In the past, whenever I’ve written enthusiastically about a modern retro console like the Nintendo Classic Mini: SNES or the Analogue Duo, there have been a few comments under the article asking why people don’t just buy a Raspberry Pi mini computer, download an emulator, and play all the games they want for next to nothing. My answer has usually been ease of use and accessibility. When you buy a mini console, you get a plug-and-play product with no complicated setup or potential compatibility issues. Simple.
But recently I bought a Raspberry Pi for an article about the wonderful PiDP-10 machine, so I thought I’d take a look at its retro gaming credentials. Here’s what I found.
The hardware
To build your retro machine, you’ll first need a Raspberry Pi computer – essentially a tiny PC built onto a circuit board slightly bigger than a credit card. Two models are currently supported: the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (£34) and the newer Raspberry Pi 5 (£58), which has a more powerful processor, making it more suitable for emulating later consoles. I bought a model 5 from the Pi Hut site , which offers a decent starter kit including a compatible power adapter and HDMI cable, a cute case to house the Pi in (complete with a small fan to keep the CPU cool) and an SD card, which you’ll need as the computer doesn’t have a built-in hard drive. That kit costs £94. However, the Raspberry Pi 4 is perfectly capable of running emulators of older machines, so if you go that route you can be retro-gaming-ready for around £60.
The emulator
This is where things get a little more complicated. There are a whole bunch of retro gaming apps that are compatible with the Raspberry Pi, the main ones being RetroPie, Recalbox, Batocera and Lakka. They’re all essentially collections of different, mostly open-source emulators, and they all let you play games on a wide variety of systems, from very early home computers to later consoles like the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2. Want to experience Manic Miner on the Oric, or Rainbow Islands on the Wonderswan? Want to play Utopia, the Dragon 32 game I made with my friend Jon back in 1987? Now you can. They also support MAME, which runs hundreds of classic arcade games. There are some differences between them in terms of how they run games, and the amount of configuration options they offer – you might want to tweak the visual settings, for example by adding authentic-looking scanlines. There’s a really good comparison of them here , though most people would agree that RetroPie is the best all-rounder.
I won’t sue you if you download Utopia, although you might want to sue me if you play it.
Getting everything up and running is pretty simple. First, you plug your SD card into a PC or Mac using a USB SD card reader, then download the Raspberry Pi Imager, a small program that installs the operating system onto your card. It’s very user-friendly, with three drop-down menus to make your selections. Clicking the Choose OS button lets you specify that you want to use the machine as a retro console, and it can automatically download an emulator for you – currently the options are limited to Recalbox if you have a model 5, or RetroPie or Recalbox if you have a model 4. (Retropie doesn’t yet have a native model 5 version.) To get any of the others, you’ll need to download their own installation imagers separately, then select Custom OS on the Raspberry Pi imager.
But don’t panic, there are plenty of guides online that can help you with this.
The games
Okay, this is the Real complicated part. To run retro games on these emulators you need game ROMs, which are software versions of the original programs, chips and cartridges. Downloading them from ROM sites on the internet is essentially piracy – it’s illegal. “Computer games are protected from copying by intellectual property rights,” explains Alex Tutty of law firm Sheridans. “In the UK and the rest of the world, a game would be protected by copyright and this would prevent someone from copying it without the owner’s permission.
“There are several exceptions to copyright law, such as making a private copy, but that does not allow emulation of games and making them available online. Even if a game no longer exists, it cannot be copied, because the copyright still exists even if it is no longer used.”
It is It’s possible to find games whose developers have removed the copyright – these are usually found on abandonware sites and software archives. (And I won’t sue you if you download Utopia, although you might want to sue me if you play it.) Either way, I’m not going to tell you how to find ROMs, but what I will say is that it’s a risky business. Game files kept on unofficial sites can be riddled with viruses and malware, they might not work at all, or they might be in foreign language versions.
Also, getting them from the computer you downloaded them on to your Raspberry Pi can be a bit of a hassle. The basic method is to pop your Raspberry Pi SD card into your PC and download ROMs directly onto the board, but there are more elegant solutions using the SD Card Share folder or file manager apps – I honestly struggled with those.
Finally
Here’s how to build a retro gaming machine for under £100. I still prefer the more expensive but legally unambiguous routes: maintaining original consoles; buying retro game compilations like Sega Genesis Classics or Rare Replay; downloading digital versions of older games from the likes of Steam, Gog or your current console’s online store; buying mini retro machines that run fairly stable versions of the games you love.
However, I’m a big fan of the Raspberry Pi and think it’s worth buying one to play around with. If you’re worried about downloading retro ROMs, there’s a huge library of games made specifically for the device, or you can download the DosBox or newer DosBox-X programs which will let you play hundreds of old PC games, many of which are shareware. Alternatively, you can use your Raspberry Pi to access cloud-based gaming services such as Xbox Cloud Gaming . You can even stream games from your PC to your Raspberry Pi. Discovering games on new platforms is fun, and having something to run on a computer you can fit in your pocket is an enchanting experience.