It doesn't have to be this way the command line is still there under the hood when you want it, but perhaps users are a bit too insulated from a Bash shell that's ultimately a lot less scary than it looks. You can go for a long time with Retropie without ever learning simple stuff like sudo apt-get, which means you're missing out on a lot of the Raspberry Pi experience. Retropie's simple installation and ease of use is, in a way, a double-edged sword. I've used my Retropie rig as a wireless bridge, installed MIDI synthesizers on it, taught myself a bit of Python, and more-all without compromising its use as a gaming machine.
Most Raspberry Pi projects and tutorials you find floating around are written for Raspbian, making it easy to customize and install new things on it. Retropie is built on Raspbian, which means you have the Raspberry Pi's most popular operating system to explore.
Retropie also has a number of other customization options: You can change the graphics in the menus, set up different control pad configurations for different emulators, make your Raspberry Pi file system visible to your local Windows network-all sorts of stuff. This means your retro-gaming rig is also good for home theatre, YouTube, SoundCloud, and all those other “lounge room computer” goodies. Retropie also offers a user-friendly menu system to manage this, saving you time.įrom the Retropie menu, it's easy to add Kodi and the Raspbian desktop, which comes with the Chromium web browser. In addition to the emulators that come installed with the Retropie image, there's a huge library of emulators you can install from the package manager, and it's growing all the time. The huge user base means that there is a wealth of support and information out there, and active online communities to turn to for questions. All you need to do is burn the image to an SD card, configure your controllers, copy your games over, and start killing bad guys. You don't need to understand a word of that to play your games, though. It uses EmulationStation as a graphical front-end for a library of open source emulators, including the Libretro emulators. It can also be installed over an existing Raspbian image if you'd prefer. It's a solid all-rounder and a great default option for emulating classic desktop and console gaming systems.
Retropie is probably the most popular retro-gaming platform for the Raspberry Pi. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, which I'll discuss here. There are a few ways to play old-school games on the Pi. So, it's little wonder that one of the most enduring popular uses for a Raspberry Pi is to relive the 8- and 16-bit golden age of gaming in the '80s and early '90s. You shouldn't need a backstory to kill bad guys. You've got a squillion and one buttons to learn just to get past the tutorial mission. Today's processors could beat up 1988's processors in a cage-fight deathmatch without breaking a sweat. Princess Zelda used to be 16 pixels in each direction there's now enough graphics power for every hair on her head. Sure, there's a bit more grunt in the gear now. They don't make 'em like they used to, do they? Video games, I mean.