One of the most frustrating things about doing anything in Linux after living in Windows is that it rarely works as smoothly as you would expect and it takes some patience to get past the hurdles. And what with how quickly I’m willing to reformat the SD card with a different image (what? an update to RaspBMC?), I thought I should document my steps for posterity. I’m happy to report that I am getting decently playable NES emulation with sound (and slightly-less-satisfactory SNES emulation) from my Raspberry Pi after a few hours of struggle. But thankfully for us, plenty of people far smarter than I have been diligently working at converting their Raspberry Pi’s into something resembling a game console, and you and I can now directly benefit from their labor. Well, posts like those from people who certainly seem pretty well informed about console emulation would certainly dissuade most human beings from settling on this as a weekend project. I’ve tried to find some console emulators that use openGLES but every time I find one, it turns out that it’s only available as a pre-assembled package for platform x. Oh yeah, that’s the one! I tried to use mednafen, but even disabling openGL so it would use SDL for graphics would only give me a blank screen. Yikes! Emulation with no sound and keyboard-only input is considered a success! And then a reply to that already discouraging post makes the landscape seem even more bleak. Not tried with a joypad, I have a wireless xbox360 joypad that is discovered as a usb device, but have not had chance to try to get it working yet. Appears to work fine apart from no sound, I’ve had a few levels on Mario Bros. fceu -input1 gamepad -inputcfg gamepad1 /home/pi/mario_bros.zipĬommand above will map gamepad buttons to your keyboard, and load game image path you specify. I have a NES emulator working without sound, using the Debian image, will only work running through console no LXDE This post on the Raspberry Pi forum from a few months earlier basically summed it up. Case in point, a Google search as I began the project in October, 2012, turned up a number of people who had already thought of turning their Raspberry Pi’s into 80’s game console emulators, and it quickly became obvious that this wasn’t going to be a completely painless process. Like, can you get the application to work with both video and sound, and are all of the peripherals fully functional? Add to that the uncertainty of the performance of Linux applications on the particular hardware limitations of the Raspberry Pi, and any simple-seeming project quickly develops into a series of hair-pulling and-now- this-doesn’t-work type obstacles. We have a pretty massive TV and plenty of Xbox 360 controllers, so I figured I could throw the Raspberry Pi into the mix and come out with a neat retro gaming console.Īs with all things Linux, the devil is in the details. At the same time, I don’t want my laptop to become the family’s gaming machine. Before they get too spoiled on the Xbox 360’s graphics and sound, I want to get them some exposure to a few of the simple but influential 8-bit games from my childhood. and The Legend of Zelda running on the VirtualNES emulator on my Windows laptop. If you get confused, please leave me a comment and I’ll try to help.Īfter playing around aimlessly a bit with my Raspberry Pi in 2012 (most recently, an install of the very nice RaspBMC), I thought of a useful purpose for it while showing my kids Super Mario Bros. So, if you encounter instructions that don’t exactly jive with what you’re seeing, it’s probably because the software continues to change and my instructions have fallen out-of-date. This post was originally written in October, 2012, and has been updated twice – first in January, 2013, while using “-wheezy-raspbian” and then again in February, 2014, while using “-wheezy-raspbian” – in all cases using the latest Raspbian release at the time and the latest versions of Emulation Station, RetroArch, and other software mentioned below.
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