QuickStart Guide for RetroPie Gift

[nogre]

I built a fully set up RetroPie game box as a gift for my brother’s birthday. He’s smart, but doesn’t have experience with the Raspberry Pi or RetroPie Project. So I wrote up a QuickStart guide so that he would be able to get gaming immediately:

REKt QuickStart Guide

Congratulations on your purchase of a RetroPie Entertainment Kit (REKt)! Now that you’ve gotten REKt, you can proceed to crush all your friends, and enemies, in classic arcade game style.

Your kit includes:

1 Raspberry Pi model 2B
1 Raspberry Pi model 2B case
1 32g Micro SD card
1 USB Classic Gamepad
1 Power Adapter
1 HDMI cable
various decorative stickers

Your kit has come preinstalled and preassembled for ease of use. This still leaves only a few steps to glory:

1. Plug the HDMI cable into your TV and REKt.
2. Connect the USB Gamepad to REKt.
3. Connect REKt to power. This should turn REKt on.

If your TV is on and set to the correct input, you should see REKt loading. This can take a minute or two, mainly to load the HUGE number of games that REKt comes with. (If you don’t get to a loading screen, unplug the power, give it a few seconds and plug it back in.)

4. Choose your game system and game of choice using the gamepad, and become a video game hero!

Important Notes:

• Getting back to the REKt console (emulation station) from within a game is as easy as holding the SELECT and START buttons at the same time.
• In MAME, adding coins and player_start can be achieved by holding SELECT and pressing the L or R buttons on the top of the gamepad. START pauses the game, and START + R brings up the Advance Mame options.
• The game systems have been unthoroughly tested and will likely work with varying success. MAME especially is prone to this, but happily the system was beta-tested with Michael Jackson’s “Moonwalker” and we can report that the last listed ROM works well.
• There appears to be some trouble with game metadata. For instance, the game-box image and game description can be added to enhance the REKt console. However, this drastically increased the system load time. To ensure as many barriers to gaming were removed as possible, this feature was foregone.
• The firmware at time of shipping was Version 3.0 BETA 2. So, while mostly stable and feature-rich, there could be a few bugs here and there.
• Currently shipping systems with ROMS included: Atari 2600, NES, SNES, SEGA Genesis (Megadrive), GameBoy Advance, MAME. Many other systems are available.

Get more info at:

The RetroPie Project – https://www.petrockblock.com/retropie/

Emulation Station – http://emulationstation.org/

[labelwhore]

Here’s another idea, which is something I’ve done on my own Pi, so that it’s there when I copy my image for friends. I made my own section on the main menu, but instead of games, it contains .txt files. The help files have useful info for working with troublesome emulators like Dice for C64, how to start Dos games, and things like that. Of course they all have askii art too.

I’m using the less command to open the files, so remember to put a line somewhere in the file that says “press Q to quit”, or something like that.

With that, I added this to es_systems.cfg:

  <system>
    <name>helpfiles</name>
    <fullname>Help Files</fullname>
    <path>/usr/local/helpfiles</path>
    <extension>.txt .TXT</extension>
    <command>less "%ROM%"</command>
    <platform/>
    <theme>helpfiles</theme>
  </system>

[matthewjosephcordova]

I guess I’m not the only one giving a raspberry pi as a gift ;). I made a pi for my mother.

I made the output of the machine appear like a console. I am having the pi start with a customized loading video with all console messages disabled so it looks clean. Then once it gets to emulationstation, I removed several menu items and options. I removed the ability to scrape, I removed the ability to exit emulationstation and to restart. Just the ability to shutdown remains in the quit menu. I also removed the ability to configure the joystick or see the FPS or change the theme. I pre-configured everything and scraped, etc.. So none of that should be necessary. Plus I customized ES to shutdown the hdmi on shutdown so it looks clean. I also removed any console messages on rom boot. You shouldn’t see a cursor or otherwise see any console text ever during the experience. Plus I added a power button button to boot up the pi.

[labelwhore]

^^ All good ideas.

On mine, I cleaned up the startup screen the lazy way, I just extended the time the first image is up so the console text only shows really quickly before that. The images are randomized via a script i found via gooogle. To make the booting process more customized, I simply added a random startup sound, mostly R2D2 noises.

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