Retropie 3.6 Tutorial - A beginners Guide to Setting up RetroPie on the Raspberry Pi 3

hello everybody detectives - here and today we're gonna set up retropie 3.6 on the Raspberry Pi 2 & 3 now this is a complete beginners guide so I'm gonna show you how to do this as easy as possible if you are a more advanced user I'll point you to links and resources along the way to help you get more out of your retro PI install so let's not waste any more time and take a look at what we're going to cover today so here is everything we're going to look at today this menu will be interactive so if you do know how to complete some of the steps just click on what you want to see and it will take you to that part of the video I'll also leave links throughout the video to get back to this menu and to skip forward and back a section throughout the tutorial I'll also be living links to other videos so when they do open up in a new tab watch them and then come back to this video and resume from there now all of that is out of the way let's have a look at what we need to get this running so here's all our hardware it might look like a lot but some of this stuff is optional and you don't need every single piece starting from the left of good air controllers I use an Xbox 360 or a Dualshock 3 gamepad but any USB style controller will work up the top we have a power adapter and a HDMI cable for the PI 2 you will on a good quality 2 amp power adapter and if you're using the Raspberry Pi 3 you want to have a minimum of 2.5 amps to find out what yours is take a close look at the text on the adapter and look for DC 2a or 2.5 a we need a micro SD card a gigabyte will be the minimum but I recommend 16 or 32 gigabytes and this card should be at least class 10 which represents the read and write speeds of the card a USB thumb drive will be used to transfer roms and a micro SD card reader will be used to write retropie to a micro SD card a USB keyboard makes setup a lot easier so make sure you have one of these and then we need our Raspberry Pi I've got a model 2 & 3 that I'll be using and either of these will work just fine the benefit of the Raspberry Pi 3 is we have onboard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth so you can skip the optional dongles on the right which will leave some of our USB ports open for more controllers also in the optional area is a athonite cable which can be used in place of your Wi-Fi dongle now both of these are optional we don't need Wi-Fi or Ethernet to set up our retropie install so if you do have one of these it's handy to use but it's not necessary so now all our hardware is gathered let's go get the software to install retropie there's four things we'll need to download one is 7-zip number two is SD card formatter number three is win32diskimager and number four is the retropie image if you head down to the description you'll see links one two three and four and if you click these it will take you to what you see on screen now to make things easy I've also added link 0 and that will include all the software from those other links ready to double click and install I recommend getting this one for the easiest setup once that software has downloaded simply open the folder and double click on item 1 2 & 3 and wait for them to install and then you're ready to download retropie you can access that website from shortcut for in my download link or go to pet rock block comm once you are there click on the retropie project menu then click on downloads and it will take us to this page from here we want to select retropie SD card image for a Raspberry Pi 2 & 3 if you're using a PI 0 or PI 1 click the link for that one instead on the next page we will choose the standard version once you click that it will start downloading so choose your desktop and then push ok and wait for it to download this file is 800 megabytes so it could take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes depending on your connection speed once that download does finish though we need to uncompress our file ready to write our image to an SD card we do need 7-zip installed for this so simply right-click on the file choose the 7-zip submenu and then click extract here it took me about 20 seconds of my system but it could take a little bit longer and yours depending on what speed your process is after that is done we are ready to write our image file to an SD card for that we're going to use win32diskimager and SD card formatter to prepare our SD card so the first thing we'll need to do is put our SD card into our SD card reader and then insert that into our PC on Windows 10 our drive letter will show on the Action Center on the right on windows 7 you usually get a pop-up saying open this folder and that will tell us our drive letter my drive is letter now we want to open SD card formatter make sure our drive is selected give this driver name I'm going to call mine retro play and then we click format to be safe during this step it'll be good idea to disconnect any other USB drives you do have connected when you do click format it's going to give you a warning message just click OK and we're ready to move on next we will write our image to the SD card using win32diskimager open up the program make sure your drive is selected in this menu here and then we're going to click this little folder icon and select our Raspberry Pi image that we extract it to the desktop before hit open when that file is selected verify that you do have that correct drive letter mine is I and then we want to hit write this will take a few minutes so let it complete it will give you an OK message once it's done and then we can remove our SD card from our computer and prepare to load up our pie now we are getting close to powering this bad boy on but first we need to plug everything in the first thing I'm gonna plug in is the micro SD card then I'm gonna take my wide controller I'm going with the DualShock 3 to start and I'm also going to use the wide version because it's a little bit easier to set up and plug that in this is my keyboard going in now and that's gonna be very handy during setup so plug that in and then we also need our HDMI and then our power so I'm plugging them in now at the moment I'm not gonna plug in our USB Drive for ROM transfer that's going to wait a little bit till after setup and for me personally I won't be inserting my Wi-Fi dongle because this is the Raspberry Pi 3 and it has onboard Wi-Fi if using a Raspberry Pi 2 you can install that now but it is completely optional and we do not need Wi-Fi or internet connection to get things running don't forget we also have the option for Ethernet and if we do plug this cable in we just need to take the other end and plug it into our modem or router now if your modem or router is not in the same room this will be a little bit difficult and that's where the Wi-Fi does come in handy but once again it is not a requirement plug the other end of the HDMI cable into your TV or monitor plug in the power and we are ready to go so here we go this is the first time the PI is booting up now I may speed up or slow down some of the video to make this thing go a little bit quicker but this is essentially what you'll be seeing while this is loading I will give you a bit of a rundown on things so when retropie loads we load into emulation station and this is known as the front-end of the retro pipe distribution in the backend we have the terminal and will sometimes access that to edit advanced settings or maybe change some configuration files emulation station is not specific to retro PI you can type that into Google and you can download this front-end for your Windows or Linux PC if you like when I refer to the terminal it's actually like ms-dos but on Linux so we will be learning to use some Linux commands and you can transfer this to other distributions like Ubuntu now emulation station has loaded we need to configure our keyboard so just hold enter until you see this screen and then let's configure the keys as you going through this set up the keys as you like but just take note of your start select and a and B keys as we will use them to navigate through the menus the most when you get down to these analog stick sections just set whatever you like they're not as important unless you want to try and play analog stick style games on your keyboard which I do not recommend if you do want to skip configuring some of these keys simply hold escape and that will set them as not defined if you do make any mistakes just wait till you get to the bottom and then use the keyboard arrows to go up and push a to select and remap another key once everything is as you like it go back to the bottom to okay and push your a button this will bring us to the emulation station main menu but before we get excited and start looking around here we will set up our gamepad so what you want to do is push your start button again for me that is enter go down to configure input and then push out a key if you get taken back to the emulation station screen you've actually pushed it to start and not da button so try that again and then push the a button to bring up this screen again now on a Dualshock 3 or xbox 360 controller we'll need a hold our PS or Xbox button for the controller to be recognized hold this down and you're ready to configure your keys on the more generic controls test and hold down various buttons until it does pick up your controller while configuring your controller you may notice that a button is missed or something is misconfigured don't panic if this happens just keep going until you get to the bottom and then use your keyboard to navigate back up and select the ones which did not work correctly and then retry those configurations sometimes I've had to try this three four five maybe six times and it can be a bit of a pain but keep at it and will eventually work once everything is set go back down to the bottom to okay and push your a button and now we're ready to do some configuration for more on advanced control setup check out link five six seven and eight in the description and you'll learn how to set up your ps3 xbox 360 Bluetooth and default controls for all emulators like seen on screen now back on the home screen keep pushing left until you find the retro play menu on here push a and then we want to go down to the raspberry pi configuration tool or as pi config on the way there you can choose to configure Wi-Fi with the a button if you do have that plugged in otherwise keep pushing down and use aid to select now when we get to this next set of menus the key presses are going to be a little different after using the keyboard you're going to use up-down left-right and enter to select and if you're using your gamepad you're going to use your analog stick to go up down left and right and just select button will act as enter with retropie 3.6 we don't need to expand filesystem because that is already done for us on startup if you do have the raspberry pi to go down to the overclock menu and choose the pipe to overclock which is the last option and press enter this will not work on the raspberry pi 3 so don't try that next we're going to go down to Advanced Options and push enter there and the first thing I'm going to fix is overscan now if you look closely at my screen I've got these black bars around the main blue area that means my overscan setting is wrong I'm going to go into this menu and I'm going to choose disable but only choose this if you do have the black bars and if that doesn't fix it try enabling it instead every monitor is different so it's a bit of trial and error now we're going to have to go back down to the Advanced Options menu again and this time we're going to select the memory split option which is three four now we're going to set this to 320 which is a good compromise value if you do want to learn more about this go down to the description and look at link nine and ten and you can maybe determine what would be best for you depending on how you're going to use your pie so that's about all you have to do here so now we just have to go down to the bottom menu and select finish and push enter and our pie will restart now the next thing I'm going to show you is a more advanced setup and it's only going to work if you do have an internet connection go back to the retro pie menu and choose retropie setup and bush a the first thing you should always do when you come to this menu is to update the retro pie setup script push enter in that item just to make sure you have the latest packages installed and it will make sure all installations go smoothly so what can we do from here item one binary-based installation will update our whole retro pie installation to the newest version so if version 3.7 came out who would select option one and it would update retro applied to that if you go to menu option three setup slash configuration you can do some cool things like setting up your ps3 controllers for Bluetooth and still wireless drivers for your Xbox 360 gamepad or some more advanced things like setting up your i/o pins for use with a gamepad or arcade controls option 5 install individual emulators from binary or source will allow us to update and install emulators now when you do this always choose the binary version because the source version can take a long time sometimes over a day to get that installed option for experimental packages is also our good menu to know because this is where we install Kodi as of version 3.6 Kodi is item number two five seven in this menu but there's also a lot of other cool stuff so have a look through there and see if anything tickles your fancy and give it a shot so that's about all that's relevant in these menus guys so have a look through them familiarize yourself with them and install or try anything you want to try and then when you're done just go down and click perform reboot and wait for emulation station to load back up now it's time for the games remember our USB storage drive which we prepared earlier or now we're going to use that the first thing you want to do is plug it into your home see and then open up the drive it's best to make sure the drive is empty and then once that's done create a new folder and name it retropie that's all we need to do on our PC for now so then close that off and safely remove the drive and get ready to plug it into the PI make sure the PI is powered up and emulation station is loaded once that is confirmed simply plug in your USB Drive as so but keep an eye on the little indication light it will start off with a few stroke lengths and then stop but then it will go a little bit wild for about 5 to 10 seconds and that's when it's safe to remove this whole process for me took around 30 seconds but if you want to be sure wait around one minute what's happening here is it's creating ROM folders on our USB Drive to transfer across from PC once you are sure all that blinking is complete pull out that USB thumb drive again and then we're going to reach plug it back into our PC so now I have plugged my USB Drive back into the computer and I'm going to open up that drive one more time and this time we're going to double click on that retro ply folder we created earlier and look that we've got configs and roms folder open up the roms and you can see all the systems that retro player supports simply take the roms that you have and drag them into the individual folders I'm going to transfer one n64 ROM into this folder here and then I'm going to do once nest game into this nest folder and finally one PlayStation CD image and there are bin and a queue file for that into the PSX folder that's going to take a little bit longer because it is a CD image and it is quite big so once that's done do the same as before and safely remove your USB thumb drive and then we're going to plug it back into the pie now on this second try plugging it in what's going to happen is all the roms on that USB thumb drive are going to be copied onto your SD card now depending how well you loaded your USB thumb drive up this could take a while a good rule of thumb is if it took you 15 minutes to copy stuff onto the USB Drive it's probably going to take that long if not longer to get back across to the SD card so once again keep a close eye on the blue flashing light and once that is done remove it from why if you do pull it out early there's nothing to be afraid of you just won't have everything copied across now jumping back to emulation station on our Raspberry Pi using our gamepad or keyboard we need to get the roms to show up how we do that is very easy push enter or your Start button and then we want to go down to quit and push a on the next menu select restart emulation station and on reboot you should be greeted with a few new menus all the systems for the roms you copied across will now be showing up and it is now almost time to play what I'm going to quickly teach you about now is the various emulators sometimes available for each system when you select a ROM you'll quickly see this menu pop-up asking you to configure emulators on the first boot of a new game it is a good idea to push a button to get into this menu this is where we'll see the various options available for each system and where we can set custom video modes on what resolution each game runs at option 1 will allow us to select the default emulator for all roms for that system if you find some games work better with one emulator version or another this is where we use option to select emulator for ROM everything we set in this screen will be saved to the retropie configuration files so the next time we run this game it will know the exact settings to use what you're seeing me set on screen now is what I think is the best setup for n64 but not every game will run well and this is where a bit of experimentation is required and to help with that check out link 11 in the description below click the system you're interested in and then look for a compatibility list and the various comments in those files to see what will work best once everything is set go down to the launch option and push enter on the keyboard or select on our gamepad and we'll be gaming now almost finish up but one final thing shortcut keys on your gamepad on screen now are some of the default shortcuts for most emulators but some will be different to get the more advanced setups head down to link 11 once again and click on your desired system so that is it guys that brings us to the end of the beginner's guide to retropie 3.6 hope you did enjoy this tutorial and if it did help please give it a thumbs up on the video and do subscribe to my channel I do a lot of reviews tutorials and tests on various electronic gadgets make sure you click through my videos to find some advanced tutorials on setting up retropie and some other videos on the Raspberry Pi 3 but for now thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: TechTipsta

Views: 1,803,724

Keywords: Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi 2, Raspberry Pi 3, RetroPie, RetroPie 3.6, TechTipsta, TechTipstaRPI, EmulationStation, Emulation Station, RetroArch, Settings, Advanced, Raspberry Pi (Computer), Step by Step, Step-by-Step, Configuration, RPI, RaspPi, Raspberry Pi Model B, Mupen64Plus, Emulation, Emulator, N64, PSX, PS1

Id: xvYX_7iRRI0

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 02 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Just to be clear, the Retropie emulator still works with every version of the Pi, correct?

[u/stw9454]

Three things:

1) Before you go through all of this, take a look at the ROM compatibility lists. I was super dissappointed to see a lot of the games I was interested in playing, especially N64 games were known to not work or have major audio issues (this is on an RPi3).

2) The BEST use I've found for RetroPi is by integrating Moonlight into it. This tutorial is pretty great: http://jordanhotmann.com/guide-install-moonlight-on-raspbianretropie/ . I have a root link hooked up so that it connects to my gaming rig in another room and automagically boots up Steam Big Picture. I streamed Rocket League over wireless 802.11n and it worked pretty damn well.

3) In terms of controller, I'm pretty biased towards wireless Xbox 360 controllers and the little wireless dongle thing for "PC". Drivers seem pretty solid and you can find controllers pretty cheap.

[u/idiosyncrisia]

Awesome. Will be following this. I bought a shield set top box, so my volumio pie is just sitting.

[u/Flojani]

Does RetroPie support local multiplayer?

[u/Tech604]

I want to buy two controllers, any suggestions? What works well without breaking the bank?

[u/DrummerOfFenrir]

Maybe a dumb question, but I just got a PINE64, could it run retropie?

[u/Mitchfarino]

I'll watch this later, thanks!!

One question - how come the 360 controller has terrible button mapping? Is there any way I can change it?

[u/MoFuga]

Anyone know how to install and get the dream cast emulator working? It says something about a BIOS and home folder, but I don't see that when I connect my retropie microsd to my pc

[u/DarthKeizer]

Thanks for the nice share :)