Hey everyone,
I am thinking of getting a a Pi - but I know nothing about it.
I got an NES mini and it made me want more. I've also heard about the Pi for such a long time and have been interested. Is it easy for a complete noob to this to be able to pick up a kit or whatever to make this work? I want to to get a setup with my tv and a Dual Shock 3, basically want to have as much retro gaming as possible up to whatever console can be reliably emulated.
This is the kit I was considering (I live in Toronto Canada) -
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01CCF6V3A/
Can anyone tell if that kit in amazon would be good?
That's the exact kit I bought a few days ago. Got it put together and was playing games in under an hour in Retropie an hour thanks to the numerous amounts of guides online. I didn't use the SD card with Noobs pre-installed that comes with that kit though, I used a new, blank card. I believe you'd have to format the one with Noobs first if you're planning on that. I kept that card as-is in case I want to mess around with that stuff at a later date.
I'm currently using a DS3 wired and have no issues, other than some settings menus I believe should be controllable with the pad aren't, so I have to use my USB keyboard for those. I'd advise having one ready as well.
FYI, I don't know if this has changed with newer versions of Retropie than what was covered in the videos I watched, but if you plan to use your DS3 wirelessly, you need to install an extra driver which will overwrite the default Bluetooth drivers meaning you can only use the DS3 over BT and nothing else. This is not an issue with DS4 controllers.
I have not tried Recallbox, but I believe it doesn't support the Pi 3's Bluetooth at all currently, so you need to also have a BT USB dongle.
As for how noob friendly it is, I'm a pretty big idiot and I got it going with ease. The software is really well set up and honestly I think I spent more tweaking my TV settings to get a perfect image than I did tweaking the Pi. Outside of its initial setup, the main things you need to do on your own is turn off/on Overscan if you have black bars around the screen, setting up wifi and then doing a package update (which took me over an hour, good god!)
I'd suggest checking a few setup videos on Youtube before you order it to see what's involved first, but I doubt you'll have issues. I'm really impressed with mine so far, but I haven't dug too deep into it due the holidays being busy.
Edit: Oh, I do have one small issue with my DS3. Since I'm using it wired, it's still BT paired to my PS3 and for some reason after shutting down the Pi, the pad goes into wireless mode turns on my PS3 by itself. I assume I can use the pinhole button to reset the controller, but that seems like it'll get annoying having to redo that all the time if I use it on the PS3 which will pair them again, so I'm just dealing with it. I could also just unplug the PS3, but I still use it as a BD player.