Category Archives: programming fun

Creating the RetroPie SD-card Image: A Recipe

RetroPie SD-card Image: A Recipe

An SD-card image of a RetroPie installation was recently made available. This post describes the individual steps taken in order to create such an image. While it serves me to ensure that no steps are forgotten during future updates, this post provides also an insight into the individual steps for people with interest in this topic.

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Gamecon driver module for NES, SNES, and N64 controllers Added to RetroPie Setup Script

Drawn by http://www.home.unix-ag.org/simon/penguin/

If you want to use original NES or SNES controllers with your Raspberry Pi, you could use SNESDev, which I have written about some weeks ago. SNESDev makes use of the user-space input module and simulates a virtual keyboard. This means that button presses on the controllers are mapped to key presses on the Raspberry. Another approach for interfacing a controller with the Raspberry from the software side is to use a specific Linux input driver. Marqs has adapted such a driver to the Raspberry Pi hardware and made it available to the public.

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Major Update for RetroPie Setup

I just committed a major update for the RetroPie setup script available at Github. The corresponding blog post was also refined. A main element of the update is the possibility to install per-compiled libraries, which dramatically speeds up the whole installation of RetroArch, various cores, SNESDev, and Emulation Station.

More information can be found in the post about the RetroPie setup script.

SNESDev-RPi: A SNES-Adapter for the Raspberry Pi

You already might have heard of the Raspberry Pi. It is a credit-card sized PC from the Raspberry Pi Foundation and is going into mass production and distribution these days. There is a huge demand for “the Pi” and the first orders are limited to one per person. A few weeks ago I got my Pi delivered and started working on what I would describe as “universal console”. In this post I describe my initial thoughts about this project and present an adapter that allows you to use SNES controllers as input devices for the Raspberry Pi.

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