Building Your Own Retro Gaming Machine with a Raspberry Pi

IIn the past, whenever I’ve written enthusiastically about the latest retro consoles, like the Nintendo Classic Mini: SNES or Analogue Duo, there have been a few comments below the article asking why people don’t just buy a Raspberry Pi mini computer, download emulators, and play their favorite games for next to nothing. My answer is usually ease of use and accessibility. When you buy a mini console, you get a plug-and-play product with no complicated setups or potential compatibility issues. Simple.

However, having recently purchased a Raspberry Pi to write an article about the beautiful PiDP-10 machine, I thought I’d check out its retro gaming capabilities as well. This is what I found.

Hardware

To put together your retro machine, you’ll first need a Raspberry Pi computer. It’s a tiny PC built on a circuit board a little bigger than a credit card. There are currently two supported models: the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (£34) and the newer Raspberry Pi 5 (£58), which has a more powerful processor and is better suited for emulating later consoles. I bought the 5 model on the Pi Hut site, which offers a decent starter kit including a compatible power adaptor and HDMI cable, a cute case to house the Pi in (with a little fan to cool the CPU), and an SD card, which you’ll need as the computer doesn’t have a built-in hard drive. The kit costs £94. However, the Raspberry Pi 4 is good enough to run emulators for old machines, so if you go for it, you’ll be ready for retro gaming for around £60.

emulator

Here’s where it gets a bit complicated. There are a number of retro gaming apps that are compatible with the Raspberry Pi, with the main contenders being RetroPie, Recalbox, Batocera and Lakka. All of these are essentially a collection of different, mostly open-source emulators that let you play games from a range of systems, from very early home computers to later consoles like the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2. Want to experience Manic Miner on Oric or Rainbow Islands on the Wonderswan? UtopiaCan you recreate the Dragon 32 games you made with your friend John in 1987? Now you can. It also supports MAME, which runs hundreds of classic arcade games. There are differences between the two, such as how the games run and how many configuration options you have. For example, you might want to tweak the visual settings to add realistic scanlines. Here is a very good comparison. hereHowever, most people agree that RetroPie is the most versatile.

It’s all very easy to do. First, connect the SD card to your PC or Mac using a USB SD card reader and download Raspberry Pi Imager. This is a small program that will install the operating system onto the card. It’s very user friendly and has three drop-down menus to choose from:[オペレーティング システムの選択]With the click of a button, you can designate your machine as a retro console and it will automatically download the emulators. Currently, your options are limited to either Recalbox for Model 5, or RetroPie or Recalbox for Model 4 (Retropie doesn’t have a native Model 5 version yet). To get anything else, you’ll need to download their own installation imagers separately and select your custom OS in the Raspberry Pi imager.

Don’t panic, there are plenty of guides online to help you solve this problem.

game

Now, this is Really Here’s the complicated part. To run retro games on these emulators you need game ROMs – software versions of the original programs, chips or cartridges. Downloading them from ROM sites on the internet is effectively copyright infringement and illegal. “Computer games are protected from copying by intellectual property law,” explains Alex Tutty of law firm Sheridans. “Generally, in the UK and around the world, games are protected by copyright and cannot be copied without the owner’s permission.

“Copyright law has various exceptions, such as personal copying, but emulation of the games or making them available online is not permitted. Even if a game is discontinued, copyright remains in place even if it is not being used, so copying is not permitted.”

that teeth It’s possible to find games that have had their copyrights removed by their developers. These tend to be found on abandonware sites or software archives. (I won’t sue you if you download Utopia, but you might want to sue me if you play it.) In any case, I won’t tell you how to find ROMs, but I can tell you that it’s a risky business. Game files on unofficial sites might be full of viruses and malware, or they might simply not work, or be in a foreign language.

Getting the ROMs onto your Raspberry Pi from your computer where you downloaded them is also a bit complicated. The basic method is to plug the Raspberry Pi SD card into your PC and download the ROMs directly to the board, but there are more elegant solutions that use SD card shared folders or file manager apps. To be honest, I struggled with all of them.

Conclusion

Here’s how to build a retro gaming machine for under £100. I prefer the more expensive but legally clear methods – keeping your original console, buying a retro gaming compilation such as Sega Genesis Classics or Rare Replay, downloading digital versions of old games from sites such as Steam, Gog or the online store of your current gaming console, or buying a mini retro machine that runs fairly stable versions of your favourite games.

However, I’m a big fan of the Raspberry Pi, so I think it’s worth buying one and giving it a try. If you’re worried about downloading retro ROMs, Huge game library Anything made specifically for your device or downloaded Dos Box or later DosBox-X A program that lets you play hundreds of old PC games, including shareware. Alternatively, you can use your Raspberry Pi to access cloud-based gaming services such as: Xbox Cloud Gaming. you too Stream games from your PC to your Raspberry PiDiscovering games on new platforms is fun, and having something to run on a computer that fits in your pocket is a fascinating experience.