The Arcade Box
The first kind of project that we want to take a look at is how we are able to take the Raspberry Pi device and turn it into our own little arcade box so we can play games and more.
This will give us a little bit of practice with what we are able to do with this device, and you will find that the Raspberry Pi is a good controller to use to make an arcade box because it has the potential to hold onto a lot of games, especially if you utilize the various SD cards, and it is going to be easy to design into this kind of box.
Before we do that, though, there are a number of steps that the programmer has to accomplish in order to make this all happen.
We need to also make sure that we have all of the necessary tools and accessories in place to really make our own arcade box.
Some of the different supplies and options that we need to keep around when creating our own arcade box will include:
The first step is to get the games from the RetroPie website over to your PI.
We are going with the RetroPie website to help us get some of the older games that we are going to use for this device.
You will simply need to download the website over to your SD card so that it can then be put on the Pi device.
To do this, visit retropie.org.uk/download, and from there, you are able to pick out the version of the Raspberry device that you want to work with.
Give it some time to copy over to your SD card.
Once everything is over on the SD card, you can turn on the Raspberry device.
Add in the controller and plug the device into the television while you wait for it to load up.
Add the SD card inside the device and give it a few minutes to boot up.
If you did the conversion properly, then you should see the EmulationStation come up on the television screen.
As we start to work on this step, and we get something to show up on the screen, we can then go through and make sure that any and all of the configurations that are necessary here are going to be complete.
The controller is often going to be the best way to handle this because it can make things easier.
And when we work on the controller, it is possible just to go through and click on only the things that we need before finishing it all up.
The first time that we do this is going to take a bit of time because we have never done it before, but the more times we have to go through it, the faster the project will go.
After we have been able to go through and get the Wi-Fi hooked up and ready to go to our device, and you are certain that you have gotten it started up and ready to go, then it is time to add on the ROMS part to this device as well.
Getting this setup and running is going to take a few moments, but the process is simple and pretty similar to what we did before.
To do this, we either need to make sure that we have a nice strong internet connection, or we can use an Ethernet cord.
If your connection is not strong, and the ROMS does get interrupted at all, then you will end up with some messy problems to try and fix.
It is your choice, but often it is best to at least do this part with the Ethernet cord to prevent issues.
Go onto your main computer.
If you are using a Windows computer, you can open up into the file manager on the computer and type in a simple code of “//retropie ”.
If you are working with a Mac computer, you can go to the finder on the computer, select on Go, and then click on Connect to Server.
You would then type in the code “smb://retropie ”.
Both of these end up with the same results—they just have to be done a bit differently on different computers.
At this point, we should have the Wi-Fi and other parts connected properly, and that is when we are going to be able to handle the ROMS over on our device.
We should do this in a remote manner, so that means that we can use the SD card to move our chosen games over, or we are able to choose which games we are going to use the most often and have those get put directly on the Raspberry Pi device.
When you have then transferred through either method, then it is time to start playing!