Play Arcade Games on a Simple Setup at 2021 (October)

 You have the crave to play some quick arcade games, and you want to satisfy it when it comes without fussing with emulators, downloads etc.


Just setup a basic small arcade home environment which you can jump to whenever you feel the need.


Ingredients

Raspberry pie (the brains of the system)

SD card (storage of the OS + Roms)

HDMI cable

USB cable (power for the RP [or use the RJ45 for POE if you use RP 4 or later])

LAN (rj45), keyboard - needed for first setup

Screen

Joystick of your choice (8bitdo?)


Supposing you have cables (hdmi, rj45, usb) lying around, and a screen to use as well as an SD card, then the only needed purchases are the actual raspberry pie and joystick, which don't accumulate to a lot of money.


Raspberry pie

Unless you want to emulate more modern systems (playstation 2 and up) then you can use a raspberry pie 3 (not even the plus version) and it will satisfy your needs without compromise.

Please note that I do recommend buying the RP 3+ as if you will need it for other projects later on then the plus has much better networking (much faster lan and wan) and the price difference is really minor.

I do recommend buying a case for the RP as well as a power cable (micro usb) with a switch so you will be able to shut down the RP without the need to disconnect it


Software

The current software contenders are:

  • Recalbox (All over winner)
  • Batocera
  • RetroPie (Winner in case of needed granular configuration)

The winner is Recalbox which made the whole installation and usage dumb simple without losing any major feature (Just look at their so active Github project!), RetorPie seems to lose ground over the years, although still good, but it is less simple to handle (although it has the most granular configuration if you care to take the time).

That's it really, just follow the instructions in the software site and you will be good to go.


Games

As a side note, I will recommend not copying too many games to your new arcade machine, as when I did so, it made it harder to find a decent game and finally it made me not play any game, I recommend installing only several good games (10 games per 3-4 systems ?), which you will actually play - and let those be the best games of each systems, hopefully, games you already recognize and cherish.
From my experience in this one: More is actually less

Let me just add here a recommendation to try one of the premade images by ArcadePunks, these are already preloaded with all settings, additional scripts, beautiful metadata for each game and of course 
lots of games!

Changes since 2015

Comparing this setup to the setup I did at 2015, not much has changed, the raspberry pie boards are better which gives us built in wifi (needed only at setup time) and built in bluetooth and in the software side, the updated Recalbox really does make things simpler, but all in all the change isn't so significant

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Profiling Java @ 2019

A good profiler can really help you in your work while coding Java (I assume while coding any coding language but I am referring to Java here) It can find memory leaks (Which object and how many of it takes the most of your limited memory?), CPU bottlenecks and other surprising data like the time consumed by each network call / DB query etc. Thus it is not so surprising to find many different java profilers around. I will try to map here the Java profiling tools lying around My short list of requirements will include the following: Profiler Requirements Constantly updated profiler (how a profiler built to profile Java6 will behave with Java11?) Clear GUI - As I will want to dive into the profiling data - it will be much simpler using UI Free (With a big advantage to the open sourced ones) (Optional) Remote profiling List of Profilers Dead Profilers (At least 5 years without an update) JIP - Java Interactive Profiler  - Last update 2010 Profiler4J - Last U...
Read more

Ant Explorer graphical Ant build tool

Every serious java developer needs to create or edit some ant building script. Eclipse offers nice ant handling features which make the task much easier, eclipse's plugin (which is embeded into eclipse since version 3.1 or so) understands the ant scripting language thus enables not only syntax coloring but also nice mouse hovering which reveals values of properties, variable names which enables finding the source of each variable and also some nice debugging features. But, there is one field in which eclipse's ant handling lacks perfection, its in viewing the whole build file in one gaze graphically feature, that feature isn't supported by eclipse. Luckily enough, it is supported by YWorks, which created a nice and free util which loads an ant script file and shows it in a beautiful and so very useful way. I think that this util (which was released as a standalone as well as an eclipse and idea) is a must for any serious java developer. Unluckily, YWorks have remo...
Read more

Start Working with AutoIT

I have decided I needed a quick GUI creator which can create a small exe file displaying the GUI, with no system dependencies like a .NET framework or Java runtime. What options do I have for a Quick GUI Creator? Maybe there are many options I am not aware of, but after extensive searching I found these two: Auto Hot keys AutoIT (Saw some recommendations to try Delphi or Pascal for this task but I passed) Both tools began from the same code source, autohotkeys branched off and continued to be open source while AutoIT is more commercial. I have compared the two (well, not actually compared, just google'd out other's comparisons) and found out that the AutoHotKeys is slightly better and is more open sourced (which makes it the better solution) but lacks in one field which is crucial for me - the script syntax is awful!  That tipped the balance (as a programmer i couldn't stand AHK's syntax) so I chose AutoIT. How to get Started with AutoI...
Read more