Power the Pi, and connect a monitor through an HDMI cable. Once it boots up you should see the
RetroPie home screen, then the Emulation Station home screen and then a menu which shows
you the available system emulators and how many games you have in each emulator. Now is
when you’ll want to get familiar with navigating through the menu and add your roms. You can fully
navigate through the menus with your newly assembled gamepad, or you can use a keyboard.
A Little Background on the SD Card Image
RetroPie
is
backbone
of
your
retro
‐
gaming
machine.
It
can
be
installed
on
top
of
an
OS
like
Rasbian.
We
left
off
the
OS
so
you
can
decide
which
one
you’d
like
to
add
or
if
you
need
one
at
all.
If you decide to add an OS, you can exit the emulator, and enter the Linux GUI by pressing F4.
This brings you to a terminal window, and typing the command
sudo
startx
starts the GUI.
To get back to the emulator, log out of the Linux GUI, and type the command
emulationstation
in
the terminal window.
Without Rasbian the only commands you need are the F4 key to enter terminal window and
emulationstation
to return to the emulator.
Emulation
Station
is
the
graphical
front
end
that
gets
you
easy
access
to
your
favorite
retro
games
without
a
keyboard.
Once
you
have
built
your
controller,
you
will
have
all
the
buttons
necessary
to
navigate
through
Emulation
Station
and
play
your
legally
obtained
roms.
RetroArch
exposes the functionality of a game or emulator. It is the front-end for
libretro
and can
do things like raw video recording and netplay. It also allows for universal controls to be
programmed – it currently is for this tutorial. This means that the controls set for ESC, Enter,
Jump, Shoot, etc. are seen across all games in all emulators - you won’t have to set up your game
pad every time you enter a new emulator.
Retrogame
is a great tool which allows Raspberry PI GPIO-to-USB utility for emulators written by
Phil Burgess for Adafruit. This is how the button mashing gets registered as keyboard presses. To
change where the buttons are mapped to or to add more buttons head over to
Retro Built Games
.
Adding Roms
The easiest way to add roms is to use a USB Thumb Drive or SD Card with adapter. Format the
USB drive to get a fresh drive. Add a folder called ‘retropie’, and insert it into your Raspberry Pi 3.
Wait a few minutes, or look for the flashing light on your USB to stop.
Pull out the USB drive, and plug it back into your computer. The ‘retropie’ folder will now have
three sub folders: ‘BIOS’, ‘Configs’ and ‘roms’. Save your roms into the appropriate folder within
the ‘roms’ folder.
Put the USB drive back in the Pi, and wait once more for the file transfer to finish. The roms are
automatically saved to the correct emulator folder. You now need to restart your Raspberry Pi.
