The Raspberry Pi microcomputer makes a great platform for emulating older console games from a variety of different systems. I’ll show you how to set up a Raspberry Pi 4 with RetroPi to create a very easy to use emulator that you can plug into your TV to play old video games.

One word of warning is you should only emulate games that you actually own or that are free from copyright otherwise you will be breaking the law in the United States and most likely in other countries as well.

Requirements

1. Raspberry Pi 4 (Model B)
2. Power supply for the Raspberry Pi 4 (Note that this needs to be good 3.0A power supply)
3. A USB controller, keyboard, or joystick to play the games and move through the RetroPie menu when connected to a monitor or TV
4. A microSD card that is large enough to hold howerver many games you plan on having
5. An HDMI cable to plug into a monitor or TV
6. Micro HDMI male to HDMI female adapter

Preparing the SD card

Start by plugging in the MicroSD card into your computer

Next download the Raspberry Pi OS imager program from here

Open the Raspberry Pi OS imager program

Click Choose OS then Select Raspberry Pi OS (other)

Choose Raspberry Pi OS Lite

Click Choose SD Card and select the SD card you plugged in earlier

Click Write to write the image to the SD card

Powering on and Connecting to the Raspberry Pi

You can use wireless to connect to the Raspberry Pi or a wired connection. For Wireless you will need to connect a USB keyboard and a monitor to the Pi in order to set up your network. I’ll go over wired setup first as that is how I set mine up.

Ethernet Wired Connection

Create a file on the boot partition of the MicroSD called ssh by going to the path of the boot partition and running

touch ssh

If you are on windows you can navigate to the drive letter of the SD card boot partition and create an empty text file called ssh

Connect an ethernet cable to the Pi and plug in the power adapter to the port that says POWER IN.

Now look on your router to see what the IP address of your raspberry pi is. It should be something starting with 192.168.1.XXX

Now you can SSH into the pi using the username pi and password raspberry

Initial Configuration

Once you are connected first change the password of the pi account by running

passwd

Update all software to the latest version

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Run the raspberry pi config setup tool

sudo raspi-config

Click change hostname to change the name of the pi to something other than raspberry pi if you like

Go to Localization options and set the country, timezone, keyboard layout, WLAN country, settings then click finish to exit the raspi-config tool

Set your language

sudo update-locale LANGUAGE=en_US:en

Restart the pi to load the new settings

sudo shutdown -r now

Installing RetroPie

Install the prerequisites first

sudo apt install git lsb-release

Clone the RetroPie setup repo and run setup

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup.git
cd RetroPie-Setup
sudo ./retropie_setup.sh

Select Basic Install to install everything then go to Configuration/Tools autostart and select 1 Start Emulation Station at boot. Now select restart and RetroPie should automatically load at next boot.

Copy ROMs to Pi

Using a program like scp or filezilla you can copy the roms you like to the appropriate folder in /home/pi/RetroPie/roms

Optional Scraping

If you like the menu in emulation station to have pictures and all the info about your roms you can scrape this info from a web source using the instructions below

We will use the program called skyscraper. Start by installing the prerequisites

sudo apt-get install build-essential qt5-default

Next downlaod, compile, and install the software

cd
mkdir skysource
cd skysource
wget -q -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/muldjord/skyscraper/master/update_skyscraper.sh | bash

Before scraping and adding the data you need to close EmulationStation

sudo killall emulationstation

Example command to scrape all SNES games from Screen Scraper Make sure to create an account there and use that account for the username and password below

./Skyscraper -p snes -s screenscraper -u "username:password"

This will take some time depending on how many roms you have.

Next run skyscraper again to save the data into emulationstation

./Skyscraper -p snes

Once you have done the above steps for all platforms you can restart the raspberry pi and you should see all the scraped data

Sources

1. RetroPie Setup
2. RetroPie Docs
3. RetroPie Manual Installation
4. Skyscraper