What I have learned so far…

[Anonymous]

Alright, I have been playing with the RetroPie setup on a Model A board for the past week, and here is what I have figured out so far…

I first want to say “Great work!” I have loved having all my games in one place. It is like a 10 year old’s dream come true (I’m 31).

1. I wish I would have gotten the Model B board for the 2 USB ports, i.e. easy 2 player controller setup without a USB hub.

2. There is no documentation that I found about loading ROMs without networking into the RPi.

The way I devised to load them is almost necessary on the Model A board because of no Ethernet. You can F4 (on a keyboard) out of Emulation Station, type “startx” at the command line, plug a USB memory stick into a powered USB hub, navigate with mouse or keyboard to the file browser at the bottom left of the desktop interface.
Here, you cannot simply click on your USB drive from the sources list at the left for some reason, but you can click the up arrow on the navigation bar at the top to go to the root directory. Navigate to the media folder, and then open USB0 in there. You should find your folders that are on your USB drive. Copy the ROMs you want to carry over to the RPi and then navigate to the Pi folder in the sources list on the left side of the window. Go into RetroPie and then the roms folder. Paste them into the specific folder for whatever system they go with.

Click log out at the bottom left and then type sudo reboot. Whenever it restarts, the emulator associated with the ROMs you just pasted should be available!

3. When I use retroarch-joyconfig from the command line, I can go through all the button presses for up down, etc., but those button presses do not seem to be saved in the RetroPie->configs->all folder’s retroarch.cfg file.

This is probably well documented in other places, but I want to do so again because it may save someone some searching. Maybe they are not supposed to.
However, if I manually edit the aforementioned retroarch.cfg file manually, the settings stick for all emulators.
Unfortunately, this is not good for emulators that do not use the same buttons as you just programmed, i.e. NES buttons would probably use the Y button on an SNES button pad for the B button. Thankfully, the creators of the RetroPie distro were forward thinking and provided extra retroarch.cfg files in separate folders under RetroPie->configs. Here, you can copy and paste the lines of code that would be different for that specific emulator. For example, I copied the X,Y,B,A button code from the main retroarch.cfg file and pasted it in the SNES retroarch.cfg file. That way, my main cfg can be set up for NES and the SNES cfg will override those buttons when I open an SNES ROM. Beautiful.

4. Programming extra buttons for extra functions is amazing.

I have a PlayStation style USB controller, the Logitech Precision to be precise. It has four shoulder buttons… L1 through R2. NES and SNES do not need many of those buttons, so they can be programmed in the retroarch.cfg file to do lots of cool things! Things like dumping a ROM and taking you back to Emulation Station, rewinding a game, saving/loading your current state (I have not gotten this one to work yet), and other cool things.
Dumping the ROM is probably the most useful. Look toward the bottom of the main retroarch.cfg file for the lines enable_hotkey and exit_emulator and get rid of the # at the beginning of each of those lines (uncomment them).

5. The menu in Emulation Station is really great and should be used for more.

I like the option of rebooting the RPi or shutting down from inside Emulation Station with just the gamepad. I am going to post a separate “wish list” that I hope will become a place for people to add things they would like to see in future releases of RetroPie.

6. Composite (Yellow RCA) out does not work unless you manually change something in the emulators folder.

I know that there are other threads documenting that people are working on this, but I wanted to put it in here for those that might not know about it. I reflashed my entire set SD card because I thought it was corrupted. Then! I found the thread about the setting.

I guess that’s it for this list. Hopefully it will help some of those that are new to the RetroPie. Again, great work! Please continue.

[petrockblog]

Thanks a lot for this detailed post!

Regarding the point about getting ROMs on the Pi without a network connection, I have just updated the corresponding article in the wiki: https://github.com/retropie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/How-to-get-ROMs-on-the-SD-card#using-usb-sticks

It is possible to get ROMs on the Pi with a network connection :-)

[Anonymous]

Very nice! That pretty much solves my wish for an easy way to get ROMs on the Pi. No need for the FAT32 mess. Great solution! I was wondering why there was a random roms folder added to my USB stick.

Ha. I realized that I could send the ROMs via network, but I have no Wi-Fi or Ethernet on the Model A Pi. I guess I could shove them into the audio jack if necessary. :)

[teeth03]

When I plug my flash drive in, a window pops up and asks me if I want to open it up in File Manager, I do that and it opens right up.

I tried to do over my network, but my Pi does weird things trying to access my Samba share, but that’s not a RetroPie issue.

You should really get a 512 Model B if you really want to do serious emulating on the Pi, aside from the extra USB port, you also get double the RAM. I guess a model A would be good if all you wanted to do was some single player action, you could just hook a hub up just to load ROMs.

On a side note, the joyconfig utility is really just there to let you know what the physical buttons and axis translate to as far as the digital buttons are concerned, my suggestion is to go through joyconfig with each type of controller and notate what buttons and axis are defined there and configure them manually.

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