First of all, I apologize to the dear audience of this column. Personal problems and changes in my work life have made any pretense of frequency prohibitive. And that affects me personally because Los Raros del Fondo is a personal column that I would love to be able to carry out more vigorously and regularly. But hey, it costs. This doesn’t imply that I haven’t played retro video games, just that I couldn’t do it with the will and desire to build a decent review. However, I hope to be able to do it again.
Prologues aside, it occurred to me to make a brief guide about something I read on social networks lately and at the same time, perhaps, save you some weight, an important situation in today’s economy.
I have seen so many advertisements from many companies or entrepreneurs that they release their version of Retro Multiconsole and the prices have been climbing to disastrous levels and with lesser pretensions than those available. I hope that with this simple tutorial you can have your own to your liking.
What do we need
Let’s start with the basics. If you have a fairly modern PC, you don’t need to spend on the console. They only require knowing where to download the emulators and ROMS. That is all. Any PC from the last ten years has no problem running the emulators of the most popular consoles (which are usually 8, 16, 32 and 64 bits). It is almost generalized that the buyer of these devices wants to relive the nostalgia of Nintendo (or Family) and Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo titles. The most oldies will remember some title of the different Ataris and Commodores. Others will flash with the memory of some mythical Sacoa arcade. With having a PC with integrated GPU they will not have problems. Integrating them into Wii or XBOX 360s consoles has its broader complexity and apart from that they already enter a path of greater illegality (?) that for the moment we prefer not to repeat, so let’s focus on the subject. Check legality of the process in the country from where you read this guide.
Suppose we have a PC but we still want the multiconsole because we saw the ads on Instagram and the possession of the chirimbolo makes us sleepy. We see that it is able to emulate all those consoles that we did not have the possibility of having in “the 90s”, like the 3DO, the NEO GEO, the Saturn or the TurboGrafx.
What we need to build it is: a PC (anyone with a Windows 7/8/10), a flash drive, a memory card of at least 4 GB (and a memory reader if the PC does not have it by default), a raspberry (2,3, 4…), a USB cable, a joystick (USB or BT), an HDMI. A keyboard and a mouse can be added but they are accessories, and of course an internet connection.
What is a raspberry
They read the last paragraph and were pedaling in the air because they didn’t want to google. I watch your back. A Raspberry is basically a tiny laptop that was created as a cheap option for computer science education. Of course, the possibilities multiplied once open source was well researched and taken advantage of. Thus, specific operating systems were developed to group and manage console emulators that had already existed for more than a decade.
In Argentina, Raspberry boards are easy to get when the dollar is static because they come largely from China (although they are also produced by Sony). When the dollar is nervous, resellers hide them or put them at ridiculous prices. Usually, it is a plate that is available for between 40 and 100 dollars. Let’s remember, we want it to emulate files, but it’s still a pretty cool computer that fits in the palm of your hand. Many companies began to use them for their offices because they are fully capable of running management systems at an exceptional value and a reduced size.
Once they manage to buy one (hopefully at an affordable price accordingly) the work begins.
what we install
We connect the memory reader with the memory card to our PC and format it. While that simple operation is running, we proceed to download our necessary software: the Raspberry Pi Imager from the official website which we access once we have it installed on the PC. The program is super intuitive and quite explanatory.
It gives us a screen with two buttons to choose from. The one on the left says “Operating System” and a lot of systems are displayed to choose from, of which we want the one that says Retropie.
What is back foot? An operating system designed to emulate consoles with the consoles already installed. We choose the version that adapts to our model of Raspberry (don’t worry, the software clearly specifies it) we have to select where it is going to be installed, which is as they suspect in our memory card. We hit the button that says “WRITE” Y Raspberry Pi Imager proceeds to install the operating system on the memory card. The process does not take more than a few minutes after which we can already put the memory card in its place in the Raspberry.
We take the plate, we plug the joystick into a USB port, the HDMI cable to the TV and its source (if it comes without a source, which would be nonsense but it can happen, the raspberry uses a normal cell phone charger) to the outlet. A DOS-style screen will indicate that the Raspberry is starting and if everything went well, you will enter the modern Retropie menu but bare. No consoles. This is so because we have not yet loaded the video games. It immediately asks us to configure the connected joystick to be able to move through the menus. After that we go to the final step.
what do we put
On the PC, what we do is put a flash drive previously formatted in FAT32 and we create a folder called “back foot”, then we eject it and connect to our off Raspberry, which we then turn on. A light will flash indicating that the board is operating on the flash drive. Once it finishes flashing (it takes a minute or less) it is safe to remove it and connect it once more to the PC where we will see that in the folder that we had previously created a tree of subfolders was created with all the consoles that can be emulated by the operating system that we download In each of them is where the roms go.
Finding and downloading ROMS is quite simple nowadays and there are hundreds of dedicated pages. Suppose we choose a Super Mario 3. We download it. They are usually downloaded in zip format, you have to extract the file and place it in its corresponding subfolder, which in the example would be NES by Nintendo Electronic System. Then we search ATP Tour Championship from Sega Genesis. We repeat the process but we leave this ROM in the folder that says Genesis/Megadrive. Later we want to see why the title of «ET» that brought down the industry in the 1980s. We download it and send it to the Atari 2600 folder. We repeat the process for each video game we want until it is finished (or until our memory card runs out of space).
Then we plug the pendrive into the off Raspberry and activate it. When you start the interface we will see that each console from which we have a downloaded video game appears. It’s as easy as choosing the console and a menu of available titles will appear. We activate it and it starts. Very occasionally, after transferring video games from the flash drive to the memory card, a reset is required. But otherwise, that’s all. Repeat the entire process from the beginning of this subtitle if we want to install new video games.
In the second part, how to configure the Raspberry to get all the juice out of it.