Retro Gaming on Raspberry Pi 4

today i'm going to show you how to play retro games on a raspberry pi stay tuned the date was february 12 1990. i had just turned 14 years old i don't remember the name of the store but i remember waiting in line with my parents to buy super mario brothers 3. i think it's the only time my family actually bought something on the day it was released this was a big deal in my household some families play sports some families go on extravagant vacations my family we played nintendo i remember us all sitting in front of that old crt with that gray box sitting on the floor in fact this very one right here still works good too i have so many fond memories of those 8-bit characters going across the screen my dad could get through super mario bros in less than an hour from beginning to end my mom she was the animated player her arms would fling in the air as if jerking the controller in the air would make her character jump higher i remember late nights with my dad and brother guiding link through the most amazing adventure in hopes to save princess zelda for people who grew up during that time you probably have similar memories whether it's spending hours trying to defeat iron mike but first having to defeat glass joe mr sandman and king hippo maybe it was trying to get through a level without killing eric balog and olaf because you know you need the abilities of all three in order to get to the next level wouldn't it be great if you could relive those days well it turns out you can and you don't need to try to adapt one of these old consoles to your big screen tv either many very talented people have emulated these retro consoles so that they can be played on the pc we're actually going to be looking at an entire operating system devoted to retro gaming on the raspberry pi this operating system is called retropie this is not the first retro pi build that i've done i did one based on the pi 3 a while ago this little thing ran great its only problem was its ability to emulate some of the more modern retro consoles like the dreamcast playstation and nintendo 64. it would run them but not well there was just not enough performance in the pi 3 to make it work well when i saw the specs to the pi 4 the first thing i thought was retropie so i jumped on google to see if retropie had support for the pi 4 and it did support for the raspberry pi 4 is in the stable image of retropie so that brings us to today before we get to setting this thing up let's look at a comparison between the old pi 3 and the new pi 4. so on the raspberry pi 3 model b we have a quad core arm cortex a53 processor now on the raspberry pi 4 we have a cortex 1.5 gigahertz quad core the raspberry pi 3 is equipped with one gigabyte of ddr2 memory and the raspberry pi 4 comes in different models this one here has four gigabytes of ddr4 however it also comes in a two four and eight gigabyte model i got the four gigabyte because what i'm using this thing for is going to be just fine the raspberry pi 3 comes with a 10 100 nic while the raspberry pi 4 comes with a gigabit ethernet both raspberry pi's have wireless however the 3 has 2.4 gigahertz wireless while the 4 has 2.4 as well as 5 gigahertz wireless the raspberry pi 3 only has usb 2.0 while the raspberry pi 4 has usb 2.0 and 3.0 this should actually allow us to run a ssd hard drive with fairly decent performance the raspberry pi 3 has a full size hdmi port while the raspberry pi 4 has dual hdmi mini ports and the hdmi mini ports actually support either dual displays or 4k you can't do them both at the same time but you can run either a single display at 4k or you can run dual displays finally the raspberry pi 3 has a micro usb and according to the raspberry pi foundation's website it can take up to 2.5 amps and the raspberry pi 4 comes with usbc and this one right here they recommend a minimum of three amps as you can see the pi 4 is the fastest raspberry pi yet i've also heard of people getting a stable 2.1 gigahertz overclock on the cpu and a 700 meg overclock on the gpu unfortunately heat becomes a problem overclocking the pi 4. so we're going to look at that in another video but for now let's get retropie up and running the first thing that you're going to need to set up retropie is an sd card i recommend getting one 32 gigs or higher remember you're going to be putting roms on this thing and depending on which consoles that you decide to emulate some of the roms get pretty big especially on the later consoles now you're also going to need a way to be able to read this sd card so you can get a micro sd to sd card adapter that your micro sd card basically slips inside of and it will stick into a regular sd card port or what you can use is a usb card reader where you just take your micro sd card stick it in your card reader and then you can plug it into a usb port so now that we've gone over this let me show you how to flash retropie onto your sd card the first thing you want to do is put your sd card into the computer it'll take a second for your sd card to detect while that's working let's open up chrome what you're going to want to do is go to google and search for raspberry pi imager so we're going to click on the first link here introducing raspberry pi imager and then scroll down to the bottom and you should see a link to their downloads page and from here you download it for whatever operating system you're using i'm using windows and i already have it installed so let's go do that now so what we're going to do is click on start we're going to open up our raspberry pi imager the first thing we want to choose is the os so from here we're going to pick retropie from the list you should be able to scroll down and it should be here and then you want to pick which version of retro pie and this is going to depend on which raspberry pi you got there's three different versions one for the pi one one for the pi two and three and one for the pi four we're going to do the one for the pi four and now that we've picked that we're gonna choose our sd card it's gonna be the card that we just put in and then we push right and hit yes to continue and that's all it takes it's going to take a while for this to actually image onto the card so i'll be back when it's done all right now that we have our sd card flashed let me show you how to install it and get this raspberry pi up and running the first thing you want to do is on the bottom of the raspberry pi is where you have your micro sd card slot so what we're going to do is we're just going to slide this card into the slot and then apply power to the raspberry pi and if everything worked correctly it should boot up with no problems now we have a little bit of setup to do so for this i highly recommend plugging in a usb keyboard you don't need a keyboard for regular operation for that a gamepad would be fine however for setting it up it's really easy using a keyboard so let's go to setting this thing up the first thing that we have to do is set up your gamepad if you have one connected for that just hold a button on your gamepad and it will give you the configuration screen and from here all you have to do is push the corresponding buttons that it's asking you to push so we got d-pad up d-pad down left right start select it's a pretty easy process just go through this real quick and get everything set up okay so my gamepad doesn't have all of the buttons that we have down here so what we're going to have to do is just hold a button in order for it to be not defined so it takes a little while to go through all these i'm actually using a super nintendo controller so it doesn't have a lot of these other controls here and then once we're done we hit a for ok and then hit a again for yes and that's it now we're in retropie so now the first thing that we're going to do is i'm going to set up wireless real quick if you plan to plug in ethernet then this isn't necessary however i still recommend doing it so the first section we want to go to is the raspy config then go down to network options then we're going to click on wi-fi and now we want to go down to our region i'm in the usa so i'm going to go down to usa here it wants you to enter your ssid i would recommend skipping this because honestly i've never really gotten this function to work properly so we're going to cancel out of that now and then we're going to click finish okay now what we want to do is to actually connect to the wi-fi we want to come down to wi-fi here and then click connect to wi-fi network and then we want to pick our network and then we want to enter our key and then hit okay all right and there we go we are now connected to wi-fi so now the next step is to actually get some roms transferred over to this thing so for that we're gonna move over to the computer now it's time to start copying roms over to our raspberry pi and for that we need to talk about something now essentially copying roms of games that you don't own is software piracy so the way the law works is as long as you own a copy of the cartridge then you can own the rom for this example i'm using the original super mario brothers and i own the cartridge so when it comes to roms i know the question is going to come up of where can you get these roms at for that unfortunately i'm not going to be able to share that with you however google is your friend and that's all i'm going to say on the subject so now to get this thing copied over let's get over to the computer and i'll show you how to do it so the first thing that you want to do is open up a file explorer and then in the address bar you want to put backslash backslash retropie and that should open up your retropie and from here you go into the roms folder and then go down to the console that you're wanting to add a rom to so we're going to do the nes so we're going to open that folder and then we're just going to copy our rom over to that folder and that's all there is to it it's extremely easy copying roms to your retropie over the network there's also several other ways that you can copy roms over to your retropie you could also use a usb thumb drive i'm not going to go over that in this video because honestly over the network is just way too easy so now that we have the rom copied let's go over to the retropie and let me show you how to configure the emulator now that we have a rom copied over to the retropie you should see a new menu item on the screen indicating that it has roms for the nintendo entertainment system let me show you how to set up the emulator okay so we're going to select nintendo entertainment system and we're going to click on our super mario brothers it's going to take a second for the game to load you can push any key here if you'd like to configure the emulator for this rom specifically so we're going to click on super mario brothers we're going to hit one player and as you can see it probably looks a lot more blocky than you're used to this is because this game was originally created for a crt and since we're running it on an hd monitor the picture doesn't come out anywhere near like it used to so there's a few things that we can do in order to make it look like we're used to so the first thing we want to do is hit the select start button at the same time this will throw us back to the retropie menu we're going to hit b to go back to the main menu then we're going to go into the retropie menu from there we're going to select configuration editor and then from here we want to do the basic configuration now we're going to scroll down to the nes so right here we're going to set video smoothing to true we're going to go down to render resolution and set this one to video output resolution and then you can optionally you can set up the shader right here it affects performance but it will give you a true crt look so i'm going to hit true here and we're going to pick the shader file and there's all different kinds of shader files the one i recommend is the crt pi right here and now we're going to hit cancel to cancel out and this should bring us back to the retropie menu so we're going to back out here go back into nintendo and we're gonna open the rom all right we're gonna select super mario brothers we're gonna hit one player so we can get into the game and here you go this looks a lot more like the super mario brothers from our childhood and that's all there is to setting up a retropie the retropie operating system supports a lot more than just the original nintendo it has a wide range of emulators i would highly recommend taking a look at their website now on the subject of roms i have to go over this again because i know the question is going to be brought up i unfortunately can't tell you where to get roms but google is your friend just search for it and you should be able to find the information that you need when it comes to the legality of roms as long as you own the original cartridge there's nothing wrong with you using a rom it's perfectly legal however if you don't have the original rom it's technically software piracy so keep that in mind everything that i used in order to make this video i'll have links in the description so you can replicate the same thing and if this video was helpful to you then please like this video and also don't forget to subscribe to my channel and hit the bell icon so you can be notified of future videos i post a new video every week have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 36,130

Keywords: retro gaming, retropie raspberry pi 4, retropie, raspberry pi 4, raspberry pi

Id: dpS6cTNfETI

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020