How to turn a Raspberry Pi into a retro games console. The latest version of the Raspberry Pi is great. It offers up to six times the power of the first gen model, yet doesnt cost any more or take up extra space. Step back a minute and you realise its only about as powerful as a budget phone like the Motorola Moto G. But thats plenty to give you enough scope to do some amazing things. Our favourite The Raspberry Pi makes a fantastic retro gaming console thanks to the efforts of the bustling indie dev scene that surrounds the computer and its predecessors. Read on to find out how to do this yourself. Downloading the right software. Were going to make this as simple as possible, so well be using a piece of software that boots straight into the emulator interface. This can be dumped right onto the Raspberry Pis micro. SD memory card, meaning you dont need to do any fiddling about with Linux, Raspbian or anything else. Its all quite easy and note that original Raspberry Pi owners can use this software too. The best emulator platform for Raspberry Pi at present is Emulation Station, ported over to Raspberry Pi as part of the Retro. Pie project. Emulation Station is a front end for a mass of go retro game emulators absolutely loads of the things. Its designed to be pretty and bold enough to work visually on your lounge TV, rather than just on a monitor where youll be sitting close up. Its just what were after, in other words. You can download this software from either the Retro. Spider-Man_2_-_Enter_Electro_[NTSC-U]-4.jpg' alt='Playstation 2 Bios Emuparadise' title='Playstation 2 Bios Emuparadise' />Pie or Emulation Station websites. Retro. Pie offers SD card images for both Raspberry Pi generations 1 and 2. The two arent 1. Download the right version, then unzip it. At the time of writing Retro. Pie is distributed as an img. Zip will sweat over. Thats a versatile compression program available for Windows and Mac OS X, if you dont have it already. Final_Fantasy_XII_(USA)-16.jpg' alt='Playstation 2 Bios Emuparadise' title='Playstation 2 Bios Emuparadise' />Making our retro brain. Now we have our image, we need to prep our micro. SD card. This can be done within Windows easily enough, but for the sake of consistency, if youre not an SD card pro just download the SD Card Formatter tool from the SD Association website. Its available for Windows and Mac OS X. It has a pretty simple graphical front end. PSXBIOSSCHPH1001. ZIP and click it. NEEDED FOR ERRORS. Diablo_[U]-3.jpg' alt='Playstation 2 Bios Emuparadise' title='Playstation 2 Bios Emuparadise' />After running it, just select Overwrite in the format type and select a name for the card. Retro. Pie will do the trick or whatever you fancy. Next we need to write the image to the card. PCSX2 is a powerful PlayStation2 emulator which allows you play great PS2 games on your computer. Introduction Installing RetroPieEmulationStation Onto Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Playstation 1 Emulator Included. PSX Title PSX Region Image Extension Image Size MB WiiSX Rev Dynarec FPS Ingame Interpreter FPS Ingame Status Cabelas NTSC. Download MVSPSP 2. Neo Geo MVSAES Emulator with ROMs Playstation Portable PSP Homebrew The Iso Zone The Ultimate Retro Gaming Resource. Using Windows Just use the Win. Disk Imager software available to download from Sourceforge. For Mac OS X theres a dedicated Raspberry Pi writer software that works very well, called RPi sd card builder v. Pi Filler is an alternative app. As these both have graphical interfaces you cant go too far wrong, as long as you keep track of where your Retro. Pie image is kept, i. Just make sure that when youre finished writing to the card, you eject it rather than just yanking it out of your computer to avoid data corruption. Boot up. Put the card in your Raspberry Pi, boot it up and you should see a rainbow screen followed by the Emulation Station boot screen. If you dont, something went wrong. To start with, though, the interface will seem very empty. Supercross Kings Game here. As part of the Emulation Stations accessible UI style, gaming machines only show up if there are ROMs available for them. In the version we used it starts off with just Scumm. VM, Dosbox, and some ports of the shareware versions of Quake III and Duke Nukem 3. D. We dont have our Raspberry Pi retro dream machine just yet. Next you need to get hold of some gaming ROMs. One of the best retro gaming sites on the web, if not the best, is Emuparadise. Pro tip dont be a pirate. Pirates are bad. Once you have the files, you cant simply drag and drop them over to the micro. SD memory card and expect them to work. Thats not how the Retro. Pie file system functions. Instead, hook the Raspberry Pi up to your router using an Ethernet cable and it will show up in the home network section of Windows Explorer or Mac OS Xs finder on your laptop or desktop. In its file system youll see BIOS and ROMs folders. The latter is filled with sub folders for every system supported by Emulation Station, into which you can drop the respective ROM files.