Anyone else using a Raspberry Pi for retro gaming? Obviously emulation rather than cold hard hardware but still, very elegant solution which works great in Wii style scenarios (holidays, parties, bunch of bored people or those avoiding uni lectures).
Lot of questions before you start, mainly around what you already have.
Have a spare HDMI cable?
Have a spare microSD card? Everything is stored on this. For just old cart games you don't need much space at all. If you wanna do NeoGeo & PSOne get a bigger one, 64GB or more.
Have something to access said microSD card via computer? My laptop has a SD card slot and I had an adapter come with one of the cards. Otherwise you can buy readers super cheap on eBay et al. You need this to flash the microSD card with the operating software, one and done deal.
Lucky enough to have a spare microUSB charger that outputs 5V 2.5A? Recommend grabbing an official power supply when you grab the board so there are no power related issues to troubleshoot.
Next a question on what you want it for!
Do you want to run N64 games? If so I'd recommend a case that comes with a tiny fan as you'll want to overclock as N64 emulation is still pretty spotty at low specs. Otherwise any fanless case will do!
Alright! So lets breakdown what you need.
Raspberry Pi 3 board (around $
55)
HDMI cable (
not much)
Power supply (
$10-15ish)
Case (not much to
$12 to fancy
$20+ ones that look like consoles)
microSD card (not much to $50 depending on size)
A USB controller or keyboard (any is fine to do the basic setup, you can grab cheap USB controllers from eBay, wireless ones, 8bitdo ones, PS3/4 controllers, etc. Once setup you can use bluetooth wireless as you can see in the board picture above!)
That's all you need to get running. And a TV of course, unless you want to go crazy and put a lil screen on it or grab the even smaller Pi Zero which you can chuck into a 3D printed Game Boy.
You could even hook it up to a cocktail arcade table.
Anyway the easiest way to set it all up for retro gaming is chuck
RetroPie on it. Means you boot straight into the OS ready to look at and select games. Will also let you run Kodi (like Plex) but no Netflix app yet
It's much easier than you'd think to get up and running. Has nice easy step by step instructions, only issue is working out how to structure ROM's on the SD card but I can talk through the specific platforms as some operate differently to each other. You can transfer straight off your PC to the Pi too through your wifi network which is really painless.
You can also download or make your own themes. You can obviously mess around with your Raspberry Pi a ton.
(obviously only download ROM's for games you own)