Given a Retropie as a gift… how to read it?

[Computer Ninja]

Hello everyone,

My best friend gave me a Raspberry Pi Model B (the 2nd from last one – I’ve since ordered the version 2 of the Pi) with an 8GB micro-SD card and Retropie on it. It has Ninentendo, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and Turbografx 16 emulators on it.

How do I get into this thing so I can see what’s on the other partition and see why only those emulators are included. I thought all the emulators were included.

I created a VM of Ubuntu but could not read the other partition on the card, just the boot partition.

Any help would be great. I’ve since purchased a 32GB card to have more room and include more emulators and ROMS.

[Anonymous]

Rather than trying to read the card itself, have you tried plugging the Pi into your network and accessing it that way?

As long as your friend didn’t mess with the default setup too much, it should create a samba network share that you can access from a desktop. That will show you what’s in the roms folders and let you add/remove stuff.

Alternately, you should be able to FTP into it using the default username “pi” and password “raspberry”.

[Computer Ninja]

I have not tried that yet. I could easily do that. Also, it has a USB WiFi dongle, but it definitely wasn’t configured to connect to my network.

How do I deal with that, same way, connect to LAN first and then SSH into it? (following online documentation, of course).

[Anonymous]

I haven’t set up wifi on a pi myself, but it should be accessible via SSH with the same username and password above. If it’s easier to just plug a keyboard into the thing, you can exit the EmulationStation front-end with F4 to get to a command prompt.

[herbfargus]

https://www.petrockblock.com/forums/topic/getting-wifi-working-with-retropie/ post #6436 is what you will use to configure your WiFi dongle

[Computer Ninja]

I was able to connect to my RetroPie via LAN by both a SAMBA share as well as via SSH.

I thought I had posted this reply but must not have clicked submit. Now that I have connected to my RetroPie, I’m curious as to how I enable some of the other emulators?

I see in the ROMS folder I have a bunch of other folders that are in the _Unused (or whatever it’s called) folder.

Looking for a little guidance here. How do I enable MAME, for instance? I have a bunch of MAME ROMs I’d love to throw on there. Do I fill that folder and move it out of the _Unused folder?

[herbfargus]

In the ROMS folder there should be a folder called mame. You put your ROMs in there. If the mame folder is in _unused then move it back into the ROMs folder, add your ROMs to the recently moved mame folder and restart emulationstation and mame will show up as an option. Once in a game you’ll use tab on the keyboard to configure your controllers since mame is different than retroarch configs. (https://www.petrockblock.com/forums/topic/configuring-usb-controller-with-mame/) You’ll also need to make sure your mame ROMs are from the 037b5 set (https://code.google.com/p/imame4all/wiki/GameList) otherwise they may not work.

[Computer Ninja]

[quote=86882]In the ROMS folder there should be a folder called mame. You put your ROMs in there. If the mame folder is in _unused then move it back into the ROMs folder, add your ROMs to the recently moved mame folder and restart emulationstation and mame will show up as an option. Once in a game you’ll use tab on the keyboard to configure your controllers since mame is different than retroarch configs. (https://www.petrockblock.com/forums/topic/configuring-usb-controller-with-mame/) You’ll also need to make sure your mame ROMs are from the 037b5 set (https://code.google.com/p/imame4all/wiki/GameList) otherwise they may not work.[/quote]

So, the ROMs folders are basically triggers as to what is active is what you’re saying? If so, that’s pretty slick!

[herbfargus]

Essentially. One of the most recent updates even allows for multiple emulators- for example it will have a folder called mame4all and another folder called mame. Both use the same ROMs but they each have their own advantages so if one ROM doesn’t work on one emulator you can try another emulator and see If you get better results. Once you get a little more experienced with the raspberry pi I highly recommend updating to newer versions of retropie. I just purchased the raspberry pi 2 and i’ll be installing retropie 2.5 on my microsd card.

[Computer Ninja]

I purchased the Raspberry Pi 2 as well… just waiting for it to get here from UK (I think).

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