Beside me here. I have my PlayStation five, and this thing is a fantastic piece
of cutting edge gaming hardware. Given the recent hardware shortages,
I feel very lucky to have this thing but it does lack in one key area. It's not very good at retro gaming and me. I'm an ATV. My formative years were spent playing
and yes, S.A., Sega, Genesis, N64, and. Well, you get it. I could go. I have a lot of good memories
tied up with those games and I would love to be able
to play them again. But I also don't want to have ten different retro game
consoles cluttering up my living room. I'm trying to at least pretend
like I'm a functional adult here. So that's where this comes in. This is a Raspberry Pi four
and we are going to transform this into a retro game console. In fact, we're going to transform this into every game
console up until about the same Dreamcast. Yeah. How's that for a throwback
that if you guys have Sega Dreamcast? Because I did. I absolutely love that. We might even be able
to get this to play games, although that might be pushing
it almost as much as the sponsor Segway is pushing it.
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exploring your creativity Now that we're here in the shop,
we can get started on the first step of this build,
which is going to be building a case for this tiny little adorable computer. And because it's so small, we're not going
to need a lot of materials. We have some Walmart here,
a little bit of oak here. And then the magnets
that let me down in my last video. Hopefully they'll do a little bit better
this time. When you guys come around to this site
and then we'll show you what I have worked out
design wise, a laptop, because we're going to be working
with incredibly small pieces, I figured that this was
a great opportunity to use my ex Karp. So over here on the computer,
I have it all loaded up, which is the CMC control software for the X car. And on it
I've got a bunch of pieces design, so I'm going to build this case
out of four main pieces. These three that you can see on the screen
here are going to be made in Walnut. And then we have this other one over here
which is made out of the oak. Now instead of explaining all the different details and y design
each one the way that I did, I think it would be easier
if I just carve them first and then explain how they work What are the
main things that I wanted to explore in this build was using my C
and C to build things and layers it would have been impossible to cut
the shape that I wanted all at once. But by making it up for individual pieces
and then joining those pieces together,
I was out of the single piece of walnut. I cut the front grille from the bottom
of the case and then the top case, and then out of this tiny little slab of oak,
I cut a middle section. If you look closely,
you can actually see that I use the CMC to cut out a bunch of little pockets
for my magnets. We'll talk more about those later. All right. That's number two. Let's
see how these guys look at the machine. Carving is now done,
and all we have to do now is break all of these individual pieces
out of the bigger piece. Somebody told me that a really good way to do
this is just with a hammer and chisel. So we're going to try that Yeah, that actually worked pretty well. Now that we have our four pieces separated, let me show you approximately
how they're going to go together. So this one is the bottom one. Raspberry
Pi is going to fit in here like so. And this one is the middle piece,
which is going to go on there, although I had to carve a little bit
out of the back of it. Then this one goes on top like so. And then finally
this one goes in the front. So a couple little cinnamon issues
that I noticed right off the bat. Obviously, this guy is just way too thick
and it looks kind of dumb as is. So I'll play this down on the drum center. And then the other thing I know this is that this stack of three ends up
being a little bit higher than that. So I will probably fix that
by just reducing the thickness of this guy a little bit. I didn't want to risk sending such a small, delicate piece
through the planer or the joint, but the drum center with its abrasive
head did a great job of reducing the thickness
of that front grill, as well as the middle oak piece
without doing any damage. It just took quite a few passes. The drum center isn't great at removing
a lot of material all at once. Now that we got those small issues taken care of, we are going to glue
this midsection to the bottom section and then we're going to glue
the front section on after that. And then as for the top, well, I have a little bit of a surprise
left for there on a way too early. Talks about the magnets.
Yeah, I'm going to use magnets well, I used to think that my larger glue ups are tricky,
but gluing together pieces this small presented its own unique
challenges Eventually, though, I got everything balance clamps and left it all to dry
over night. It is now 24 hours later and the wardrobe change
and the glue is now definitely dry. So before we attach this front grille
to the main chassis, I love coming up with all names
for the pieces as I go. We had to do a couple of little things to this first,
but we still have good, easy access to it. The first one is going to be widening
this iReport here. You can see that
there's not quite enough room for all these USB ports
and this Ethernet port here. I obviously remember to include it in the walnut piece,
but I forgot to include it in this OP. So we're going to chisel that out
and sign it by hand. This is the part of the video where I
expose myself as a true novice woodworker using a small hacksaw, which, by the way, is the only saw
that I could fit into this tight opening. I cut two lines
up to the height that I need it. I then used a semi sharp chisel
to chip away at the oak until my raspberry
PI's USB ports had to fit next. It was
time to do a little bit of trolling. You see, last time I drilled through
a PCB like this and my desk filled video, quite a few people
got mad at me in the comments. But here's the thing there's not really any traces
that run anywhere near these walls, and it's a great, foolproof way
to locate your belt extender. So I'm going to keep doing it
Once the holes were drilled, I threaded in some brass standoffs
that I could then mount the Raspberry
Pi two and then, well, then I mounted the Raspberry Pi only
to discover a small issue with my design. So between this front grill
and the actual board itself, there's a little area here
which I was intending to use to put a fit
specifically this little one right here. Then I got it and I was like, Ooh, that's a little bit
smaller than I imagined it would be. So I ended up ordering a different fan. This one right here
but this one is significantly thicker than the first one, so we don't have enough clearance
to get this one in there properly. So that's the nice thing
about having your own see and see. I turned off the camera for like
five or 10 minutes, put it up easel, and now I have a redesigned front grille
that's ready to be carved. Being able to remake components
like this on the fly is so here. Could you imagine how heartbreaking
it would have been to discover that mistake had
I even carved the front grille? Yeah, I might it to scrap the whole build
at that point. Lucky for me, though, I was able to carve a new piece
with a new and improved design. This time I included a recessed area
for the fan that held it tightly in place. No need for glue
or even any mounting screws. Let's see how this guy looks now. Lots of dust, but yeah,
I think that should do the trick. Sorry. Just give me one quick second. Hearing
Upload a photo to my Instagram account, which, if you're following me, by the way,
you might want to because I do upload photos
live of my projects as I'm doing them. So if you're ever curious about what
I'm building next, you might want to check it out. That in there. And then beauty. Okay, now we have the kind of clearance
that we need, although this is still looking
a little bit too chunky. For my tastes. So really the same thing we did before
and played it down to the drum center Who could? This fits in there very nicely. Now everything looks pretty good, so I think it's time that we glued
the front grill in place. Paradoxically, when you're working
on small pieces like this, wood movement can be even more of an issue
than it normally is. I had to force this wedge
into the front of the case in order to return it
back to its original shape. After that, though,
it was an extremely straightforward look It's about an hour later. See how we did all right? A couple of little rough edges,
but I've already set up a little area over here where we can clean those up. Let me show you on my left here, you'll see that I have taped
a piece of sandpaper to the desk so what we're going to do
is we're going to take our box and we're going to rub it across it
and sand it down so that all the sides of it are perfectly flat. Because you'll see there's
a couple of spots like here where there's a little ridge
and a little bit there, too. And I want this thing to be nice and flat
when we're done. So this is a good way to do it. Basically, we're just referencing
the surface of the table in order to flatten this out. At this point, you might be asking yourself,
why use a table and not a random sander? And the answer is you just get way
more control when doing it right here. Is really easy to accidentally
hold a vibrating tool at a slightly off angle and end up removing more material
than you ever intended to. I found that this method was perfect for dialing in
all those little millimeter adjustments. Okay. So that's pretty close to where I want it. Now, before we go any further,
I want you install all the magnets that I'm going to use
to secure this top to the main body here. Since all the magnet holes were machine
carved, installing them was as easy as adding
a single drop of glue and then gently tapping them
into their individual holes. Once the blue set,
they were in there permanently. So let's
see how these two halves fit together. Pretty good, actually. That's not bad at all. Okay, we got to do a little bit
more sanding to smooth out these edges. But then we on the finishing this passes. Sanding was more about shaping the case
than it was about making sure everything lined up. I ran it off some of the corners by hand,
and then I used a random orbital sander to do what my friend calls. Hello. Were you slightly round and bevel
your piece? Wood. I felt like this little detail was kind of reminiscent
of some of those rounded edges that were so popular in nineties
gaming consoles like SNL and the Genesis. Look at that. That is looking pretty damn good. Now we're ready to do some finishing. And if you watch my last video
or is making that Bluetooth speaker, you know that finishing in
these little slots is an absolute pain. So we're gonna try something new today. We are going to try
spraying on the finish. This is my makeshift spray,
as you can see in the rest of the shop. There's a lot of stuff going on right now, so I want to be as mindful over
spray as I possibly can. Be After I got my makeshift spray booth set up,
it was time to test it out. I loaded up some Water-Based varnish
and gave it a spray. Well,
this did end up working decently well. In retrospect, the sprayer was probably
a bit oversize. Job. In the future, I think I'll have to invest in a little
airbrush for smaller pieces like this. So that is the finishes dry. Basically, at this point in the
normal video, we would almost be done. We still have quite a bit of work
in front of us. So let's go home and install the hardware
and then also install all the software that's going to drive this thing
because this could take some time. It's now the next day and we are back home
and ready to dove into some hardware. Well, earlier in the video
I said something like, we might be able to get it
to run some GameCube we games. Well, in order to achieve that, we
are going to have to overclock this thing. And if you're familiar with overclocking,
what it means is you're basically pushing the hardware inside this thing to run
faster than it was ever designed to run. And a byproduct of that
is that it produces a ton of extra heat. So we are going to need to upgrade
the cooling on this thing, and we're going to be doing that
in two key ways. So the first, which is just as big well, big, relatively speaking, fan
that I installed at the front of the case. This is going to blow air over the Raspberry Pi and keep it cool
by dissipating the heat that way. The second way we're going to cool
it is with this guy. This is a heatsink and it attaches directly to the CPU on the Raspberry
Pi and Wicks Heat away from it, which is then
cooled by this fan right here. But even that is not enough to satisfy
my thirst for maximum performance. So we're actually going to replace the Stalk fan on this heatsink, which, by
the way, is like a little light up L.e.d. one, which I really didn't want in my case
with this high performance, one from Noctua. This is quieter and it moves more air
than this one and unhook this. And now we're just going to put the last one in place
for a cool retention bracket on there. Slide it under the heatsink. There you go. Upgraded heatsink. Next, we have a little bit
of a compatibility issue. You see the power connectors
that come with these fans aren't really compatible with the power
supplies that are on the raspberry PI. These are DuPont connectors,
and this is the DuPont crimper. So what we're going to do is crimp a single female pin onto the end of each
one of our wires. That will allow us to connect them to
individual male pins on the Raspberry Pi. Of course, I don't have a wire stripper well enough to do these
teeny little wires. So I'm going to have to do it
the old fashioned way and try to strip these wires
just using a little knife. Wish me luck. I want to just cut through
the plastic shielding without cutting through the actual wire,
which is a bit of a delicate operation. All right. Z0 three. And then we have the pin in the crypt tool
being held in there. Kind of wing. Insert the wire in. Good. Now, with a little bit of luck,
if I just crimp that on there, like, that should be connected. Yeah. Seems pretty good. So now we have this
little metal connector, and we slide it
into one of these little plastic sheets. These are all extremely technical terms
I'm extremely well versed in, as I'm sure you can tell. This guy goes in here, like, so it's locked in there. So there's one. We got to do three more. Just do a quick test here
to make sure our fins actually work. And I hooked up everything, right?
And here's the power switch. And. Yeah. Perfect. Both our fans are spinning this and smooth
move on, though. This little micro SD card here
holds the raspberry PIs operating system as well as all of the games. And it goes in this little slot
on the underside of it, which is going to be kind of hard
to reach. Once we install it there. So we just sort out the software
before we permanently mount this thing on location. So I'm actually going to kind of breeze through this because this step
could be a video unto itself. But long the short of it
is, I'm going to use my main computer here to install Retro Pi onto this SD card. Now, Retro Pi is an operating system
for the Raspberry Pi that is specifically geared towards emulation and playing
retro games and ROMs and stuff like that. It's just going to give us a neat, easy
to use clean UI, specifically designed for what we want this thing to do. So in summary, pop
the SD card into the main computer, right? Retro PI to it, pop it out,
pop it into the Raspberry Pi and enjoy it just like that. We're done. So that's a freshly installed
copy of Retro Pi. We'll slide that into the Raspberry Pi. So now we're ready to install this. In the case, assembling everything inside
the case was pretty straightforward, if a little bit frustrating but only because I was working with such
small pieces inside an already tight case. Instead of using screws
to mount the Raspberry Pi, I actually installed a second set of brass
standoffs This set of standoffs would in turn
give me some work in the heatsink, but not before I installed
a little bit of thermal paste on the CPU and a little bit of thermal compound
on the ram chip. These piece helped to facilitate heat
transfer from the components to the heatsink,
and they actually helped quite a bit. Without them,
the heatsink would be almost useless. So that's something
you might want to keep in mind if you're planning on building
a similar setup success. Everything fits inside the case. So the way this is set up to work is that that fan at the front
is going to pour cold air in. It's going to pass over the CPU
in the heatsink, and then it's going to get ejected out
this top side. Now, let me show you one little compromise that I had to make on this build
that I'm not overly thrilled about. So unfortunately,
the Raspberry Pi actually has two sets of inputs and outputs. You have these ones around back,
which are the USB ports and Ethernet, but then you also have
this row of ports here. So this is the power supply. And then this one is the HDMI port. So in order to get those to work, I had to attach two right angle
adapters to them. Now, obviously, I could have just drilled
another set of holes there for those cables, but I really wanted all the cables
on this thing to come out the back side. So what I'm really going to do
is bring these around it over and then I'm going to root them
through the top of the box. So this one, I'll go there, that one goes there,
and then they just come out the back. Honestly, not the cleanest, the most
elegant solution, but it works for now. I think what I would do
if I were going to do this project again is have a cut out here
and a cut out here, and then just run extension cables to those cutouts
and then glue them in place. But you know what they say first you
make it work, then you make it look good. So let's get this
thing booted up and see how it runs Look at that. That is running quite nicely now. So give me a little bit of time
to get this all set up. Connected to wi fi transfer over some games and
then we will take this thing for a spin. Oh, okay. So that ended up taking a lot longer
than I thought it would. I turned off the camera yesterday. Think it just be a couple of hours and
it ended up getting the rest of the day. But regardless,
I now have it set up in the living room and it's ready to be demoed. As you can see,
this is the initial splash screen. Once you put up the console and from here
you can pick whatever system you want. We've got the any s that ends in 64
Sega Genesis, Gameboy, Gameboy Color Game Gear Dreamcast
basically every console right up to and including the PlayStation
one and the PSP. The best part of it is all of the games run great and importantly, they feel
just like they used to back in the day. Now, at this point, I should
probably point out that running emulators in ROMs is a little bit of a legal
and moral gray area. So for my system, I stuck to only games and consoles
that I actually owned in real life. They just happened to be collecting dust
in my dad's basement right now, thanks to the controller
I've got here is actually pretty cool too. It's from a company
called Do or a bit Doh, and it's basically like somebody mash together
a Super Nintendo control and a PlayStation two controller,
but it's completely wireless and even has rumble functionality
built into it. I just need to get like three
or more of these so that my friends can play too. Another neat feature that this setup has
is the ability to remotely manage it. Say, I want to download a new game. I can just download it on my main computer
and then drag and drop it on to the Raspberry
Pi and it transfers over WiFi. It's really seamless and really easy. Now, unfortunately, I did fall short of my own expectations
and this build in a couple of key ways. One, I just don't love this design
that much. It's not bad, mind you, but I just also don't feel like it's
my greatest work ever. And two, I never really got it to run
WI and GameCube games that well. The fact of the matter is the CPU
and the CPU in this thing, even one overclocked just aren't
powerful enough for those platforms. However, I am quite pleased with the way
it runs Dreamcast and PlayStation games. And if there's one thing that I learned from Marvel movies, it's
that you always leave room for a sequel. If you guys enjoy this video
and it does well, then maybe we can do a follow up to this
where we build a second version of this
with a lot more computational horsepower. And maybe a better chassis design too. We'll see if we can build
something that runs Xbox to PS3 and who knows, maybe even more. So let me know down in the comments if that's something
you'd be interested in seeing. And on that note, I think
that's a good spot to end this video. As always, all include a bunch of links in the video
description to all the products I use, as well as a bunch of in-depth guides
as to how you can set up your own Raspberry
Pi as a retro gaming console. Big. Thank you to all my Patreon supporters
for sponsoring this video and everybody. I do. And a big thank you to Skillshare
for sponsoring this video in particular. As always, I would really appreciate it
if you like this video, if you could hit that like button, give it a comment and subscribe
if you are already. Now, if you'll excuse me,
I have a little bit of retro gaming to do. I will see you guys in the next video
piece. Oh, and I almost forgot. I owe you guys a B-roll
sequence. Hit it, Bryson.
