A slice of Raspberry Pi: how to build your own retro games machine

In the past, whenever I have written enthusiastically about a modern retro console such as the Nintendo Classic Mini: SNES or the Analogue Duo, there have been a smattering of comments below the article asking why people don’t just buy a Raspberry Pi mini computer, download an emulator and play all the games they like for virtually nothing. My answer has usually been ease of use and accessibility. When you buy a mini console, you’re getting a plug-and-play product without any complicated set-up or potential compatibility issues. Simple.
But recently I bought a Raspberry Pi for an article on the beautiful PiDP-10 machine, so I thought I might as well check out its retro gaming credentials. Here is what I found.
To build your retro machine, you first need a Raspberry Pi computer – effectively a teeny PC built on to a circuit board just larger than a credit card. There are two models being supported now: the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (£34) and the newer Raspberry Pi 5 (£58), which has a more powerful processor, making it more suitable for emulating later consoles. I bought a 5 model on the Pi Hut site, which offers a decent starter kit including a compatible power adaptor and HDMI cable, a cute case to house the Pi (complete with a tiny fan to keep the CPU cool) and an SD card, which you need because the computer doesn’t have a built-in hard drive. That kit costs £94, but you’ll also need a USB joypad – my Xbox one works fine. The Raspberry Pi 4 is fine for running emulators of older machines, though, so if you went for that you could get retro-gaming-ready for around £60.
This is where things get a bit more complicated. There are an array of retro gaming apps compatible with Raspberry Pi, the main contenders being RetroPie, Recalbox, Batocera and Lakka. All are effectively collections of different, mostly open-source emulators, and they all let you play games from a huge variety of systems, whether that’s very early home computers or later consoles such as the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2. Want to experience Manic Miner on the Oric, or Rainbow Islands on the Wonderswan? Want to play Utopia, the Dragon 32 game I made with my friend Jon in 1987? Now you can. They also support MAME, which runs hundreds of classic arcade games. There are some differences between them in terms of how they run games and the number of configuration options they offer: you may want to tweak the visual settings, perhaps adding authentic-looking scanlines, for example. There’s a really good comparison of them here, although most people agree that RetroPie is the best all-rounder.
Getting everything running is pretty easy. First you plug your SD card into a PC or Mac using a USB SD card reader, then you download the Raspberry Pi Imager, which is a little program that installs the operating system on to your card. It’s very user-friendly, with three drop-down menus to make your selections. When you click on the Choose Operating System button, you can specify that you want to use the machine as a retro console and it can automatically download an emulator for you – currently the options are limited to Recalbox if you have a 5 model, or either RetroPie or Recalbox if you have a model 4. (Retropie doesn’t have a native model 5 version yet.) To get any of the others, you need to separately download their own installation imagers, then select Custom OS on the Raspberry Pi imager.
Look, don’t panic, there are loads of guides online to help with this.
Okay, this is the really complicated part. To run retro games on these emulators you need game ROMs, which are software versions of the original programs, chips and cartridges. Downloading them from ROM sites on the internet is effectively piracy – it’s illegal. “Computer games are protected from being copied by intellectual property laws,” explains Alex Tutty of legal firm Sheridans. “Broadly, in the UK and around the world, a game would be protected by copyright and this would prevent anyone from copying it without the permission of the owner.
“There are various exceptions to copyright laws such as making a private copy but that does not allow emulation of games and making these available online. Even if a game is defunct it does not allow for it to be copied as copyright will continue even if not in use.”
It is possible to find games that have had the copyright erased by the developers – these tend to be found on abandonware sites and software archives. (And I won’t sue you if you download Utopia, although you may want to sue me when you play it.) Either way, I’m not going to tell you how to find ROMs, but what I will say is that it’s a risky business. Game files held on unofficial sites can be riddled with viruses and malware, they might also simply not work, or could be foreign-language versions.
Also, getting them to your Raspberry Pi from the computer on which you downloaded them can be a little complicated. The basic method is to plug your Raspberry Pi SD card into your PC and download ROMs straight on board, but there are more elegant solutions using the SD Card Share folder or file manager apps – I struggled with all that, to be honest.
That’s how you can build a retro gaming machine for under £100. Once you get used to it, you can do other cool things like building a mini retro arcade cabinet. I still prefer the more expensive but legally unambiguous routes: maintaining original consoles; buying retro games compilations, such as Sega Genesis Classics or Rare Replay; downloading digital versions of older games from, say, Steam, Gog, or your current games console’s online store; buying mini retro machines that run pretty stable versions of the games you loved.
However, I’m a big fan of the Raspberry Pi and I think it’s worth buying one to mess about with. If you’re worried about downloading retro ROMs, there is a vast library of games made specifically for the device, or you download the DosBox or newer DosBox-X programs that lets you play hundreds of old PC games, many of them shareware. Otherwise, can use Raspberry Pi to access cloud-based game services such as Xbox Cloud Gaming. You can even stream games from your PC to your Raspberry Pi. Discovering gaming on new platforms is fun, and getting something running on a computer that fits in your pocket is a beguiling experience.