This is the Raspberry Pi 3.
It’s a single board computer the size of a credit card and as the name suggests, it’s pretty sweet. It has a ton of uses from learning how to program to making your own DIY media center or maybe best of all which I’ll show you how to do in this video, turning it into your own Retro gaming console where you can play nearly any game from old-school consoles like Atari to Super Nintendo to Playstation and a lot more in between.
You can get the Raspberry Pi 3 on Amazon, but what I have is the #1 Best Seller CanaKit Raspberry Pi 3 Complete Starter Kit 32GB Edition. It’s the one I recommend because it comes with everything you need to get started. So let’s get into it. Here’s how to set up a Raspberry Pi 3 as your own Retro gaming machine.
First you’ll need to install the Raspberry Pi board into the CanaKit case that’s included in the kit. It’s very easy to do, just snaps right in there. Next you’ll need to insert the MicroSD card into the MicroSD card reader then connect it to your PC or Mac.
Download the free RetroPie image file.
Download a free SD Card Image writer for Mac or Windows. Use the SD Card Image writer to apply the RetroPie image file onto the MicroSD card then eject it when it is finished.
Insert the MicroSD card into your Raspberry Pi MicroSD slot, and finally connect the HDMI cable and the power adapter. Now you can either connect a regular keyboard and mouse if you want to play old school PC games, but you’ll eventually want a USB gaming controller like this Playstation one or this SNES one. I’ll leave links to the best USB controllers below.
When the Raspberry Pi is connected to power it will start up and you’ll see it boot into EmulationStation then you’ll need to configure your keyboard or controller. After you configure the buttons on your controller you should now see the RetroPie home screen.
From here you can go into your settings and connect the Raspberry Pi to your WiFi network or connect Bluetooth devices.
The last part is getting ROMs. ROMs are basically digital files of games that you can find online. The rules behind it are simple: only download ROMs to games that you physically own. I can’t provide the actual sites that host the ROMs, but you can find them with a simple Google search.
Once you have the ROMs downloaded on your Mac or PC, copy them to the correct console folder in the ROMs folder on your Raspberry Pi either over the network or using a USB flash drive. Since mine is connected to WiFi I just copied over the network from my Mac.
Once the ROMs are copied, restart the Raspberry Pi and there you go. You should be able to choose the game and start playing. By the way Donkey Kong is the best Super Nintendo game ever, hands down, no questions asked. If you have any other suggestions I’m happy to hear them. Comment down below!