Build a Raspberry Pi 4 Retro-Gaming Console with RetroPie (Complete Guide)

hello again everyone in this video I'm going to show you guys all about how to set up your own retro gaming system with raspberry pi 4 and the latest version of retro PI I've done a video like this in the past with Tom Lawrence and I wanted to update it now that a new version of both the Raspberry Pi and retro PI are available I just thought it would be a great idea to have an updated build video so that's what we're going to take care of in this video now this is a full tutorial I'm going to show you guys the entire process of setting up your retro PI all the way from the initial build all the way to setting up the SD card and adding roms basically everything you'll need to know in fact this is the finished product right here I'm going to show you what to buy and how to build it everything you need to know and this is basically what you're building right here it's going to be awesome and I'm going to be doing this a little bit different than most rather than split this up into a bunch of smaller tutorials by putting everything in this one video with time codes down in the description so if you want to skip a particular section and go right to the thing that you want to know or the section that is most applicable to where you are in the process you could go ahead and do that so without further ado let's go ahead and get started now in this section of the video I'm going to talk to you guys about what you can reasonably expect from the Raspberry Pi 4 to set your expectations accordingly some systems are harder to emulate than others some things this platform does very well other things are a little bit beyond the reach of a Raspberry Pi in what is capable of with its resources so first of all the general rule of thumb is pretty much most of the systems that you would want to run from the 90s and earlier are going to run fairly well now there's some you know exceptions there Sega Saturn has been harder to run playstation for me has run very well Super Nintendo Sega Genesis or Mega Drive as you guys call it in other parts of the world runs just fine the 32x that works fine as well Sega CD has worked fine for me I've tried pc engine pc engine CD I've had success with that Game Boy Game Boy Color Game Boy Advance game gear those are extremely easy to run regular Nintendo or Famicom in other parts of the world Super NES that you know those systems actually run very well in addition so if you are generally going to be running something that's 16-bit it's going to probably run very well check the documentation if you're at all concerned about what it will or won't do but if you are just trying to run eight or 16-bit games it's probably going to run just fine which means if you are trying something like n64 it may work it may work well with some tweaking but it's not going to be a set it and forget it kind of system n64 is a little bit of a challenge dreamcast same thing that's a challenge some games will run well others maybe not so much PSP for the most part should run fine on a PI 4 there's going to be some edge cases so basically the more recent the system the harder it's going to be to emulate which means a PlayStation 2 probably not PlayStation 3 not going to happen so just why are you guys to know what you can reasonably expect in my experience so for Nintendo Sega Playstation 32x Sega CD all the handheld systems they work wonderfully so if that's what you're trying to do then you're all set and then your results may vary if you go beyond that I think that's the best rule of thumb so in the next section what I'm going to do is show you guys what you need to buy and I'm going to show you guys some recommendations I'll do some unboxing of various components and then after that I'll show you guys how to build it so in this part of the video I'm going to answer the question what do you need in order to get started what do you need to go and buy in order to get this project going so I have some stuff right here that I'm going to be unboxing and I'm going to tell you about the various things that you need in order to get started so first of all we have the Raspberry Pi you'll obviously need a Raspberry Pi board that's the most important part of this now retropie can be installed on a PC I have a separate video for that but this video is all about building your own retro gaming system that's based on the Raspberry Pi 4 which is exactly what I have here this is the 2 gigabyte version but the 4 gigabyte version is fine you're not going to benefit from the 4 gigabyte version you may as well save a little bit of money and get the 2 gigabyte version if all you intend to use it for is retro PI so let's go ahead and get this unboxed a little impatient here but go ahead and get this out of the box here and then nothing too surprising if you've ever seen a Raspberry Pi then you know exactly what to expect again this is the Raspberry Pi 4 board right here so we got that so let's go ahead and move on to the next component and then here we have a case now the case is optional it's definitely good to have a case but you don't need a case in order to use retropie it might look a little weird by your TV with just a circuit board essentially on your TV stand the case is kind of like for appearance basically but this one also has a safe shutdown feature which allows you to toggle the shutdown mechanism from the power button in the back of the case and that's great because you don't have to manually shut it down and that's something that I highly recommend this is not required but highly recommended now there are other cases available but this is the one that I decided to go with I use this on my own retro PI so essentially I'm building another one so I'll get this out of the box here we have anything but the screwdriver but I think this will do the trick tape off here and we have a little instruction book don't worry I'll go ahead and show you the setup of this case but definitely keep this for your reference then we have the case itself and here it is this is the actual case right here and I'm going to go over this in more detail in the build section of the video but it's pretty easy to put it together when you go ahead and lift it you have some components right here that's going to be needed for the setup it's all included and we have a built-in fan which I'm going to show you right here which is going to help keep it cool which is pretty neat and then the power button is actually going to be on the back which is right here and that's what you'll use to turn it on and also to turn it off and then it's going to expose your ports in the back as well so this is a pretty cool case and I'll return to the case in just a moment now here we have some controllers you'll need at least one game pad or controller to get started this actually came with two and they're Wireless so this is actually new something that I just decided to check out I thought it'd be pretty neat to build a retro pie with two controllers that are Wireless and if you want to save some money you could go with something cheap like this controller from retro flag it's a wired USB controller it is a really good one I really like this one I like the freedom of being Wireless basically but this is a good controller to go with if you're on the cheap I'm not going to do an unboxing obviously because I just had this lying around but they're about I think twelve or fifteen dollars I'll have links to everything in the description below but if you want something inexpensive this is a good one to get started with another controller you may consider is this one right here this is the SN 30 Pro Plus I love this controller if you are going to be playing like PlayStation games or games with analog support something like that this is a great choice I like this one a lot it's Bluetooth so it's wireless the only problem is setting up Bluetooth controllers in retropie is a little finicky it's not really hard but it's just going to be it's gonna be a little involved it takes a few tries to get it right it's not that bad once you get it set up you're pretty much good to go and bluetooth is awesome but if you want to go with Bluetooth and have something more premium or something with analog joysticks this is the one that I recommend I like this controller a lot like I mentioned it's definitely a great choice but for the purposes of this video here I'm going to show you guys this set of wireless controllers and these are the ones that we are going to be using for our project today now the controllers you see here that I'll be unboxing is by a company called Zito I hope I'm pronouncing that right I'll have links in the description below like I mentioned and these cost me about $40 it looks like the price is normally 60 but as of the time I ordered it I only had to pay $40 which is pretty cheap considering both of them are Wireless another 2.4 gigahertz Wireless they're not bluetooth but they should work just fine so let's go ahead and get it out of the box and I did take the seal off I promise I didn't open it though and here we have one of the gamepad's so let me show you guys what it looks like so you know it's a very standard gamepad it's not going to have as high of bill quality as the 8-bit do SN 30 controller I just showed you but they feel solid and the buttons you know they don't feel maybe as great as a real Super Nintendo controller but darn close I think this is going to be fine it doesn't feel super light it feels you know it feels just right I think this will be fine the d-pad feels nice so this is a good solution if you want to again have wireless controllers and you know you don't want to buy to s n 30 controllers this might be a good option so here we have some peripherals we have a dongle and I'll go ahead and get this out of here so this can be used with the SNES classic essentially so if you have an SNES classic that's why we have this little dongle here that allows you to use it for that that's obviously not what we will use it for but what we will use is this little USB dongle right here that we will be plugging into our retro PI to facilitate the wireless and of course we also have this charging cable that it comes with as well it's just a USB cable so nothing too surprising there and then of course we have like I mentioned two of them in this box we get some instructions and then here we have the second controller so we have both of the controllers here so again definitely worth a shot if you guys want to get wireless controllers on the cheap and then finally one last thing you will need is a power cord and I had this one lying around it's a USBC power cord that's what the Raspberry Pi 4 uses you will definitely need a power cord and not just any power cord you basically need one that's rated for the PI 4 there was an issue with the build quality of the PI 4 where some chargers didn't work but they actually did fix it in a newer version of the pi/4 but if you order a pipe or I don't know which one you will get if yours will be the new revision or not I think it's better just to say get a Raspberry Pi for certified power cord from Amazon so that way you don't have to worry about it you know what's going to be the right one and that's what I have here have a bunch of these lying around so of course no unboxing but it's just a power cord but you get the idea you need a power cord in order to provide your retro PI console with power so there we go so I almost forgot something very important since the Raspberry Pi 4 doesn't have a full-sized HDMI port you're going to need an adapter or a micro HDMI to full size HDMI cable what I have right here is an adapter this one adapts micro HDMI to full-sized HDMI so you can find these on Amazon pretty easily and even your local stores might have these as well so you'll need something like this in order to get it connected to your TV if you follow the link in the description below this video you'll find a link to my affiliate store which will have a link to this as well as other items that I've gone over in this video so as you can see my desk is an absolute mess but in this section of the video I'm going to go ahead and show you how to put all of this stuff together and build the actual unit I'll show you guys the case how to install the pipe or board and get everything set up so let's go ahead and move on so here we have the case and what I'm going to do right now is show you guys how to put the pi4 board inside the case so we'll put this top section aside for now to have these two little baggies so in this one right here I can get it open essentially what we have is a daughterboard of sorts that's going to plug into the Raspberry Pi itself so let's go ahead and take care of that so here's the board again this is the Raspberry Pi 4 and what we're going to do is well basically just like this we're going to plug the daughter board right into the side and gently push it in so that all of the connections are nice and tight as you can see here so it basically just makes the PI for a bit longer and just extends the ports which are going to basically help the ports reach the appropriate section inside the case so basically you just go ahead and attach that now we have another baggie here so we'll go ahead and open this and this is going to have the screws and also the thermal pads that we will need to complete the setup little clumsy but just trying to get everything out of the baggie here so we have rubber feet for the bottom of the case but that aside here are the two thermal pads there's actually two of them here as I'll show you and these are going to help the thermals make proper connectivity to the case itself between the case and the pi board so that's actually what we're going to do first is get that installed and the way we'll do it is we'll get this top portion of the case flip it over and you see we have these two right here these two square or rectangle and a square actually they're both rectangles anyway you have these two things we're going to put the thermal pads directly on these now there's going to be two sides of the thermal pad that have plastic so you definitely don't want to put this in with one of the two plastics there we want to get that removed so first of all I just remove one side here and then we'll go ahead and put it down we're basically just putting it on to the board right here sure it's nice and tight and then there's going to be another layer of plastic and this is a little off-center let me fix that and then try to gently separate the plastic from the top right here which can be a little challenging so I'll just try my fingernail there goes now we have both of the plastic protective layers removed and then we're going to go ahead and get the other piece right here we're going to do the exact same thing here it could be a little challenging to separate it just keep working at it and eventually it will do the same thing again you see we kind of have it right here and feel free to trim this if you'd like to make sure that there's nothing hanging out off the sides and it's a little challenging I'm trying not to destroy the thermal pads in the process but now we have both of the thermal pads here so I'm going to try my best to kind of trim this down a little bit and then here we go I mean this is a pretty pathetic attempt to be honest so you know I'm sure you guys will do a much better more pristine job than me so anyway we're just trying to make sure there's not too much hanging off these sides of the you know these standoffs here so now that we have that done we could go ahead and insert the Raspberry Pi to the board and it should be pretty self-explanatory we have this section right here for the GPIO pins and then we have the GPIO pins right here we're essentially going to match that looks and I have something hanging off here get rid of that so anyway what we're gonna do is essentially just well we're going to push this down and what we want to do is try to get it frame line up the GPIO pins right where the case is we basically just push this in sure it's lined up so we don't touch the thermal pads until we're ready to push that down make sure everything is lined up is really hard to do with recording lights in my face here just gonna gently push it together make sure all the ports are basically lined up flush with the case so it could be a little tight here just keep working at it chit in and just check to make sure everything is lined up so far so good and now when it comes to the screws some right here four of these screws are going to be a bit shorter so if I kind of just put this in focus you can see one screw is much shorter than the other so we're going to get four of these for the shorter ones those are the ones that we're actually going to use for this next step where we will be screwing the board directly into the case so I'll go ahead and just turn this round here you'll need a screw driver obviously and we'll go ahead and start putting the screws onto the board so put one here another one right here one right here and the final one right here I'll just put that in focus a little bit you can see where the screws are and we simply tighten them down and now we have this part done and then finally we grab the bottom portion I have right here and then what we're going to do is go ahead and put the bottom portion on basically we have this curved side right here so we know exactly where it needs to go and it should just fall right down and just kind of sit on there it doesn't really snap in it's just you know kind of wobbly but what will secure it in place are these longer screws the ones that we have left over so we will use those to finish this process you of course we simply tighten those down just like this then you basically give it a once-over just have a look around at the unit make sure everything is flush and it's pretty much built we have these rubber feet right here will just simply tear these off here put them in the recessed areas you and as you can see we're pretty much good to go the unit is now built we are ready almost to get this thing turned into a gaming system I mean it already looks pretty sweet I mean look at this case I think this case is just plain awesome it looks kind of futuristic there's actually going to be some LED lights right here that'll show disk activity the SD card will slide in right there and then we actually have all of the ports exposed here on the back again there's a power button so this will be a great case to use for this project and in the next section of the video I'm going to show you guys how to set up the SD card because as great as this is it's completely useless without an operating system you can plug it in but absolutely nothing will happen until we get the SD card set up and that's what we're going to do in the next section so stick with me and we'll get that done too okay so at this point in the video guys I'm going to show you how to install retro PI which is required to get our new gaming system booted up and ready to go now you'll need an SD card for this and I talked about that earlier in the video and then you'll need some kind of way of inserting that SD card into your computer whether it be via a USB card reader or maybe you have an SD card slot on your actual computer itself either way you'll go ahead and insert it I have mine right here that I'll use as my example and then you can use your Windows PC your Mac your Linux PC whatever you have to go ahead and flash the retropie image onto the SD card and I'm going to show you how to do that right now so what you're going to do is open up your web browser and then you'll go to this website right here valina or Valena Villena now no bueno dot io / Boettcher the etcher tool will allow you to basically flash the retropie image directly onto your SD card and the reason why I like this tool is because it works the same regardless if you have a PC a Mac or like me you're running on Linux it's the same for each so if you scroll down it'll automatically detect your operating system and then you simply go ahead and click on it to download the utility I'll go ahead and save it then we'll let that download in addition to that you'll also need and by the way I will have the links in the description below the video but you'll also need retropie itself so you'll go to the retropie website also linked below and click on the download button and if you scroll down you'll have several download buttons here now I'm showing you guys how to set this up on a Raspberry Pi 4 but if you only have a Raspberry Pi 3 for example then you'll want this one right here but if you are starting from scratch in 2020 or Beyond or however long until we have raspberry pi 5 you're definitely going to want the raspberry pi 4 version and the raspberry pi 4 board for the best experience so since I have a raspberry pi 4 I'm also going to choose this option right here so I'll download that and it's going to be a fairly large file here so I'll go ahead and click the Save button here and we'll go ahead and let that download okay so now that we have both files downloaded what you'll do is open up the file manager for your operating system I'm on pop OS so I have the files utility open here but of course in Mac OS you have finder and you have Explorer on Windows whatever that happens to be you just basically open up whatever the location is for your downloads and you should have two files named similarly now obviously I'm on Linux so if you're on Windows the file name might be different for this and the Linux equivalent here is an app image file so I'm going to go ahead and unzip this so I'll click extract here in my case for the etcher utility if you double-click on there you should have an application so if you're on linux like i am you'll right click go to properties permissions and make sure allow executing as a program is selected now if you are on Mac OS or Windows you'll just probably double click on it after you extract it and it should open it up so I'll double click on it myself and the utility is open now basically what you'll do is you will select the file that you downloaded for retropie so I'll click on the button and then navigate to wherever you saved the retropie image from a previous step and that's it right here for the PI for the file name will be or similar to retropie Buster in this case version 4.6 billion and now it asks us to select a target now I'm going to go ahead and insert the actual SD card and there it is we can ignore what it says about the size here because I was already using that for retropie which makes it look a little bit different anyway I'll select the target and you want to definitely make sure that you choose the appropriate SD card for your retro pie install because this will erase everything on the SD card completely so you want to make sure that this is an SD card that is dedicated to this project so I'll select it and then click continue and then this flash button should light up right here so I'll go ahead and click on it so I'm getting an error here that's warning me that this is an unusually large SD card which is a very silly warning because large SD cards are very very common nowadays especially if you are trying to emulate something like ps1 that has very large ROM sizes it's going to be very common for something like this to be large just make sure that you did select the right SD card because again it's going to completely wipe it out and then click continue now you may get an administrator prompt or equivalent depending on what your operating system is to make changes to the SD card so I'll just simply put in my password and it's going to go ahead and write the image to the SD card and convert it into a bootable device for retropie you so there we go the flashing process is complete we can go ahead and eject the SD card and insert it into our new gaming system we should be ready to go ahead and put it up so we prepared the SD card it's ready to go and then we can go ahead and insert the SD card into our game system here and get it powered up so you'll go ahead and connect the power cable and if you are using one of the wireless controllers that I mentioned earlier in the video then you'll also plug in one of the dongles for that as well and then you should be able to press the power button in the back make sure you have an HDMI cable inserted before you press the power button because the screen can look a little weird if you actually turn it on before inserting the HDMI cable if that happens you just simply restart it and then you should be presented with a screen that is asking you to set up the controller which is exactly what we're going to do in this section and once everything has started up you should see a screen that looks like this that's basically asking you to go ahead and configure your controller if you are using the wireless game pads that I showed off near the beginning of the video then the first thing you're going to have to do is pair the controller to the dongle so what you'll do is you'll plug in one of the two dongles because you'll want to program the controller's one at a time so if you're using the same controller as me to go ahead and start the pairing process you basically grab the controller and hold up select and start at the same time you hold those three buttons for about a second and you'll notice that the light on the top of the controller will start blinking which means you are in pairing mode and then I'm going to go steady that means that the controller is paired and ready to go and then what you do to go ahead and start the process of programming the gamepad for use with retropie you'll go ahead and hold a button on the gamepad to go ahead and start that process so I'll just hold down the a button here and then you'll see this screen right here which is basically asking you to go ahead and program your controller so for every button that is asking you to press you simply press that button on the gamepad so what I'll do is go ahead and press the buttons on the gamepad that correspond to what I see on the screen and if you are using a Super Nintendo style controller like I am that's pretty easy because the actual button names do match up to what you see on the screen but if you're using something that is not in this format you could go ahead and refer to the retropie documentation for what button you should be pressing at every prompt so anyway I'll go ahead and press up down left right start select and then a B X Y and then L and then R now at this point it's asking me to press the left trigger button but I only have the L in our buttons left trigger right trigger would be akin to l2 and r2 if it was for example a PlayStation gamepad but as you can see I don't have enough buttons at this point so I can hold down any button to skip the current selection and I'll just do it again so I don't have that one and then again then again and I'm going to keep going because now it's asking me to press the analog joystick in the various directions which of course I don't have so I'll skip all of these in my case and then don't skip the last one here where it says hotkey enable for that if you don't have a dedicated button you would like for the hotkey just press select and with everything done I could press the a button give it a few seconds and then the screen should go to the main menu and there we are we have the retro pie menu and the controller should work I could press the a button to go into this menu right here for example and then the B button to go back and we don't have any menu items here for the various game emulators like Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis because it only shows a selection for emulators that you have roms on the SD card for so what I'm going to show you guys how to do next is to go ahead and configure the retro pie or adding roms so when it comes to adding roms to your retropie unfortunately I can't provide you the download links to download those as it's somewhat of a legal gray area but if you just go on google and search for name of system roms for example Super Nintendo roms you'll probably find what you're looking for but even if I could give you direct links these sites have a tendency to go down so just try your best to find them and you should if you are good at Google have no problem getting the download sites that you need to get those ROM images that make the games work so go ahead and download the roms and I'll show you how to add those to your retro pie now be careful a ROM should never end in dot exe so you go to download a rom and it has a dot exe file extension or it's asking you to download a download manager browser extension anything weird don't some people out there kind of put some malicious things out there pretending like their rom sites and they're not so just be careful what you download and you should be fine another thing you may need is in the form of BIOS images some systems like Gameboy Advance work better if you have the BIOS image which is also something I can't give you a download link for but you'll just have to Google to find and Sega CD PlayStation and a number of other emulators will require BIOS images as well but go ahead and search for those if you need to the retropie documentation will tell you what you need generally speaking Game Boy Game Boy Color Super Nintendo Nintendo Sega Genesis do not need that I have needed it for a Playstation I think PC engine CD needs it Game Boy Advance as I mentioned before so there's a few again consult the retropie documentation if you're at all curious about that but you know at this point I need to show you guys how to connect your retro PI to wireless because it just makes adding roms to your retro PI all that much easier to do so here at the retro PI menu I could press the a button and then there's actually an option if ice roll down here or Wi-Fi so I'll go ahead and press the a button on that now this is actually something you will need a keyboard for because we are going to need to enter the password for our wireless network and it's just easier to do that with a keyboard actually you can't enter the password without a keyboard so what you'll do is grab a spare keyboard and plug it into one of the USB ports so that we can continue on with the next step now obviously any USB keyboard will work just fine but I have here my favorite keyboard that's a standard non mechanical keyboard that has ever been made this is the Dell SK 81 15 I mean look at this keyboard this is just awesome I love this thing it's really old but you know I just figured if there's any excuse to show off this keyboard in one of my videos I may as well do that so I'm gonna go ahead and plug it into my retro PI unit right here we should be good to go and there we go so I'll go ahead and use the keyboard to go ahead and go through the next screens and you'll do the same on your end and we'll get this thing set up on Wi-Fi now before we can continue though it's basically prompting us to set the Wi-Fi country which is a prerequisite for Wi-Fi to function at all so I'll press the left arrow and then enter on yes I'll go down here to localization options and the last item here is change Wi-Fi country so I'll just go down to that and press enter and then I'll press the down key until I find my Wi-Fi country and in my case United States I'll press Enter enter again then next I'll go to the network options enter then of course Wi-Fi and enter and then what you do right here is you type the name of your Wi-Fi network it has to be correct so just make sure you're typing the right name now I have a dedicated network on my end for all of my multimedia devices that I call galaxy and then enter and then it's asking for the password for the Wi-Fi network which I'll enter here and then enter again now we should be good to go but what you want to do is kind of give it like 20 or 30 seconds to connect just to make sure that you've given it enough time then we can go ahead and verify that we did get it set up go ahead and finish and I just press the tab key twice to go down here to finish and you could tell on the top here that it's actually showing an IP address that's why I had you guys wait 20 seconds or so because if you go back to this menu too soon you won't see that but it should work so long as you put in the right password and as this ID of course I did and you can see I have an IP address here I'll go ahead and exit and now we're back to the retro pie menu now that we have Wi-Fi setup I recommend you go up here to the retro pie setup menu I'll press the a button on the controller and I'm going to use the keyboard for this because it's just easier when you're navigating these menus a press enter here and I want to bring your attention to two items the update menu which I'm not going to do right now allows you to basically update the system if the retropie developers implement any fixes or improvements which they always do by updating it you will get the latest improvements direct from the project so it's recommended that you go ahead and do that now down here where it says configuration slash tools there's something we can do to make this a lot easier for us later and that's all the way down here where shows Samba which is a basically a utility that will allow you to access the file system on the retropie from your computer so you can go ahead and add games and BIOS files very easily I'll go ahead and press enter and we're going to choose the first option here to go ahead and install the retro PI shares I'll press ENTER for that and that's pretty quick we could press ENTER for that and this step may not be necessary but I'm going to go ahead and restart the Samba service just to make sure that everything has been activated I'll press ENTER and I can press the right arrow we go out which will take us back to the previous menu so I'll press the right arrow to go back now go ahead and exit it should take us back to the retro pie menu now optionally we could go ahead and enable SSH for us Linux people that's just a very easy way of basically connecting to the retro pie to make changes or add files just another way we can do it so what we'll do is we'll go back to raspy config we'll go down here to interfacing options I'll press ENTER go down to SSH enter so would you like the ssh server to be enabled well if you want to go ahead and do that I always enable it it's not something that you plan on using you probably shouldn't but I find it useful so I'll press ENTER and it's enabled now you can notice here that I have black bars along the screen if you notice that in the retropie menu as well you probably want to disable this little feature here if I go down to Advanced Options and I've had to do this on every retropie setup on my end I'll press ENTER and the second option is overscan I'll press ENTER on that and it's basically asking would we like that feature turned on I always turn this off I just find that it always fixes the issue every single TV I have has these black bars by default so I'll just go over here press the right arrow and then enter on no and then press ok I'll press the right arrow to go to finish it's asking if we would like to reboot I will go ahead and do that just to make sure the overscan option is disabled and now it's starting back up again so it should be pretty quick and we should be good to go to go to the next step and here we are so the next step that I'm going to show you guys is how to add roms to the retropie so we can actually play some games on this thing so let's go ahead and check out that process right now ok so what I'm going to do right now is plug in my computer to the screen recorder and show you guys the process of adding roms to the retropie since we've enabled samba it's actually pretty easy so let's go ahead and get to it okay so here I am on my laptop and the process is very similar regardless of which operating system you're using because pretty much every operating system supports the ability to navigate to a Windows file share which is essentially what samba is so what you'll do is open a file manager here we have the file manager right from where I showed you guys the downloaded files and how to set that up now what we want to do is find the section on our file manager window where we will go to browse Network shares this varies from one operating system to another but it's very similar regardless so look for something that says network shares or something like that in my case I'll select other locations and you can see here that the retropie unit just showed up on the list it wasn't there before so off camera I had to basically join it to a different Wi-Fi network because I remember now that if you want to share files with it you probably should be on the same land so I had to go ahead and switch the retropie over to the proper Wi-Fi network and now that I've done that it's showing up here on the list so I should be able to double click on retropie and we can see that we have some file shares here that we can use to go ahead and add files to the unit now we have the roms folder right here I'll go ahead and connect as anonymous and we have a list of systems here basically a folder for each of the supported systems out of the box so I'll scroll down here we can see we have quite a few supported systems so what I'm going to do is add some Sega Genesis games also known as Mega Drive pretty much everywhere else if you are not in the USA notice we have a Mega Drive folder right here and then we also have a Genesis folder as well it doesn't matter where you put the Genesis slash Mega Drive games they will show up in the same place the Genesis folder is basically linked to the Mega Drive folder so it really doesn't matter so I'll go ahead and click on mega drive here just double click and we can see that the folder is actually empty so now we have the folder open where we're going to put the Genesis games we actually need some games to put there again these are called rom files I can't help you with where to find these but again a Google search will probably definitely point you in the right direction just make sure you don't download an executable file or a download manager like I mentioned now off-camera I've already downloaded some files so I'm going to go ahead and show you those just open up my downloads folder in a new tab here and I have some new files here that weren't here before for example Sonic the Hedgehog and vectorman these are actually Sega Genesis games or Mega Drive games for the rest of you and the file extensions can sometimes vary ads I've seen these in other file extensions MD you know short for dot Mega Drive is pretty common so what I'm going to do is just select both of these files I'm going to cut these and then I'm going to paste them right here in the Mega Drive folder just like that and now we have those two games on our retro pie in addition to that I also wanted to show you guys the process of adding a ROM for another system and also a BIOS file as well so GBA we don't have any games there for the gameboy advance but in my downloads directory I do I have Final Fantasy 6 advanced for the Game Boy Advance one of my favorite games ever definitely want to make sure this one is on there so I'll go ahead and cut so I can move that file over here to the GBA folder and now Final Fantasy 6 is on the retro PI but you know we need a BIOS file for this to make it work the best so we'll go ahead and go back a little bit further and notice that we have a BIOS folder right here I'll double click on it again I'll connect anonymously to the share there's already going to be some files there let's leave those alone now in my downloads directory I have this file selected right here GBA underscore BIOS dot bin that's what you could expect to find and BIOS files generally don't have any variation on the file name so if you wanted the Game Boy Advance BIOS file you should be able to search for exactly this file name maybe they'll be there might be some variations with I doubt it I'll go ahead and cut this and then I'll go ahead and paste it right here in this folder and we should be good to go so now what I'm going to do is switch my screen recorder over the retropie and we're going to see how to activate these new games that we've added so here on the retropie screen you'll notice that we don't have anything new we don't have a Sega Genesis or Mega Drive menu and we don't even have the Game Boy Advance menu either so for this we need to go ahead and restart emulation station because it detects newly added games when emulation station starts so I'll press Start then I'll go down to quit and press the a button then I'll press the a button again on restart emulation station then I'll confirm yes and now we have two more options that we didn't have before Gameboy Advance and Sega Megadrive so I'll choose mega drive let's see what we have here we have Sonic the Hedgehog and vectorman so let's check out Sonic it was made by Sega in case you didn't already know and start let's check it out some actual gameplay from the retro pie itself how awesome is that now the screen recorder is gonna have some lag as you can see I just died here I promise I'm not that bad at this game I'm actually kind of decent at it but a screen recorder is not the kind of thing you want to use to play a game because of the lag and that's not something that you can expect to see on your end it should actually run very very well and of course for me it's gonna be a little bit hard to play with that screen lag here so I could press Start and select to exit the game then we can check out vectorman here we go let's see if this works and if we were upset that the sega promo in the Sonic the Hedgehog game was too loud we could take our frustration out on the Sega logo here but I'll press Start enough of that this is a really fun game I love it probably one of my favorites on the system there's actually a sequel to this one as well I think I kind of liked the first one better but they're both pretty good start the game get the intro there and here we are actually a pretty cool pretty cool looking game here for the Sega Genesis in his time period I think they were trying to compete with Donkey Kong Country at the time but I could be wrong on that I think it was around the same time but you get the idea it seems to work just fine even if I am a klutz there so press the B button to go back and then we have the Gameboy advanced menu here which only has Final Fantasy 6 right now now if this works then we should see the Gameboy Advance logo when we start the game that tells us that the BIOS file is in the right spot and there we go we see the animated Game Boy Advance logo there the BIOS file is fine that's pretty cool and now we officially have the best game in all of existence Final Fantasy 6 right here on the system and the game Chrono Trigger is the only one that even comes close to this you definitely have to make sure that Final Fantasy 6 at least one of the versions is on your system here start a new game because of course I don't have a save file here quite yet and the game is running so now we have the intro so we know that everything is working just fine I'm not going to go ahead and play the whole intro you get the idea this game is fully functional and we now have it on our system so that's pretty much the process of setting up retropie but there's one more thing that I want to show you guys before I close the video and that is the process of installing the safe shutdown script for your case so back here on the laptop we have well the file manager on the screen that we were using here just previously now this is a little bit more advanced because we need to use SSH to configure this so what you're going to want to do is make sure that you have the SSH service enabled which I showed you earlier in the video and then what you'll do is open up a terminal and even on Windows and Mac OS there's also a terminal application available I'll leave it up to you to find it if it's Mac OS it should be in your utilities folder if I remember correctly and on Windows you'll probably need to install something like Services for Linux or whatever they're deciding to call it these days basically just Google Linux terminal for Windows or terminal for Mac OS if you are using something else so I've made the font size a bit bigger here and what we need to do is SSH into the Raspberry Pi so I'll do SSH PI for the user at and then the IP address of the retro PI which you can get your router or whatever you have if you have basically DNS setup you should be able to just do something simple like this pie at retropie which is not going to work in my case because I made a mistake long story so what I'm going to do is type in the IP address I'll say yes then the password by default is raspberry protip if you want this to work you do have to type that correctly and now we have an SSH session open to the actual retropie device itself now the script I'm going to show you guys is specific to the argon one case so if you are using a different case don't do this there's going to be some documentation that came with the case that'll tell you which one you should be installing so in the case of the argon one case the command that you will need to run is actually in the instruction booklet that I'll go ahead and type it here so what we're going to do is type curl and then the URL that is in the instructions and I'm gonna pipe that to sudo bash and then press ENTER and it's going to go ahead and install the required software that makes the power button in the back function properly this is known as safe shutdown which basically allows us to easily shutdown the system with the power button which is a lot better than just cutting the power which is something you can't really do it basically makes it act just like a standard computer when you press the power button which is definitely good to have not required but it's a great feature to have and it's already done so what we can do now is restart the unit and that will basically allow us to go ahead and start using that feature since we're already in an SSH session we could simply do sudo reboot and then press Enter switch the screen recorder now and watch this boot up and now the retropie is ready to go the safe shutdown feature is also installed so just like before we could simply press the power button to turn it on and then we could simply hold down the power button for about three seconds which will activate the shutdown process which I'll do right now one two three there we go and that safely shut it down I didn't even need to pick up the controller or anything it's already good to go so there we go that was my updated video on setting up retropie this time on the Raspberry Pi 4 I hope that was helpful for you guys now from here you can go ahead and check out the retro PI documentation because there's additional tweaks and things you could do to configure and customize your retro PI console further and be sure to check out the links in the description below the video where I will have links to all of the products that I talked about today in case you want to build yours similar to how I've built mine in this video so go ahead and subscribe if you haven't already done so and I will see you in the next video

Channel: LearnLinuxTV

Views: 131,179

Keywords: LearnLinux, Linux, Tutorial, Review, Howto, Guide, Distribution, Distro, Learn Linux, operating system, os, open-source, open source, gnu/linux, Raspberry Pi, Pi, Raspberry Pi 4, pi4, retropie, gaming, retro, retro-gaming, snes, megadrive, nintendo, sega, console, 8-bit, 16-bit, raspberry pi 3, raspberry pi 4 retropie, retro gaming, emulation station, raspberry pi 4 gaming, how to install retropie, pi4 retropie, pi 4 retropie, how to, raspberry pi projects, retro gaming room, retro gaming pc

Id: fsc3gYIYwV8

Length: 57min 20sec (3440 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020