A £15 Raspberry Pi turns your TV into a retro gaming powerhouse – play all the classic consoles

Games consoles have been developing since the 1970s. From the very first generation of Pong style machines, through the classic Atari VCS era, on to the Nintendo and Sega wars and now with the three way battle between Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.

Over that time literally thousands of great games have been released, many of them now sitting unplayed unless you have an old, working console.

But emulation is the retro gamer’s best friend. With just a very cheap Raspberry Pi you can turn your TV into any console you want from the 8, 16 and 32 bit eras of the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Add some legally obtained ROM backup files and you can play any game ever written for these fantastic machines.

I this video we’ll take our £15 Raspberry Pi Zero 2 and turn it into a retro console emulation powerhouse.

So let’s see how it’s done.

Previous Video

For this project we’ll be using the same setup as my Pi Zero arcade emulation setup. Indeed you can simply add this project onto the end of the other to have all the arcade games and all the console games in one fantastic system.

So I’m going to quickly run through the basic setup and installation here. If you want more in depth instructions do please have a look at the arcade video. Just leave out the bit where we install the arcade game ROMs.

What You Need

To get started you’ll need some components.

Gamesir G7 Pro – https://amzn.to/4gyEGgW
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 – https://amzn.to/4nimlHG
Mini HDMI converter – https://amzn.to/4pzISRx
Micro USB converter – https://amzn.to/46xETwp
Raspberry Pi power supply – https://amzn.to/46P9lDn
Raspberry Pi Zero case – https://amzn.to/4pBtkgj

The main computer we’ll use is the Raspberry Pi Zero 2. This is my favourite Raspberry Pi as it gives us a fully powered Linux PC for only £15 here in the UK. It’s about the same power as the Raspberry Pi 3B, so nowhere near as much processing power as the latest Pi5, but more than enough for what we’re going to be using it for.

On top of this you’ll also need a micro SD card. If you’re just going to be loading console games 64GB will be fine, but if you want to install the arcade games as well I’d opt for 128GB, just to make sure you’ve got enough room for the ROMs and media files.

The Pi Zero also uses smaller USB and HDMI connectors so you’ll need a micro USB to standard USB converter, and a mini HDMI to full size HDMI port converter. If you buy the Raspberry Pi Zero Essentials pack you’ll get everything you need.

After that you’ll need a Raspberry Pi compatible power supply and a game controller. I’m using the Gamesir G7 Pro as it’s a great quality gamepad, but if you need to keep the cost down you can use pretty much anything that has a full set of buttons. By this I mean a D pad, four action buttons, a start and select button and two shoulder buttons.

As we’re only going up to the PlayStation 1 era you don’t need any analogue controls. I’ve got this Super NES style controller which only costs around £6 which works great for all the old consoles.

So all in you’re looking at around £30 to get all the parts if you don’t already have any.

Building the SD Card

Once you’ve got the parts we need to build the SD card and get it ready for the Raspberry Pi.

For this project I’ve been using Batocera which is a full Linux gaming front end. To get this set up all we need to do is to download the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 disk image from the Batocera website and then flash that to our SD card.

For this you’ll need a flasher application like Etcher or the Raspberry Pi Imager.

There isn’t any special settings you need, just flash the downloaded image file to the SD card and we’re ready for action.

If you’re not sure how to do this then refer back to the arcade setup video which goes through the process step by step.

First Boot

Once the SD card is ready you need to make sure your Raspberry Pi is not connected to power. Then pop in the SD card. Connect up the HDMI display and then connect your game controller using a USB cable or USB wireless dongle. Until we get up and running we can’t turn on Bluetooth.

Then just connect power to the Pi and wait for Batocera to boot up. This will take a couple of minutes but you should see the software running through some initialisation processes before finally booting into the main screen.

At this point you need to press a button on your controller to get Batocera to recognise it. Then just hold down a button to start the mapping system and then just press each button on the controller as indicated on the screen. For the Hotkey button press the Select button on the controller.

We’re now running Batocera and you should be able to use your controller to move around the interface. To select items use the D pad to move around and then the South button on your controller (A on an Xbox controller, X on a PlayStation device) to select and the East button to cancel.

Great! We’re ready to go.

Connect to the Network

The next task is to get some games onto the SD card. For this we’ll need to connect Batocera to our home network so it can access the Internet, but also so we can connect to it from our other computers.

In Batocera press the Start button to go to the settings page. Then select Network Settings and enable WiFi. If you click the back button and then go back into Network Settings you should see option to enter the WiFi credentials.

Once you’re connected you should be able to go back to the Network Settings and you should see an IP address and Hostname. Make a note of these.

We now need to jump back onto our normal computer.

Getting Game Files

To play games we need some game ROM files. These are the actual game code dumps from the original game cartridges. Using these means that we’ll be playing the original games exactly as they were released.

The files are scattered around the Internet so you’ll need to track them down. Try searching for rom downloads or a ROM MEGATHREAD.

I’m going to assume that you’ve found some ROM files and have them stored on your computer in folders for each console. I’ve got my files here. So each folder represents one console, and inside are the actual ROM dumps.

All we need to do now it to transfer these files to the Batocera system.

Copying Files

Once you connect Batocera to your network it will automatically share it’s hard drive with other computers on the same connection.

On your computer open up its file explorer application and then in the address or path box enter the hostname or IP address of your Batocera system. Make sure you add two back slashes in front of the hostname so that the Explorer knows you mean a computer name.

You should now see the SD card of the Raspberry Pi pop up as a share folder. Inside that you’ll find a roms folder and inside that you’ll find a folder for each of the systems that Batocera can emulate.

All we need to do is to copy our game ROMs to the relevant folders on the SD card.

That’s the games all installed!

Game Images

One last thing before we leave the PC.

We want out game collection to look great. We don’t want to scroll through text lists to find games. We want images and videos so we can see what the games look like. To get these we’ll need to set up a free account with a website called ScreenScraper.

Head over to the screenscrapper.fr website and create an account. Make sure you make a note of your login credentials as we’ll need those in a second.

Refresh Games List

Once you’re back in Batocera we need to tell it to look for the new games we’ve loaded.

Back into the Settings page and this time select Game Settings and then Update Gamelists. Batocera will now scan all the game folders and should find our new games.

If you now go back to the main screen you’ll find all your systems listed.

Find one you want to have a go with and select it with the South button.

You should find a list of games with default rom cartridge images.

So let’s get some game art.

Back into Settings and down to Scraper. The Scrape From setting should be ScreenScraper. Just use the left and right D pad buttons to change it and then select the Scraper Settings. Here you can set up whatever types of images you want to download. If you’re not sure just leave them at the default settings.

I’m then going to go down the list and turn on the video downloads. This will try to get a short game video for each title so we can get a preview of the gameplay.

The  down the very bottom you’ll see options to enter your Screen Scraper login details.

Once you’ve entered those go back to the Scraper page and then select your scraper filters. We want to get the missing media files, we can leave the ignore as it is and then we need to select the Systems Included option. In here we can either check everything or select the consoles we want to scrape. I’m selecting a couple here so we can see it working. This process will take a while to download if you select lots of ROMs.

With that set up we can then back out and click the Scrape Now button.

You should then see a dialog appear in the top right as the downloads progress.

Playing Games

With all that set up we’re now ready to play some games.

Back out to the main system selection screen and choose a console.

Select it to get your list of games and you should now find each one listed with some images.

To play a game just highlight it and press the South button.

Batocera is pre loaded with all the emulators set up and ready to go. You should see it open up an emulator and then drop you straight into the game.

Once you’re finished with a game we can use a hotkey combination to exit. If you set the hotkey to the select button at the start hold that in and press the start button. This combo tells Batocera to exit from the game and you should drop back to the system games selection.

Congratulations. You’ve now got a full retro gaming system on your TV.

What Next

From here there are a whole range of options you can start playing around with.

As I mentioned earlier, in the first part of this video series I showed you how to set up arcade gaming. If you want to play the real arcade hits from before 2000 make sure to install those.

In that video I also showed you how to set up themes in Batocera to fine tune the system and game select screens to make everything look much, much better. So do ckeck that out as well.

But for now just browse your new game collection and have fun with all the classic retro games.