So, I have one. I also see lots of people talking about them in light of the SNES Classic Mini reveal.
I FUCKING LOVE THIS THING
What do you use yours for? What OS do you run? microSD card size?
If you use it for emulation, what systems do you emulate? Full romsets or curated subsets? What input devices do you use?
Overclock? What case do you like? Heatsinks? Active cooling?
I have been running Retropie 4.2 with a wired 360 pad. Currently using a basic black CanaKit case but just received the Flirc case in the post. I have distressingly massive sets, personally pared and culled of duplicates and other cruft, for
amstrad cpc
amiga, cd32
atari 2600, 5200, 7800
c64, vic20, plus-4
colecovision
gb
gba
gbc
intellivision
megadrive, 32x, megacd
n64
nes
ngp/c
pcengine, pcengine cd
psx
sms, sg-1000
snes
wonderswan/color
zmachine (infocom text adventures)
zx spectrum
also many many arcade games
also for the cd-based things i have tiny subsets but most of my CDs are for PSX (~50 games)
i have jaguar games on there too but i don’t think they will run too well. also i’m probably forgetting a couple.
this is my dream hardware, just being able to pick up your computer and throw it in your pocket is mindblowing
i’ve been thinking about getting a raspberry pi but i know nothing about it…is the starter kit ya link easy to assemble without needing too many extra tools or knowledge? is there a guide somewhere to get it up and running with retroarch?
the hardware setup is literally plop the board into the case, snap the top on and plug it in
i can help you with retropie or lakka (haven’t used recalbox or batocera, etc.)
retropie is a frontend that lets you use retroarch cores or other ARM linux emulators/apps, basically a controller-friendly front end for a linux installation - a little tricky to set up but not too bad, and there is extensive documentation available on their website.
lakka is just straight up retroarch-as-OS. it’s unbelievably easy to set up (there’s really great documentation for this as well)
many controllers will just straight up work out of the box, but pretty much every sane input device under the sun will work with a little elbow grease
A Pi would be a fun platform for pd or supercollider projects. Having lots of cheap cpu headroom for physical computing/dsp is a nice thing right. I haven’t looked much into it but I’m sure there are pd externals for the Pi GPIO interface. Or I mean even just with a USB midi controller you could tape a Pi running a pd synthesizer patch to the bottom of the thing and if you can get the dac stuff worked out you could have have yr own custom standalone berzerker
I had a Retropie setup for a bit. It was fun to mess around with and I feel like it would make a great gift for the right person! right now tho mine is home doing network gruntwork - running Pi-hole + the household torrent server and data share. Still enough headroom to run a home vpn for accessing all this from elsewhere as soon as I figure out how to not be perpetually in brainsick in bed and get everything running together nicely. Retropie is a real good time though. Gzdoom built in. if I didn’t have a laptop it would be a necessity.
I primarily use it for emulation, but i sometimes throw it and some extra cables into a lunchbox and take it to my friend’s record store to project weird movies with.
I’m running Retropie, with select cool roms (rom sets are for the people who order preselected outfits). I have kodi installed inside of retropie, which is a little janky and doesn’t take gamepad input. There’s probably a better way to do that, but it works well enough for my purposes.
No heatsink, and just in the boring white and red official case.
My wired 360 pad works best for gaming but I keep trying to acculment myself to weirder gamepad options. I have a super tiny wireless pad from whatever that company is that makes the wireless NES and SNES knockoff pads that everyone loves, and it’s a cool novelty but a hassle to pair. Got burnt on a beautiful but shoddy ibuffalo six button pad in a famicom inspired form. It’s d pad was broken from the get go.
I nabbed a rechargeable tiny wireless keyboard with a track pad that I keep handy too for when I have to switch into kodi. There were a bunch of them in generic plastic bags at the thrift store, so they probably explode or something. I tried to get a similar one for a friend’s retropie set up, from Amazon but it didn’t work for him. These are little no name brand guys with their own wireless dongles, not another fancy Bluetooth device.
I started with a model 1B, and I still haven’t really ventured into the late 90s era of emulators, but it works great for old stuff. Unless you were using the composite out, that first model really struggled with NES stuff and beyond. The 3 is such an improvement. I briefly played around with N64 settings and got things running smoothly. LSD for the PS1 runs well enough too.
One of the acts at the first Tripmetal Fest used a raspberry pi running a custom pd patch controlled by a ps2 controller. That’s what I really should be doing with mine.
I typed all this on my phone while eating super greasy onion rings so it’s probably a big mess. Thanks for your patience. I love you.
n64 emulation is mostly a miss, with a few exceptions
you can run a few dreamcast games if you overclock, but you’ll still get frameskipping and bad audio and other issues. apparently some people have gotten soul calibur to run with minimal issue.
saturn is a hard pass (i guess you could say hard fail in this case, lol)
I run Retropie on a Pi 3. When I run PSX and Sega CD games, both give me weird minor stuttering every 15 seconds or so, kind of like a CD skipping. It’s not bad enough to render things unplayable, but it is annoying. I don’t know if there are settings that improve that or if my Pi just has its own idiosyncrasies or whatever.
that’s definitely not my experience! i actually saw that the guy who runs the blog i linked has been able to run psx at 60 fps while also recording it onto an external usb - but i do know there is a pretty major variance between pi 3s in particular. given the afore, though, i think there may be something you can do on your end to make things better. i’m new to this but i can try to help!
I think so? I was using an improper one at first and getting stuttering even in SNES games, but when I switched to this new one my performance was much better. Here’s a pic:
