting even more cranky in my old-ish age, I don't want to spend four hours configuring something to get it to work.

The process was surprisingly not bad. I followed this guide and used an app called Etcher (Windows) to create the SD card. Entire process took about 40 minutes.

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-turn-yo...sole-498561192

[BlastProcessing402]

Made one in December, spent more time configuring it than playing it.

If you just want it to run, it's not hard, but actually configuring it can be a huge mess, particularly if you aren't up on Linux.

[Az]

To the above posters; I thank you kindly. Retropie is the best thing since sliced bread according to a lot of people yet discussion of the software itself is jarringly mum. The discussion usually begins and ends on vanity projects about shoving a Raspberry Pi into something stupid like a game cart, NES mini, anus, etc.

From what I understand it performs a bit above a modded Xbox, just with a better PS1 and N64 support. Is that correct?

[Niku-Sama]

I think i wanna try this with a pi zero

[YoshiM]

What I'd like to know is how configurable is MAME on a Pi? Two of my favorite arcade games are "Tron" and "Discs of Tron". I can set MAME on the PC to allow me to use the right thumbstick on a 360 pad to control the spinner (turrets and arm in Tron, the crosshairs in DoT), which for me works great. But for other emulators like on the Ouya and on a modded Xbox, I couldn't set that. Can this be done with the RetroPi setup?

[Ze_ro]

From what I understand it performs a bit above a modded Xbox, just with a better PS1 and N64 support. Is that correct?

PS1 is fantastic, with basically every game running perfectly.

N64 is generally unplayable though. Some games will play alright, but almost all of them will have occasional framerate stutters, and a majority will be unplayably slow or have severe graphical glitches. There are a number of different N64 cores and options that you can play with to potentially get your favorite game to run, but it's a huge pain in the ass to do so. Don't invest your time and money into RetroPie thinking you'll get a good experience with N64, because I guarantee that you won't.

I put together a RetroPie setup a while back, and I love it. I found it very simple and easy to do, but I've got a lot of experience with Linux already, so that definitely helped. If all you want to do is get pre-N64 stuff running, it's not that hard if you follow the instructions. Here are a few things that would definitely cause headaches for people getting into this for the first time:

• Setting up certain wireless controllers (Xbone, PS4, 8bitdo stuff) requires installing kernel modules. (Some of this can be done via menus without having to use the command line)
• While RetroPie supports basically every USB controller available, the mapping can be a bit funny at times. It'll go through a process where you map all the buttons, but this all basically assumes that your controller is similar to a DualShock, so your controller might not have everything it tries to map, or it might have more that is left unused. This can be confusing at times, as it'll ask you to map buttons for A, B, X, and Y... but never prompts for C or Z... so what's going to happen when you run a Genesis game? Well, Y-B-A will map to A-B-C. It all works in the long run, but it wasn't at all obvious to me when I first started with it.
• Arcade emulators like MAME and FinalBurn require very precise ROM sets in order to work. Keep in mind that the latest versions of MAME are made to be used on high-end PC's, so what the RetroArch guys have done is use older versions that can get better performance on the lesser hardware of the Raspberry Pi. In fact, I believe there are actually SEVEN different versions of MAME that you can run, many of which use a different set of roms (0.37b5, 0.78, 0.94, 0.106, or 0.139). You can't just dump a newer ROM set in there and expect everything to work, because even many of the older sets had changes along the way, and older MAME will refuse to run the newer versions that it doesn't recognize. There IS a way to downgrade a set of newer ROMs to something that will work, but it's a massive pain. If you're looking to run MAME here, I recommend doing some research, choose a version ahead of time and find a torrent with that exact set.
• Some of the systems it "supports", such as Atari 5200, ColecoVision and Intellivision are very poorly integrated... for example, the ColecoVision emulator requires you to press Right Shift+Enter in order to exit the emulator, so if you don't have a keyboard, you're screwed (though you kind of need a keyboard anyways because all three of these have number pads). They also don't follow the default controller mappings, so I had to edit a config file in order to properly map things.
• There are a lot of non-emulator "ports" available to be installed too, but the majority of these also don't integrate very nicely, and many require keyboard and/or mouse. In fact, I really suggest you keep a keyboard handy just in case it's needed (compact wireless things like this are what most people tend to use).
• RetroPie itself has options to download box art and game info, but this process is extremely slow and far more complicated than I would like it to be. It also regularly fails, requiring a lot of manual intervention. It won't find anything for prototypes or homebrews, and some games I was just unable to get it to match up at all (For some reason. Atari 2600 Jr. Pac-Man was one of those. It's definitely in the database, but I could not for the life of me get it to match up). If you have thousands of ROMs to scrape data for, it's an extremely tedious process... though the results are quite nice when you get it all done.

--Zero