Full Retropie installation

putting a raspberry pi and retropie together gives you the ultimate retro gaming machine let me show you how to set this up from scratch and download and install all the games you've ever dreamed of so let's get playing [Music] [Music] so hi and welcome to bites and bits retropie is a great way to turn a simple raspberry pi into any console or arcade machine up to the mid-1990s so all of the classic 8-bit 16-bit and 32-bit machines will work flawlessly giving you access to the literally thousands of the best computer games ever written it combines a number of pieces of software that provide control and emulation and then builds them into a single application that lets you very easily set up every console and arcade machine on a single raspberry pi you can then easily swap between any of these machines using only your game controller in this tutorial we'll start with a raspberry pi and a blank sd card and build the complete system from scratch i'll show you where to get your games and how to install them so that you can play practically every game ever written in the first 25 years of the games industry so let's get started the people at retropie have made it incredibly easy to get started they provide a number of sd card images that you can simply download and burn onto your blank sd card simply plug it into your raspberry pi and you're 90 finished so first we need to go to the retropie website at retropie.org dot uk from here you need to click the download link in the menu bar and then scroll down to the big red download buttons simply click the one that matches the raspberry pi that you're going to be using for this tutorial i'm going to be using a raspberry pi 3 and this will let me emulate pretty much everything up to the sega saturn and nintendo 64. and both of which just about run on the raspberry pi 4. so once the image has been downloaded we need to burn it to an sd card if you haven't done this before you're going to need to download a program called etcher which will put the sd card image onto the actual sd card and this process is called flashing the card so etcher can be downloaded from this web address so from the home page simply click the download button that matches your operating system and install etcher we've now got everything we need to create our retropie installation disk so next we need to plug in our blank sd card into our computer so that we can flash it we then need to boot up etcher and as you can see there are only three steps needed to actually get the card flashed so first we need to select the file which we just downloaded so find that on your hard drive wherever you saved it so i've saved it in this emulation retropie folder once we've done that we need to tell etcher where we want to flash this to so click on the select target button and then you'll see that it shows you a list of the devices select your sd card and then finally we just click on the flash button and that will start etcher actually creating our installation disk one thing you need to be careful with is the size of your sd card now retropie will install onto a 4 gigabyte card but you do have to leave enough space for the games you want to run now all of the 8-bit machines added together only take up about 2 gigabytes but when you get to 16-bit consoles you'll need a couple of gigabytes each and if you want to install a full arcade game set you'll need around 30 to 60 gigabytes depending on what version you use now for consoles like the playstation 1 which will work okay on the raspberry pi you'll get about three or four games per gigabyte of storage space so i'll be installing all the 8 and 16 bit console games along with a full 2003 meme arcade set which should play well on my raspberry pi 3. now for this i'm going to be using a 64 gigabyte sd card which will leave a few gigabytes left over for my favorite playstation games so now that we have our retropie disk image we need to get the software up and running on our raspberry pi the easiest way to do this is to plug in a keyboard mouse on a games controller and then plug the raspberry pi into a tv or monitor we then simply plug the sd card in and power on the raspberry pi as retropie boots up for the first time it will first resize itself to make full use of your full sd card space and then it will reboot for a second time and eventually you'll get to the gamepad setup screen so just simply hold down any button on your controller until it's recognized and then just go through each of the buttons and pressing the relevant one on your controller you'll work your way through so i'm using a super nes controller here and i run out of buttons at the right shoulder so any of these buttons which i don't have on my controller i can just hold down any button i want and it will then come up as not defined so all of these last analog sticks and so on i'm just holding on a button and setting them as not defined eventually i'll get down to the very bottom for the hotkey enable i'm just going to hold down the key for that to say not defined but then retropie will come back and saying that i do need to define that and at this point i can just simply accept the default value by clicking the a button to say yes and then i'm into retropie so this leaves us in the settings area and there's only really one thing we need to do with retropie right now and that's to set up our internet connection and that's configured inside the raspy config option so you need to use your games controller to move the selector down here so if we move the down to that and then press a to select that that will take us into the raspberry pi's configuration utility on these screens it's best to use your keyboard to navigate so use the arrow keys to move up and down within a list and then we can use the tab key to move between the areas so here the areas are the actual list and then the buttons down the bottom so we want to go to system options and we can just press return to select that so i'm setting up my wi-fi connection so i select wireless lan and then i have to specify what country region that i'm currently based in and and for me that's going to be gb for for great britain it's now setting up my wi-fi and asking me for my ssid so again that's the broadcast name for your wi-fi connection and of course my wi-fi password so just press enter to accept that and that should take me back to my options here and at this point i need to use the tab key to get down to my finish button press enter to select that and then enter again to reboot the raspberry pi so once retropie and the raspberry pi have rebooted we should now have an internet connection so that's retropie all set up and ready to go but obviously we don't yet have any games for our consoles so that's we're going to work on next the best place to get games from is the mu paradise website now a few years ago this website removed all its links to its games downloads due to legal pressure but we can apply a simple fix to get them working again i've covered this in detail in a separate video which i'll put links to in the description so i'm only going to show you the quick setup process here the the fix involves running a piece of javascript code when you view the mu paradise website we need a browser plugin called tampermonkey to do this so if you go to this web address then select the tab that matches your browser and then click the link to install tamper monkey and you'll then need to follow the instructions from there to add it as an extension to your browser so now that we have tamper monkey we need a piece of code that fixes these download links on the mu paradise website so if you go to this web address and again i'll include all these links in the description once you get there you'll see that this is a github page so look for the raw link in the top right hand corner of the listing window and click on that tamper monkey will recognize that this is some code that it can use and it will ask you if you want to install it so click the install button and that's the fix now installed for mu paradise so let's go to mu paradise at this web address and if you use the link on the left hand side to go to the roms isos and games section you'll see there's a list of consoles computers and arcade systems and you can download games for each of these now if you want to you can of course browse through or use the search function on this page to look for individual games that you might want to play but a much faster and easier way to build up your games library is just to download complete rom sets for each of the systems that you want to emulate so if i scroll down this page to the other section you'll see here there is a link to the complete rom sets library so clicking this link link we're now again to a navigation page but here each of the letter links will let you find the gaming systems that you want for rather than individual games so we now have links for our computers and gaming consoles we're not going to download any arcade roms from mu paradise you can do that but again we're going to try and get a complete set and we will do that in a different way so i'm going to show you how to add a single system and you can simply repeat this process for as many games consoles as you want and to build up your complete retro gaming mega system so if i click on the a link you'll see a list of computers and consoles that begin with the letter a so we're going to start with the grand daddy of them all the atari 2600 so if you click on this link then scroll down to the download section you'll see that there are two download links the bottom one is the original broken link from mu paradise and the top one as it says is the one added by tamper monkey which includes our work around code now on some browsers you can just click this link to trigger the download but in others such as google chrome as i'm using here we need to right click on the link and then select the save link as option so this should then trigger the download now again some of the browsers will warn you that this is not being downloaded over a secure connection now this doesn't mean that there are any issues with security on this download it just means that it's not using an encrypted connection so if your browser does do this there's usually an option here which lets you select keep the download once the download is complete we need to open the archive file and extract the game files into a suitably named folder now some of the downloads will be in rar format so you may need to install the 7zip app to open them so just go to 7zip.org and install it from there but once you've extracted these files these will be the ones that we need to transfer to our raspberry pi sd card so there are a couple of ways of transferring your files we can set up a network share using samba and i'll show you that in just a second but probably the easiest way is to use a usb memory stick and to simply use that to transport the files from one computer to another so make sure you have a memory stick that's big enough to transport the games you want to move again for these 8-bit consoles they are very small files and but once you start to get up especially when we come to do our arcade um games we're gonna need um at least 30 gigabytes or 32 gigabyte drives so make sure your drive is formatted as an fat30 drive and that simply make sure that both your pc and your raspberry pi can actually read the um drive and read the files from it so open the memory stick using i'm using using windows here so i'm just going to use windows explorer or you can use whatever normal file manager program you you use and we need to create a folder on the usb stick in the root of it called retropie that's all lowercase once we've done that make sure that your raspberry pi which is running retropie is fully booted up and then simply plug this newly created usb stick into it retropie will detect that folder that we just created and it's going to format it for us so that we can easily copy our game files and get them put into the right emulators now this process does take a few seconds to complete so if you watch the activity light on your usb drive you'll see that it is blinking for a while and wait until you get a nice steady state and at that point the folders are created and if you don't have an activity light then i would suggest leaving it for about a minute just to make sure that everything has been created if you now plug the usb drive back into your pc and view it with your file manager you'll see that retropie has added a number of subfolders inside that retrofi folder that you created and each of these represents a console or a computer or a gaming system that retropie can emulate and all we need to do is to copy our game roms into the correct game system folder so for our atari 2600 roms we simply need to copy them into the atari 2600 folder once you copy the files into the correct folder you simply need to plug the usb drive back into our retropie raspberry pi it will then detect the game files and transfer them into the retropie installation folder actually on the sd card inside the raspberry pi now for the atari 2600 this will be a very fast process because there's only a few megabytes worth of data but keep an eye on the activity light on your usb drive and that will tell you when this copying has finished for some of the later systems there can be quite a few gigabytes to copy so it can take quite a long time so do try and use a usb stick with an activity light so you can see when this is finished so once the process has finished we need to jump back on to the raspberry pi and you'll notice that we don't see anything yet we need to restart emulation station to get it to see the new games that we've added so once you do that you'll find all of a sudden then you have the atari 2600 listed in your list of games and if you select that with the a key you'll find your list of games use your d-pad to navigate the list and a to play a game and that will boot up the relevant emulator so you've now got your atari 2600 built into your raspberry pi and don't forget that if you want to finish a game just press your start and select buttons together and that will take you back to the main retropie screen so that's one complete console set up in retropie and you can simply repeat this process for all the other consoles you want to emulate and of course you don't have to do each one individually we can download a number copy a number onto our usb drive and then import them into retropie all in one go so another way to copy your files between computers is to use a network share and that works using something called samba on the retropie so if you go to your retropie configuration section and then select the retropie setup that will open up a little configuration utility so we need to go to configuration and tools and then we need to scroll down until we find the samba share if you select that the first option there is to install that so do that and then come back out of that utility and that's now set up our retropie and it will share some of its folders including our roms folder on the network so of course we now need to connect to that from our main computer in windows you do this by mapping a network drive using windows explorer right click on the this pc icon and select the map network drive option this will bring up a dialog window which lets us find the retropie shares so leave the drive letter as it is but in the folder box type in backslash backslash retropie retropie will automatically set up this network name to make it easy to connect if you now click in the browse button you should see the retropie network share with a number of folders inside it select the roms folder and click the finish button if you can't get the retropie share to show in the browse section you can simply type backslash backslash retropie backslash roms into the folder box and then click finish to see if windows can locate the share or if that doesn't work you can find the ip address of your raspberry pi and use that instead now once you've got the network share set up you should now find the roms folder on your raspberry pi appearing as an extra drive on your computer inside the roms folder you'll see all the individual system folders that we need to put the games roms inside and you can now simply drag and drop files into these folders to install them into retropie after installing any roms you need to restart emulation station so that it can detect all your new games now there are some consoles that you won't see listed in the main mu paradise complete rom set section if we browse across to the ends you'll find that all of the nintendo consoles aren't there now it's not that these pages don't exist anymore it's just that they links to them have been removed from the complete rom set section so the way to get these is to go to google and if you search for mu paradise followed by the console followed by full rom sets then you should be able to find them in the lists and if you click through that will take you then to the download pages for these rom sets that lets you download full rom sets for just about every games console or home computer that you can think of but if you want to play arcade games we need to get hold of them in a slightly different way if you look at the retropie documentation you'll see that it suggests using meme 2003 as your arcade emulator meme roms work in a slightly different way to console roms and we have to make sure that we get the right set of roms for the version of meme that we're going to be using now i've made a couple of videos to help you understand main roms and where you can download them so please do check the description for links to those videos but i'll quickly take you through the process here but please do refer to those videos for full instructions each version of meme has a matching set of game roms to get the best from meme you should use its matching rom set so mem 2003 uses rom version 0.78 and the best place to get hold of these roms is from archive.org if we go to this website we can search for maim followed by the version number that we want now this should bring up the rom sets that we want if you click into one of these results and i'll put a link to the below to the one that i've used you'll get a number of download options on the right hand side of the page now these rom sets are big downloads they're upwards of 30 gigabytes and the fastest way to download them is to use bittorrent so you should find a downloadable torrent link in the download section you'll need a bittorrent client that understands these links and is able to get hold of the files for you now i use cubit torrent as my download client and if you install this software and then download the torrent link file from archive.org you can then open that link file and qubit torrent should start to download your rom set again check out my other videos where i go through this in much more detail at the end of this process and it will take a couple of hours to download you will have a full set of arcade machine roms and that's somewhere around three thousand to four thousand games now these need to be copied into the main hyphen lib retro folder on your raspberry pi so whatever method you're going to use do be aware that this is again a 30 gigabyte data transfer so it is going to take a couple of hours probably to complete but once the transfer is complete restart emulation station again and you should see a meme section in your main retropie menu if you open up the section you'll see a list of all the arcade machines ready for you to play when you use meme you're using the exact software from the original arcade machines now this still expects you to put money in the slot before you can play the game so use the select button on your controller to put a coin in the machine and then the start button on your controller to press the one player button on the arcade machine and you're ready to go so that's your raspberry pi setup as the ultimate retro games console there should be enough great games in there to keep you going for quite some time as well as playing all the well-known games make sure you browse through the lists and try out some that you've never heard of i always find a few fantastic titles that i've never played as well as a few where you do have to wonder how they ever made it to a commercial release i hope you've enjoyed this video and found it useful and don't forget to click the like and subscribe buttons to make sure you don't miss any of my new videos and also make sure to check out my other retro gaming coding and making videos don't forget that the mu paradise setup and meme download videos will be linked to in the description down below so i look forward to seeing you again very soon and bye for now for more games programming electronics projects and retro gaming please make sure you like this video subscribe to my youtube channel and visit my website

Channel: Bytes N Bits

Views: 3,641

Keywords: retropie, raspberry pi, retro gaming, mame

Id: 888BKOFtFu0

Length: 25min 53sec (1553 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2021