Setting Up RetroPie the Easy Way

 It's been a while since my last post, but I've finally come up with an easy way to set up RetroPie. RetroPie is nice, but it's got a lot of text configuration files to wade through. The process I lay out here makes it far easier to get a working RetroPie install set up with lots of pre-configured niceties.

First, you need to install RetroPie on to an SD card. Then, you can boot it and get your controller set up. I'd advise using a wired controller to start with, and make sure you have a keyboard attached. Next, download this file. It contains configuration files that can be copied to the Raspberry Pi. It contains:

• The zfast CRT and LCD shaders pre-configured for a number of emulators
• Configurations for Atari 5200 and Colecovision that should work out of the box
• Sets the Supergrafx emulator to run for all seven of the Supergrafx games. Impressive, right?
• Blargg's NTSC S-Video filters preset on the emulators that use them.
• Sega Master System FM Audio support pre-configured.
  
• Last but not least, pre-configured Vectrex Overlays, so you can play those games as they were originally intended. Some of them are basically unplayable without them.

To install everything, just copy everything from the configs directory of the Setup Pack into the configs directory on your RETROPIE network share. That's literally it. After you do that, you might want to create a file in the configs/all directory called platforms.cfg and add these lines to it if you want to change the themes for a few emulators to the American names and logos:

megadrive_theme="genesis"
megadrive_platform="genesis"
videopac_theme="odyssey2"
videopac_platform="odyssey2"
pcengine_theme="tg16"
pce-cd_theme="tg-cd"

Next, you should go into the RetroPie menu on the Pi, and go to RASPI-CONFIG. If everything is in a box with black borders on your screen, you'll need to turn off the underscan by selecting Display, then Underscan, and select No. Next, if you live outside the UK, you'll want to change the localization settings by going into the Localization menu. Under Locale, you change the system locale. The time zone setting should be pretty self-explanatory. Finally, there's the Keyboard setting. Under that, you can select the number of keys your keyboard has. Then, you'll want to select Other at the next menu, and then change the language of the keyboard. Finally, you'll probably want to select the top option on the next screen (in my case, English(US). There's a couple more screens about keys that don't exist on American keyboards, but you answer those based on whether you have those keys on your keyboard. Once you've finished up with that, reboot your system.

 Now, go back in to the RetroPie menu, and go to RetroPie Config. Once the script has loaded, run the updater, and update everything you can. Next, go to Manage Packages, and then look through the opt and experimental sections to select additional emulators to install. I installed the following emulators:

• lr-bluemsx
• lr-beetle-vb
  
• lr-freechaf
• lr-freeintv
• lr-o2em

Now, you can reboot again. Once you've rebooted, you should hit F4 to get to a command prompt and type the following:

 cp /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg

You can also install any fan control script you might need here (such as for the awesome Argon One Pi 4 case.) Type reboot again, and after it's booted you can now modify the es_systems.cfg file. This is mainly if you want the PC Engine CD as a separate system (unless the RetroPie maintainers accept my pull request, which I doubt they'll ever considering how long some of the pull requests in their repo have been languishing). In the Setup Pack, there's a file called pce-cd.txt. Copy everything from there into the es_systems.cfg file. Then, create a copy of the configs/pcengine directory in the configs directory, and call it pce-cd. Finally, create a directory in the roms directory called pce-cd. And that should do it. You can now copy all your ROMs over. For CD games, I would suggest using namDHC as a frontend for chdman to create CHDs, as chdman has a borderline unusable command-line interface.

It's also possible to scrape game descriptions and cover art and the like with a scraper. My preferred scraper is Skraper. It requires an account at ScreenScraper.fr, which is ungodly slow if you're too cheap to pay them, but if you're patient it'll get done eventually. One of the benefits of Skraper is that it caches all the images and metadata on your PC, so you'll have more room for games on your Pi. Once you sign in with your account, it'll download some stuff, and then ask where your Pi's network share is. It will then auto-detect which systems you have installed. It will get them mostly right, but you will need to manually add some. If it can't find any ROMs, that means that the path it's looking in is wrong, so you may need to manually fix a few. Also, be sure to go to the Media tab and remove the videos. Not only are they annoying, but they will take forever to download, and will waste space on your Pi. Under the Metadata tab, you might want to click on some Name Decorations... especially the Region one, if you have the same game from multiple regions. Finally under Miscellaneous, set the regions to: us,wor,ss,jp or it'll tend to give you lots of Japanese language cover art.

I hope I've covered everything I need to here. It should be noted that the Vectrex overlays are based on a combination of GoodVec and No-intro file names, and so you might have to change the names of the appropriate .cfg files in the configs/all/retroarch/overlay/vectrex directory to the names of the ROMs that you are using. I'm still working on getting arcade stuff working, so I'll be making another post about that when I'm done with it.