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This post was originally written in October, 2012, and has been updated twice – first in January, 2013, while using “2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian” and then again in February, 2014, while using “2014-01-07-wheezy-raspbian” – in all cases using the latest Raspbian release at the time and the latest versions of Emulation Station, RetroArch, and other software mentioned below. So, if you encounter instructions that don’t exactly jive with what you’re seeing, it’s probably because the software continues to change and my instructions have fallen out-of-date. If you get confused, please leave me a comment and I’ll try to help.

After playing around aimlessly a bit with my Raspberry Pi in 2012 (most recently, an install of the very nice RaspBMC), I thought of a useful purpose for it while showing my kids Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda running on the VirtualNES emulator on my Windows laptop. Before they get too spoiled on the Xbox 360’s graphics and sound, I want to get them some exposure to a few of the simple but influential 8-bit games from my childhood. At the same time, I don’t want my laptop to become the family’s gaming machine. We have a pretty massive TV and plenty of Xbox 360 controllers, so I figured I could throw the Raspberry Pi into the mix and come out with a neat retro gaming console.

As with all things Linux, the devil is in the details. Like, can you get the application to work with both video and sound, and are all of the peripherals fully functional? Add to that the uncertainty of the performance of Linux applications on the particular hardware limitations of the Raspberry Pi, and any simple-seeming project quickly develops into a series of hair-pulling and-now-this-doesn’t-work type obstacles. Case in point, a Google search as I began the project in October, 2012, turned up a number of people who had already thought of turning their Raspberry Pi’s into 80’s game console emulators, and it quickly became obvious that this wasn’t going to be a completely painless process.

This post on the Raspberry Pi forum from a few months earlier basically summed it up.

I have a NES emulator working without sound, using the Debian image, will only work running through console no LXDE

sudo apt-get install fceu
cd /usr/games
./fceu -input1 gamepad -inputcfg gamepad1 /home/pi/mario_bros.zip

Command above will map gamepad buttons to your keyboard, and load game image path you specify. Appears to work fine apart from no sound, I’ve had a few levels on Mario Bros.

Not tried with a joypad, I have a wireless xbox360 joypad that is discovered as a usb device, but have not had chance to try to get it working yet. It doesn’t work by default

www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5874

Yikes! Emulation with no sound and keyboard-only input is considered a success! And then a reply to that already discouraging post makes the landscape seem even more bleak.

Oh yeah, that’s the one! I tried to use mednafen, but even disabling openGL so it would use SDL for graphics would only give me a blank screen. I’ve tried to find some console emulators that use openGLES but every time I find one, it turns out that it’s only available as a pre-assembled package for platform x.

www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5874

Well, posts like those from people who certainly seem pretty well informed about console emulation would certainly dissuade most human beings from settling on this as a weekend project. But thankfully for us, plenty of people far smarter than I have been diligently working at converting their Raspberry Pi’s into something resembling a game console, and you and I can now directly benefit from their labor. I’m happy to report that I am getting decently playable NES emulation with sound (and slightly-less-satisfactory SNES emulation) from my Raspberry Pi after a few hours of struggle. And what with how quickly I’m willing to reformat the SD card with a different image (what? an update to RaspBMC?), I thought I should document my steps for posterity.

One of the most frustrating things about doing anything in Linux after living in Windows is that it rarely works as smoothly as you would expect and it takes some patience to get past the hurdles. On top of that, when you turn to Google for help, forum threads typically assume the readers will have more than a passing familiarity with the Linux file structure, command line input, Make files, and the like. Once I eventually track down something that looks like a possible fix, I often find myself searching for help on just exactly how to implement the fix, which advice frequently turns out to be out-of-date and no longer applicable.

So, for those of us who are not going to know how to chmod +x a shell script without some hand-holding, here are the steps I’ve followed so far, that are hopefully detailed enough that you end up with a working RPi game console instead of a smashed bit of PCB and some seething frustration. At times, I assume that you’re still using the ‘pi’ user account, but if you’re not, you’ll probably be able to recognize where you need to substitute your new account. If you can see where I’m definitely doing stuff horribly wrong, please leave a comment and I’ll try to make it better.

Steps to set up the SD card and configure Raspbian with the necessary software

1. On your main computer (I’ll go out on a limb and assume you’re running Windows here), get the latest release of Rasbian from the Raspberry Pi Downloads page, extract the image file, format your (4 GB or larger) SD card using SD Formatter 4.0 and write the Raspbian disk image to your SD card using win32diskimager. I’ve used win32diskimager successfully more than once, but it will complain at me every time.

Connect the Raspberry Pi to a TV or monitor (I greatly prefer the HDMI out, but the composite output is fine if that’s all you have), connect a USB keyboard (my superstitious nature makes me connect it to the bottom USB port), and connect an Ethernet cable to your router because 1) the Raspberry Pi will need Internet access during setup and 2) your life will be easier if the Raspberry Pi can also talk with a computer on your home network. You can also connect your wired Xbox controller or Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver dongle thingie now, if you like. Power on the Raspberry Pi and use the spacebar, tab, arrow and enter keys to navigate through the raspi-config utility (it should run automatically at the first boot) to

1. expand the root partition to fill the SD card
2. change the internationalization options – language, timezone, and keyboard – as appropriate (this actually is important)
3. enable the SSH server (in Advanced Options)

Choose finish and reboot the Raspberry Pi by typing the command:

sudo shutdown -r now

And then hitting Enter. Each time I specify a line of input, like the one above, hit the Enter key at the end to execute it.

After the Raspberry Pi restarts, write down its IP address, which is reported in the lines just before the login prompt.

I typically overclock my Raspberry Pi to the Modest setting (800MHz), but I don’t know if this makes any difference, so you can play with this to meet your needs. I run the original Model B board with 256 MB memory, and while it’s sometimes recommended to bump up the memory split to allocate 192 MB to the GPU, it hasn’t been necessary in my experience. If you need to run the raspi-config utility again to change any of these settings, open a terminal (Alt+F1 through Alt+F6) and enter

sudo raspi-config

I recommend against changing the setting that causes the Raspberry Pi to boot straight into the desktop, as the Emulation Station and RetroArch stuff that comes later is best launched from the terminal immediately after logging in (and not from a window within X) and offers something of a GUI anyway.

2. Back on the Windows computer, download PuTTY, which is an application that will allow you to access the command prompt on the RPi (RPi is easier to type, so I’ll be using this shorthand frequently) from your Windows computer across your home network. Launch PuTTY, connect to the RPi using its IP address, and log in (username: pi and password: raspberry). A great thing about accessing the RPi via PuTTY is that you can send command lines to the RPi by copying them from your favorite web browser in Windows and pasting them into the PuTTY window, saving you from typing in lots of unfamiliar and sometimes lengthy Linux commands.

3. In the PuTTY window, get Raspbian up-to-date by updating the package lists from the repositories and retrieving new versions of existing packages with

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y

4. Still in the PuTTY window, install GIT, vim, xboxdrv, and other useful software with

sudo apt-get install -y git vim dialog xboxdrv

Then reboot the RPi with

sudo shutdown -r now

5. Because the next part – installing RetroArch, the console emulators, and Emulation Station – takes a long time, I recommend either a) using the USB-connected keyboard on the RPi or b) using the screen command (here’s a good introduction to screen) if you are connecting to the RPi with PuTTY. I mention this because if your PuTTY session drops, the shell in which the commands are running will terminate and interrupt any running process. If this happens, you will have to run the setup script again (but you won’t necessarily know how far along it got before it terminated).

Whichever way you choose to connect, follow the instructions at RetroPie-Setup: An initialization script for RetroArch on the Raspberry Pi to install RetroArch for the Raspberry Pi. I would recommend using the source-code based installation, as it’s unclear how often the binaries are compiled. You can leave the options for installing components at their defaults, but I generally deselect the cores (the console emulators) that I don’t want or that I expect won’t work very well on the RPi. The installation may take hours, but the fewer emulator cores you choose to install, the faster it will go. Reboot at the end of the RetroArch installation.

6. The next step is to copy your ROMs into the appropriate, console-named subdirectory under /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/ on the RPi. There are a few different ways to do this. You can put them on a FAT-32 formatted USB flash drive and then transfer them to the RPi via command line, or you can launch the desktop with startx and drag-and-drop them, but I find that it’s much easier to use WinSCP to copy files from a Windows machine to the RPi across the network. (You can also use WinSCP to copy config files between the Raspberry Pi and your Windows machine, where you can edit them in a more familiar text editor. More on this later.)

Contrary to the advice below, at least for NES ROMs, both the .nes and .NES file extensions are acceptable. But if you’re having problems with ROMs for other systems, you may consider looking at the extensions.

Make sure that the extensions of your roms are lowercase and correspond to those given in /home/pi/.emulationstation/es_systems.cfg. You can show the content of that file with “cat /home/pi/.emulationstation/es_systems.cfg”.
www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=13600&p=155809

Note: In my experience, if you have chosen not to install most of the emulator cores, you will need to put at least one ROM in at least one console emulator’s ROMs directory in order for Emulation Station to start up successfully. I ran into a problem when I chose not to install any cores except for NES, and then tried to start Emulation Station for the first time before I copied any NES ROMs to the RPi. Instead of the Emulation Station starting up the gamepad configuration wizard, I got only a black screen with a small white dot in the center and spent hours thinking that something was wrong with Raspian/Emulation Station/Retroarch/the RPi itself, etc.

This dot is the “fake” SDL window ES uses to get input. Actual rendering is done through OpenGL ES. If all you see is this dot, then odds are something went wrong initializing the OpenGL ES