My son is an avid gamer, or at least he appears to be. He loves video games about as much as I did when I was his age. In fact as I remember, our lives were pretty similar: video games, sports, food and friends. One thing appears to be much different, and that’s the type of game we are playing. The games today are almost lifelike with full soundtracks and the games I was playing, well they were made of 16 bit graphics and midi sound. But I thought it was important to show my children the games I played in hope that they would enjoy it as well and potentially give us something to do on a Friday night in.
The next question was how was I going to obtain all these games and systems, I certainly didn’t have the room nor the time to find all them.
That’s where my Raspberry Pi came into the picture. I had been reading about a project where someone built an emulator that contained just about every old gaming system ever created. A bonus was that it fit on my credit card size mini computer and on an 8 gig MicroSD card.
Here is what it took to build a retro gaming system with 2000+ games and up to four controllers.
- Raspberry Pi B+: $29
- Micro SD card 8 gig: $5.99
- USB SNES Gamepad: $19
- USB Wifi: $9.99
Depending on the way one goes about building a system like this, the only frustrating part is the amount of time it takes. Some of the blogs and forum posts I read on this said it could take 16 – 30 hours. I decided to build everything and I can tell you that it did take about 30 hours for all the latest sources to be installed. It also took time to create all the ROMSÂ from the games I already owned (legally you can’t use ROMSÂ you don’t own)
However the project is complete and we’ve been playing Street Fighter, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Tecmo Bowl and a ton of other games. The system that I put together consisted of the following systems:
- NES
- SNES
- Gameboy Advanced
- Gameboy Color
- Atari
- Dreamcast
- MAME
- NeoGeo
I opted to upgrade my control from the SNES gamepad to the Xbox 360 controller, and I’ve also scrapped all the ROMs by hand so that I could match the right box art with the right game.
There were plenty of games that just didn’t work right, and I’ve ended up deleting them, but for the most part, all the essential games work. I’ll post more pictures and a list of games shortly, but right now I’m working on building a cabinet for it to live in.
Great little project and an incrediable use of the Raspberry Pi B+. I can only imagine what it will be like on the new Pi2.