With the migration of the blog to a new provider it is now possible to offer a whole SD-card image of a complete RetroPie installation. You can find the download in the new RetroPie Downloads section of the RetroPie Project.
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.
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.
If you want to install and setup RetroArch on the Raspberry Pi (TM) together with various emulator cores, all needed libraries for the SNESDev controller interface, and a graphical front end you can now go to https://github.com/petrockblog/RetroPie-Setup. There you will find an easy-to-use script that installs all essential packages for retro gaming on the Raspberry. I call it RetroPie script.
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.