Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Building a retro gaming engine is more affordable than ever before, thanks to the RetroPie Project

AKA ♪♫ Tonight we're gonna compute like it's 1999 ♬

What if you could buy a computer brand new in 2014 that was equally as powerful as the Pentium III you used in 1999? That would be pretty retro right? But what if that computer only cost $35 and had a motherboard slightly bigger than a credit card allowing it to conveniently fit just about anywhere?

If your first thought is "that would run MAME," LEVEL UP: you're a true Retrogeeker.™

But a wise geeker doesn't have the spare geek hours for yet another knock-down drag-out tech project that would waste time-better-spent playing Centipede. No, a wise retrogeeker would put that idea on the back burner until a preconfigured bootable SD image is released by someone with geek to burn.

  1. That time is now.
  2. That download is called "Retro Pie."
  3. That project makes it easy to emulate your favorite games from some of the most nostalgia-inducing systems including:
  • MAME
  • Intellivision
  • Amiga
  • Game Boy Advance
  • Atari 2600
  • NeoGeo
  • Sega Master System
  • Sega Megadrive
  • Super-NES
  • Turbo Grafx 16
  • Playstation 1 
  • and others

These videos like motherfucking Clarissa explain it all:

Basic overview

Install and configure

Add games

Links

All the steps are detailed in this Lifehacker article. And updated Retropie info can be found at petrockblock.com

More links

Adafruit's excellent overview of basically the same project

1 comment:

  1. The Pi is awesome, I've been eager to see what kind of kick-ass projects people would come up with!

    ReplyDelete