The Ultimate RetroPie Setup and Install Guide (2022)

[Music] this video is sponsored by pcb way so before we get started let's thank them for supporting us if you're not familiar with pcbway their goal is to be the most professional pcb manufacturer for prototyping and low volume production work in the world new customers get a five dollar bonus on their first order thank you pcb way welcome to the ultimate retropie setup guide so um about four or five years ago we built this awesome bar top arcade and it's been out of my possession now for a couple of years i had loaned it to a company to use in their break room and it is now back it has returned and it needs a complete rebuild and so i thought what the great opportunity to finally go ahead and make the ultimate retropie setup guide but before we go into that i want to let you know that retropie is just one of the ways that you can build your own arcade and by the way it is an absolutely awesome way but there are other ways so you could use what's called like this is a a jama box it is a 750 in one and it has all kinds of games pre-loaded on it you just buy it shows up at your door and i mean this is it this is all you get but there's literally uh next to zero configuration to do you simply take a harness like this that has a jamma connector on it and you plug it in and you plug all of these wires into your joysticks button coin door and all of that and it just works and there's really not much that you have to do now this won't run like you're not going to emulate you know an indentento or an atari 2600 or anything like that on here or definitely not play pc games but it is perfect if you just want to play old school arcade games and a lot of people choose this because of the simplicity the second way to build your own arcade and the way we like to do it and what you guys are all here for is to use something like retropie and to do that you need something like a raspberry pi computer this is a raspberry pi 4 that you can use other models and then you get something like this which is one of our geek pub arcade controller kits and inside the geekbob arcade controller kit is all of the wiring that you will need joysticks buttons and they come with these boards and i have one of these boards separ separated here this is called an encoder and so you use this encoder to plug usb into your raspberry pi then you plug all of your joysticks buttons your coin door all of that into the encoder and then retropie running on the raspberry pi talks to the encoder and that's how you play your games now the this method has a couple of cool benefits uh first of all you can use you know all of the arcade controls and make it you know just like an absolute you know retro arcade in a an actual arcade right um but with this method you can use all kinds of aftermarket usb style controllers and so this one looks like a nes controller but it has a usb connection on it and so i always put usb ports on the outside of my arcades so that i can play those games in addition to that outside of just emulating arcades as mentioned you can do the nes you can do the atari 2600 you can do playstation games you can do just about oh and old dos games you can do just about any old school or retro game that you want and you can play it on your arcade now a lot of people don't even want to build an arcade they're just like hey that's outside of my budget or i don't have room to put it i just want to play retro games on my tv well the raspberry pi is a fantastic way to do that because you can literally just plug this into the hdmi on your tv plug one of these controllers in to your to your uh to your raspberry pi and you can start playing right on your tv you don't actually even have to build the cabinet well let's get started installing retropie and getting this all set up and i'm going to teach you a lot of things that these other videos don't bother to go into first you'll need an sd card we recommend a 32 gigabyte for most builds plug that into your favorite sd card reader and then plug that into your computer if you don't have a copy of the sd card formatter we recommend that you grab a copy of it from their website and format your card this fixes so many problems with sd cards not working with retropie now let's grab a copy of retropie from their website in my case i'm grabbing an image for the raspberry pi 4 because that's what i have let's also grab a copy of baleena etcher this is a great and super simple utility for writing the retropie image to our sd card once in etcher pick the retropie image from your downloads folder select the sd card we just formatted and then click flash etcher will get to work decompressing the file and writing it to your sd card have some patience because this is likely going to take a few minutes to complete once complete eject the sd card from your computer and plug it into your raspberry pi's sd card slot with the sd card installed into the raspberry pi and all of the cables connected we're going to turn the arcade on and go through the initial installation process now if you haven't seen our videos on how to build an arcade you might want to pause right here and go watch one of those that has all of the information on how to wire up the buttons and joysticks connect the hdmi and all those other things it's not all that complicated but if you feel like you're missing something that's where you need to go retropie will go through its initial boot process and configure behind the scenes settings for the first time this process can take a few minutes and may turn your monitor on or off several times eventually you'll wind up on the configuration welcome screen it's at this point that retropie is going to pop up and tell you how many game pads it found and um in this case it's telling us that it has detected two game pads now what it's really detecting are these encoder boards and so you're going to have one of these encoder boards for each player that you've installed since we've installed two players with two joysticks and two sets of buttons we will have two of these boards in our arcade now it says on the screen hold a button on your device to configure it now the retropie instructions don't say that you have to start with whatever is going to be your player one however we have found that always works better so um in this particular instance we're going to make this side player one uh because it's closer to the camera and makes it easier for you guys to see what's going on but you can start with either one and you can always switch them around you could always make player one player two and vice versa it's it's an easy change to make in the background um so we'll go ahead and press and hold a button on this one and you'll see that it comes up with a screen that says configuring gamepad 2. that is just because the serial number on this gamepad is higher so it says it's gamepad 2 but it's going to be our gamepad one now depending on how you designed your arcade and what games you want to play on it you may have more or less buttons and so if you get into a situation where you don't have a button six for example then you would just hold down any button or push any direction on the joystick and hold it and it will just skip that button so this process is how we configure the joysticks and the buttons to work with all of the emulators that are included with retropie and so whatever we define here gets passed to all of the emulators whether that be maim or vice or some of the other ones and so it's really simple so we're going to start with it says d-pad up press anything and so all we have to do is press d-pad up which is really in this case it's our joystick up and then same thing we'll press joystick down joystick left joystick right and then we're going to hit start and then select and then now we get to the point where it's asking for our buttons and so it really depends on the layout that you've picked for your joysticks but i have decided that button 1 is going to be a so press that button 2 here is going to be b button x is going to be 3 and button y is going to be 4. now i'll probably change those later that's just for demonstration purposes because i'm probably going to build a whole new uh control panel for this at some point and change these completely but for now that's what we're going to pick and so now we have this left shoulder right shoulder left trigger right trigger coming up and we don't have those because this is not like a playstation controller that has those extra triggers so what we'll do is we'll just hold down any button and just hold it down it'll say not defined and skip it so same thing we'll just continue hold down skip hold down skip hold down skip and we'll do this for all of these you know left thumb left analog again these would like be like if you had your xbox or your playstation controller that you were configuring um so we will just skip all of those all right so the last button that it will ask you to configure is the hotkey enable and this is really important so many people just program this to some random button and then they can't figure out why things don't work the hotkey is how you exit emulators it's how you load and save games while you're inside emulators and things like that and so the retropie documentation actually says that this should be the same as your select key in most cases however some people do like to put a hotkey button like somewhere on the arcade that they can press but you press the hotkey in combination with another button so for example uh start and select would exit like if you were in maine playing pac-man then if you press start and select at the same time you will exit out of mame and come back to this menu and so that's what the hotkey is for and so i'm going to just make it select so i'll just press that and then the last thing to do is press ok and now the the gamepad is configured so we can just press the a key which is going to select ok and then we're back to the main menu if we had roms installed for different games you could scroll through the emulators and so we'll do that in just a minute but what if you want to add additional controllers if you have more than one well that's super easy too so let's say you have a second controller or maybe even a third or a fourth that you want to add to your arcade especially if you're building one of the larger style ones or let's say that you have some of those usb connected nes controllers just connected to a raspberry pi with your television set how do you add the second player well it's super simple just go ahead and press the start button scroll down to configure input you do this on the controller that you've already configured press the a button and then it says are you sure you wish to configure input so just hit the a button again so this controller is already configured this is the player 1 controller so to add the second one you simply just hold down a button on it and then it takes you through the same process and so you know up down left right sorry start select um and then so on and then that controller will be configured exactly like the first one and you would just do the same no matter how many controllers you had just follow the same process now it's almost time to install and configure some games but you might want to configure some things on retropie before you get started and so retropie basically uses the a button and the b button or in our case they're labeled 1 and 2 and a and b those buttons to interact with the ui along with the joystick and so if we wanted to enter this menu we would simply just press the a button and so now we're in the retropie configuration and there's all kinds of things that we can do in here so for example we can actually configure some of the more intricate details of retropie we can show our ip address we can set up wi-fi there's all kinds of of neat configuration options that are in here and if we wanted to get out of this we would just hit the b button and we would be back to the main menu now there's a couple other things that you can do from this screen number one is you can press the start button and if you press the start button it kind of brings up the main menu of retropie and this allows you to set some things so for example if you scroll down to sound settings so just push down on the joystick one time and then press the a button it's going to give us a chance to set the volume this is the master volume and we can just switch the joystick left and right to do that now the other thing that you can do and this is what confuses a lot of people they boot up their retropie system and they have no sound and that is because we're using a monitor that does not have a built-in um audio and there's no speakers in it and so there's no sound but if we switch over to headphone which is what we have our add-on speakers plugged into we will now be able to get sound and so we can just scroll down hit a on back and then hit the b button and then if you see we go back into this menu we now have sound and so that's uh that's something that a lot of people get confused on okay so let's do something very important while we're here let's scroll down to wi-fi and let's get this thing on the wi-fi network now this is the point where you're going to need to add a keyboard and you don't have to have a keyboard on retropie all the time but sometimes when you're making some of these configuration settings you do have to add a keyboard and so we're going to just plug in a logitech just a little wireless keyboard that i have and then now we can we're going to say yes and then we will select number one which is system options and then we will select wireless lan now this is something that's really irritating but it's an international law and you have to select where you are so there we go united states hit okay now we can enter our information and we will select finish and then we have to reboot for this to take effect the reason that you want wi-fi turned on is so that a lot of the functionality like when you add a rom and you want it to automatically add artwork and things like that you need wi-fi turned on in order for it to go out to the internet databases and grab those pieces of artwork and descriptions and things like that so it also is necessary for updates and other things okay so we're back to the main menu and there's one more thing that we need to fix and this is something that i get emailed about constantly um and it is that that if you notice and it's really hard to see i'll try to get the camera up here but there is a black border that goes all the way around the screen and this is because it defaults to having overscan turned on and that is because a lot of televisions actually uh crop the picture just a little bit with using a monitor like this we don't have that problem so what we need to do is once again go back into the configuration and then we are going to go down to raspy config and then we're going to go back down to sorry we're going to scroll down one to display options and see here it says d2 underscan remove black border around the screen so we will select that says would you like to enable compensation for displaying overscan the answer to that is no we do not want to do that okay and then we will go back to finish and of course we have to reboot one more time and now we're back to the configuration screen again and you can see that the black border has been removed now it's time to talk about roms now we're not going to go into any detail here on how to download roms if you go to thegeekpub.com go to the search bar and type in download roms you will find out everything you need to know about how to acquire roms for your arcade what we are going to talk about in this episode is how to get those roms from your pc or mac over to your arcade now there's kind of three different ways to do that actually there's there's many more than that but the main three are uh just using the file explorer on windows and the network and or and copying them over same thing with ftp and copying them over if you're really good with linux and you have some technical skills that's probably the way to go for you but i think for the average person the usb stick method is absolutely the easiest and there's really like it's a foolproof method and that's what we're going to demonstrate today from the retropie configuration screen scroll down to the retropie setup and press a on your controller on the setup screen scroll down and select configuration slash tools now scroll all the way down to usb rom service and select it select enable usb rom service and then select ok now exit all the way out of the retropie configuration screens until you land back in retropie press the start button scroll down to quit and then select restart system once retropie reboots the usb rom service will be running now grab a usb flash drive and plug it into your pc or mac when the usb drive pops up on your desktop or windows file explorer open the usb drive and create a directory called retropie dash mount all lower case eject the drive and then insert it into a usb port on your arcade or directly into a usb port on your raspberry pi and then wait about one minute while retropie creates all of the directories we're going to need remove the flash drive from your arcade and place it back into your pc or mac you can see under the retropie mount directory that you now have all of these new folders this is where we will copy our roms to [Music] in our case we're going to copy over some old school arcade games like pac-man and galaga so we will drop them into the arcade folder once the files are copied eject the usb drive and place it back into the usb port of your arcade or directly into your raspberry pi and again wait about a minute quick note if you added hundreds or more games you may want to wait 10 minutes or so now press start on your controller scroll down to quit and then select restart emulation station [Music] now you can see we have a new menu called arcade and here we have our games let's select pac-man and there you have it pac-man is ready to play we can press start and select at the same time to exit pacman and return to retropie and from this point forward all you have to do is drop the roms into the appropriate folder for each emulator retropie will automatically create a menu and a list of games for each system so it's important to understand that retropie itself is just a compilation of existing packages so for example front ends like retroarch and emulators like mame and vice and so many times you have to go into a specific emulator and make configuration changes there for example back in pacman if you press the tab key on your keyboard you will get maim's configuration screen from here we can change many different things if we scroll down and select dip switches we can configure items that would have been in the original hardware this includes being able to change the game to cocktail table mode or change the number of lives from 1 to 5. if you go into the input general you can change settings for all games that use this emulator or input this game and change just settings for pacman this is a fantastic way to set up things like your coin doors tilt switches and game cheats now that retropie is all set up we've got our games running and everything's configured how do we add all of that beautiful artwork that we see on all of these youtube videos well it's pretty easy press the start button on your controller and select the first item on the menu scraper now scroll down and select scrape now and then scroll down and select start scraper will search the file names of your roms and find artwork for them this time it found only one match and it's the correct one so we just pressed the a button however on galaga it found multiple matches ours is indeed just the original so we'll just press the a button again on rally x you can see the wrong game is selected so we'll just scroll down to select rally x from the menu and then press a and that's it when we exit the menu all of our games will have beautiful artwork titles descriptions and more awesome well i hope as you go down your journey building your very own arcade that you find this video helpful if there's any other topic on retropie or building an arcade that you'd like to learn more about leave a comment below and we'll see if we can help you out see in the next video [Music] [Music] you

Channel: TheGeekPub

Views: 8,438

Keywords: Retropie, retropie setup, retropie install, retropie guide, setup guide, install guide, tutuorial, arcade, retrogaming, gaming, arcade games, emulation

Id: f0ZFr5EaZsE

Length: 22min 34sec (1354 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2021