In the 1980s and 90s there was an explosion of gaming consoles and home computers. Computer users of a certain age will have fond memories of machines such as the ZX80, BBC Micro and Megadrive/Genesis. These machines are now quite rare and this is where emulation plays a big part in helping re-live those glory days.
With Retropie on your SD card connect all of your peripherals, including any USB gamepads that you wish to use, to your Raspberry Pi and power up. On first boot RetroPie will ask if you would like to configure your joypad to work with the user interface. Note: There’s a separate configuration for each of the emulators due to their differing joypad layouts. If you have a wired Xbox 360 controller there’s a great guide on the RetroPie GitHub (http://bit.ly/ RetroPieXbox360SetUp) for helping set it up.
RetroPie uses the popular Emulation Station as its user interface and by default there are a number of systems that can be emulated out of the box. These systems are identifiable by being active on the user interface. For each system there’s a games library beneath it and this is created by inserting a USB drive into your Pi. A script creates the necessary file structure on the drive. Insert this drive into your PC and copy the ROMs from your computer into their corresponding folder on the USB drive. Now return the stick to your Raspberry Pi and RetroPie will automatically copy the contents to your install. By copying ROMs in this way their corresponding emulator is enabled in the Emulation Station user interface.
At this point, we need to advise you that ROMs are copyright material and remain the property of their owners. Their use in emulation is a grey area and many games are now so old that they are no longer commercially available; however, this doesn’t mean that they are out of copyright.
With your ROMs installed go back to the user interface and select which system you would like to play. RetroPie will now ask if you would like to catalogue your games, before accepting, ensure that your Pi is connected via Ethernet to your router. RetroPie will search the internet for your games and download any box art and information about each title. Where there’s a conflict it will ask you to choose which is correct, or if nothing is found it will ask you to manually enter the names of the games. RetroPie can emulate a number of systems, such as the Commodore Amiga, Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, and on the Pi 2 there’s no need to overclock the system as it runs six times faster than its predecessor. If you are using an original Raspberry Pi then you can streamline your setup using the Advanced Configuration steps on the RetroPie wiki.
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There were many different games consoles and computers from the 1970s to early 2000s. Companies such as Commodore, Sinclair, Acorn, Dragon, Sega, Atari all competed for home computing dominance. This drove the rise of bedroom programmers; people who learnt to code from magazines of the time.
In each magazine there would be pages of BASIC code to type into your computer and learn coding via experience. This lead to a boom in the number of games being produced in the UK, and fuelled a generation of coders who are now hoping to reignite that spark with the Raspberry Pi. David Braben, for example, co-wrote the iconic Elite game in the 1980s. Elite was an entire galaxy full of planets, space stations and pirates in only 32Kb of memory. David Braben also happens to be one of the co-founders of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and is very keen to see children creating and learning with computers, rather than simply consuming content.
