Tag Archives: SNES

The RetroPie GPIO Adapter

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If you want to use your Raspberry Pi for gaming you certainly want to attach some sort of controller(s) to it. Since the Raspberry comes with two USB ports one way would be to simply attach any sort of USB gamepad or joystick via these ports to it. Besides the configuration this approach has the disadvantages that one or both USB ports become occupied and, what I think is even more disturbing, that an active USB hub might become necessary to provide enough energy to the controller(s). Also, if you want to get the real retro feeling you certainly want to use original controllers. The GPIO pins of the Raspberry allow the communication with all sorts of hardware and attaching, for example, SNES controllers can be done in quite a few steps. A user-space program that polls the controller(s) in the background was presented here. In the following I am presenting a dedicated GPIO adapter for the Raspberry Pi that allows an easy and safe connection of up to two NES or SNES controllers.

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

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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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PetRockBlock Pie – A (Gaming) Raspberry Pi Case

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I present: The PetRockBlock Pie. It is not yet another a Raspberry Pi case that has been specifically designed with a list of desired properties in mind. While the nice and compact design will let the case fit even into your living room as an eye-catcher, another advantage of the case is used, when you want to connect external components via a ribbon cable to the GPIO pins or when you want to add SNES or similar game-pad connectors to the case.

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Major Update for RetroPie Setup

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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.

Connecting SNES sockets to the Raspberry Pi: An assembly guide

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In a previous post, I described my idea of a universal console with the Raspberry Pi. I presented, what I called, the SNESDev-RPi, which is an SNES-controller interface for the Raspberry Pi. A core element of this interface is a SNES-adapter PCB that I recently designed and that does nothing more than providing all needed connections between the GPIO pins and two SNES connectors. In this post I describe the details for assembling the SNES-adapter that I showed in the previous post. Furthermore, I show how a single SNES socket can be directly connected to the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi.

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

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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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