It has been a while since I did my post on my portable Retro Pie console.
If you haven't seen it, I built my son a portable game console for our flight to Florida last year. It consisted of 16 buttons, complete with shoulder buttons and 6 street fighter style action buttons, a 3.5" color screen, long battery life, 4,000+ retro games from 1970's to 2000, and all powered by a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W.
I also have a similar device on my TV with 8,000+ games and using a Raspberry Pi 3. If you have a $35 Raspberry Pi and one or two console controllers lying around you can make your own. The process is very easy and doesn't require any electronics knowledge to make a TV-based console. The portable is a whole nother story.
Retro Pie is an open source bundle that includes a launcher for over 50 different retro consoles so you can seamlessly run game roms from all the popular game consoles of the 1970's to around 2000.
Setting up a Retro Pie for a TV is fairly easy, and can be done with the following components:
Raspberry Pi 3B or 3B+
Micro SD Memory Card (8GB+)
Case (Optional)
HDMI Cable
Some controller(s) used or new
For about $75-100 you can have a gaming console with over 8,000 retro games you grew up playing. Many support 2+ players if you have multiple controllers.
Setting up is easy, but there are a few tricks you learn as you do it. The Retro Pie Website does a good job walking you through the installation and how to configure it. If you have kids, it is an awesome project to do together.
I have built a portable as well as one for my TV, my next project is to build a tabletop version.
Check out this video if you want to see Retro Pie in action
Honestly, I am not a huge fan of retro games, I am a graphics whore and love modern games but there are a few I enjoy playing and it's a lot more enjoyable with kids. Some of them will give you tears of nostalgia and others will make you wonder how the hell we played them as a kid.
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Building a Portable Game Console
Nice. I want one.
Are you willing to take orders and be paid in Steem :P. I will pay you a commission and shipping hah.
I actually thought of that, and was originally planning on opening a store for various maker projects (I'm working on a big crypto arbitrage desktop monitor) but the broken SBD peg kind of killed the idea. Although I could do something where I charge USD and calculate STEEM/SBD price on checkout.
Just not sure there would be enough demand to be worth it.
Probably not enough demand for the gaming console. However, an eCommerce solution with Steem payments could have a lot of demand.
I would start one if I could figure out how to reliably source goods from a drop shipper.
To me the good's sourcing part would be the easy part, just follow the shopify/amazon models loads of people are using. The hard part would be the payment/checkout system, as @themarkymark mentioned the SBD peg, if it ever gets fixed, it would be much easier to do. Just my #twocents take it or leave it, CoinsAndChains
Very cool. I just saw something the other day for the PiGrrl very similar to what you made here. I was into emulators back before the Raspberry Pi and it is amazing what they have done withe technology in the years since then. How did your son like it?
Haha. I remember downloading roms and warez back in my teens. I can't beleive its been almost 20 years now since I was in to all that.
No kidding. Good ole warez. I remember how much of a game changer it was when roms came out because of save states. It made it so much easier to get past those hard areas. Plus you could apply all the game genie codes you wanted to all at once. Talk about god mode!
My son likes to play it, but he is so hooked on Fortnite right now not much else matters to him. If I did it again, I would build something more like a PiGrrl 2 with the extra buttons and a hell of a lot easier to build.
Very cool. Yes, Fortnite has taken over the world. Even though it isn't accessible inside of my network the students still spend all of their free time playing it and talking about it. I haven't tried it out yet myself, but I might at some point. I'd much rather dive back into emulation and play some of the classics like Final Fantasy or Mario 3 on something like the PiGrrl 2!
Retro Pi is so good. I had my rPi set up for dual-boot between retro-pi and Kodi. These little computers are amazing. No wonder the pi series is the new all-time best selling computer ever.
Just get another Pi
haha true. I've got a few kicking around right now actually. One that I'm working on setting up a MagicMirror build, another one where I'm going to use for my camper-van build that is the interface for the AutoPi dongle I've ordered, and another one for building a Mycroft voice assistant... Couldn't hurt to get another though....
On a somewhat related note -- I was tinkering around with one last night, and was having a hard time getting the official steem python library to install (running raspbian stretch, and couldn't get pip3 to install it)... Do you have any experience with getting steem-python / steempy running on a pi?
Damn, they open sourced the Automatic Dongle! I love it.
https://www.automatic.com/
I have not tried to put Steem-Python library on Raspberry Pi, but should be similar to Ubuntu.
sudo apt install libffi-dev libssl-dev python3 python3-dev python3-pip
Oh man -- wish I saw this Automatic Dongle before I saw the AutoPi (a bit more expensive). Both seem like they generally have the same capability.
yeah maybe I just forgot to install the dependencies. I'll try again tonight -- maybe I'll have a bit less beer beforehand this time.
Thanks, dude.
Nice, thanks for this wonderful information. I really enjoyed it
Soooooo cool you built that! I remember when gameboys were all around!
awesome, thanks for sharing
Oh man that is awesome. Ive been looking at building a retropie and this takes it to that next level. Thanks for the post. Now i must have one. Lol
so difficult for me to understand..! You keep playing. 😇😇
I love seeing maker projects and admiring the creativity and hard work that goes into them. I can get the guts of projects to work but always have issues with enclosures and making it look decent. If I ever attempted something like this it would work but be held together with duct tape!!
Haha, that deserves to be hung on my wall immediately!
Muy bueno, saludos.
I love your publication, keep that up, friend!
that is super awesome, I want one. I personally prefer older games, too many buttons on new games. Nice build!
Whoa, I need to try this. I hope your kids realize that they have like...the coolest dad ever!
hey, you changed your name on discord, how come?
Nope, same account, I just change the name on a server basis, so most steemit Discords I show up as TheMarkyMark, otherwise Malcolm Reynolds.
A number of my top projects involve Ras Pis, this is just another on my list XD
the old ninja turtles game!
wasted a few bob on that one.
Super article. I am under recalbox with a pc, and I will mount a rasberry pie 3 to put a console in our living room. The version on pc is more powerful bitch to the graphics card which allows to play with n64, dreamcast without problem. I just made an article about retrogaming, and different ways existing.
I would also like to make a portable version as you indicated, and may be more atrd mount a pad acrade see a terminal (I look already forums that explains all that ^ ^). thank you for your article very interesting. upvoted and follow ^^
Amazing! :D Would love to see progress builds of yours!
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Really cool! Always love to see creativity like this. Ben Heck does amazing things like this too, if you've never seen him you should definitely check him out.