8 votes

Building a retro-gaming super-console with $100 and a Raspberry Pi: 2022 edition

5 comments

  1. [3]
    Rudism
    Link
    I've tried RetroPie, RecalBox, and Batocera at various points on my Pi4-based emulation console and Pi-Zero based handheld, but finally settled on Lakka (not mentioned in the article). It's...

    I've tried RetroPie, RecalBox, and Batocera at various points on my Pi4-based emulation console and Pi-Zero based handheld, but finally settled on Lakka (not mentioned in the article). It's essentially a hyper-focused linux distro whose sole purpose is to run stock RetroArch (also not mentioned in the article, but it's the same emulation backend used by all of those other options).

    I found on all those other options that I wasted more time fine-tuning all of the metadata on my collection like thumbnails, descriptions, etc. than I did actually playing games. With Lakka that's not a problem because it doesn't support most of that stuff anyway--it's just a PS3-like menu interface with text-based lists of your games for each system. It's maybe not as pretty or noob-friendly but it's perfect for me.

    3 votes
    1. [2]
      knocklessmonster
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      I sort of wish there was just a Retroarch distro for Raspberry Pi with the PS3-style interface that RetroArch has on PC platforms (closer to Lakka). That's what I wind up using Emulation Station...

      I sort of wish there was just a Retroarch distro for Raspberry Pi with the PS3-style interface that RetroArch has on PC platforms (closer to Lakka). That's what I wind up using Emulation Station via RetroPie as anyway, but I actually prefer having the raspbian backend and how they generally do things. I felt locked out of Lakka.

      EDIT: Derp, I just realized that Lakka is the official distro, but my want still stands.

      2 votes
      1. Rudism
        Link Parent
        Yeah that is the one annoying caveat with Lakka--making any kind of persistent change to the OS itself can only be done in a few ways using their overlay filesystem stuff, unless you're willing to...

        Yeah that is the one annoying caveat with Lakka--making any kind of persistent change to the OS itself can only be done in a few ways using their overlay filesystem stuff, unless you're willing to rebuild the whole thing from source to bake your changes into the system image.

        I took a stab once at building an Arch Linux ARM-based system that had the bare minimum packages installed to load RetroArch up at boot, but was never able to get it working.

        2 votes
  2. knocklessmonster
    Link
    I've got a 4 I'm not using for much and want to experiment with this. Two things I would do differently: A software-moderated power switch and USB boot to prevent corruption should the power cut....

    I've got a 4 I'm not using for much and want to experiment with this. Two things I would do differently: A software-moderated power switch and USB boot to prevent corruption should the power cut. That's what I did for my Kintaro SNES case Retropie build, but I am now very curious about the current state of affairs from a practical sense.

    3 votes
  3. kfwyre
    Link
    Somewhat off-topic, but is anyone here hoping to make their eventual Steam Deck a one-stop emulation shop? RetroArch is already on Steam, so I feel like it will be pretty trivial to install that...

    Somewhat off-topic, but is anyone here hoping to make their eventual Steam Deck a one-stop emulation shop? RetroArch is already on Steam, so I feel like it will be pretty trivial to install that and load up some games.

    I'm loving the idea of having a big chunk of the history of gaming available in a convenient handheld.

    3 votes