Build A Retro Console For Classic Gaming Fun

Turn your Raspberry Pi into a fully featured retro games console, capable of playing titles for Amiga, Sega, Nintendo and much more.

Anyone growing up in the past 30 years is likely to feel a twinge of nostalgia when remembering playing such classics as Super Mario Bros., Pac-Man and Street Fighter. Some readers may even have been fortunate enough to own their own games console, while the rest of us had to be content with pumping coins into any arcade machine they could get their hands on.

Using the custom RetroPie operating system, your Raspberry Pi can be transformed into a machine capable of playing all your favourite games for dozens of different titles for Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Atari and more.

If you’re familiar with emulating games, you may wonder why you would install RetroPie given the number of emulators out there. The answer is simply that installing RetroPie is one of the quickest and easiest ways to play video games classics – the frontend software, EmulationStation, is specifically designed for display on HD televisions. The steps for this project have been partly adapted from the official wiki for RetroPie available at https://github.com/ RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki.

This Raspberry Pi project is easy to set up, but you may want some extra equipment to make sure your gaming experience is top-notch. The bare minimum you’ll need is your Raspberry Pi computer.

The RetroPie website offers images for the Raspberry Pi 1, 2 and 3B, but during our tests, the latter image worked perfectly well with the latest Raspberry Pi 4. You’ll also need a USB keyboard and mouse for setup, a spare microSD card of about 8GB and a computer with internet access.

In order to install the RetroPie image to your new microSD card, you’ll also need an SD card adapter. These may come bundled with your SD card; if not they can be obtained very inexpensively from Amazon or the like. The remaining equipment is optional but useful.