retropie game console

My 7 year old son loves playing video games, not the modern day MMPORPG games but the retro ones, like Super Mario Bros, Sonic the Hedgehog, literally the video games my generation grew up to.

I had bought a video game couple of months back, but these things are not built to last especially in the hands for a hyperactive 7 year old. It's also very difficult to source 8 bit games for these kind of consoles. These consoles also have a limitation in regards to the cable length of the gamepad, the cable is about 50 cms long, thus the player stands very close to the TV, and with modern day big screen TVs its a pain standing so close to a display while playing games.

I had always wanted to try out the RetroPie project, and this was this was the perfect oppurtunity. RetroPie is a project which can emulate almost all of the legacy gaming platforms like Nintendo, Atari, Sega etc. ROMs (games) need to be downloaded separately for each of the consoles, but one can get a wide range of games to download from the internet. As with most software in today's world, one must understand the legality and copyright restrictions for ROMs before downloading them.

I had a spare Raspberry Pi Zero, which would be the perfect candidate for running a low power consuming gaming console hidden right behind the TV. The installation was simple process and RetroPie was up in a few minutes. Downloading ROMs was a bit tricky as the websites offering the ROMs are full of ads and adware, hence one has to be cautious while downloading the ROMs. In about an hour the RetroPie installation was complete along with a big set of Super Mario ROMs starting from 1983 till 2006 !

At this stage I was able to fire up the games and play them with a keyboard connected to the Pi, but I wanted a wireless gamepad. I was inclined on buying wireless gamepads, then I came across this virtual gamepads project on Github, this seemed to be the perfect solution. I can run a gamepad as a browser app on a mobile phone, which is connected to the home WiFi, a true wireless gamepad running within a web browser. It took couple of days of reading thru the docs and configuring the virtual gamepad app on the RetroPie, but finally I was able to make it work !

The final result, a Raspberry Pi Zero running retro games just like an arcade, while me and my son sit back on the sofa, playing games with a virtual gamepad on the phone ! Check out this video to see how it works.