My brother came home from work and told me about this neat little mini computer called a Raspberry Pi and what you could do with it. I started looking for one and found a site http://www.retrobuiltgames.com. The creator of the Porta Pi arcade. I had to get one and try my had at assembling this beast and here is what I ended up with:

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That looks great!!! I’m looking into getting the PI 2 Its a quad core with 1gig of ram. (Just as soon as I can find them in stock. I was thinking about doing the handheld emulator,but looking at what you’ve done here…..

The great thing about this setup is that I will eventually be able to put the pi 2 right in there, but I would have to rewire all the buttons. Hopefully Ryan will get his pi 2 image to work,then all I have to do is swap them out.

I’m not sure what took longer, gluing the cabinet together or all the wiring, but it was a fun 3 days!

That’s the exact control scheme I want with the 6 button layout and a Happ joystick. What emulators you got loaded?

Right now I have Mame, GB, GBC, GBA, NES, Snes, PC engine aka Turbografix 16, DOS,Apple II. When you plug a thumb drive in the pi it puts a folder on it for roms and there is a heck of a list. Once the roms are in that folder emulationstation on the pi takes over and adds the corresponding emulator. I know there is atari,sega etc on there, but I haven’t tried them all yet.

Update! I just got my raspberry pi 2 yesterday and got everything up and ready.I need a get an n64 usb controller adapter and try out the n64 emulation. Some games work really well others do not at the moment.

Cool I take it the Pi 2 image is updated and working. Man let me know how well it runs the n64 emulation (been wanting to play a decent version of Blast Corp.) Also if you get a chance, see if it can do the Sega Saturn at all. I’m not expecting much from Saturn emulation because of Sega’s hardware in that particular system but I am curious if the frame-rate is playable.

Have Fun

[modeltfordman]

It doesn’t look like the sega saturn is supported on rpi. I’ve searched petrock’s official pi blog site and have found that the saturn is not currently being supported on raspberry pi. I still need to download some n64 roms and try it out my self.

Just tried Mario 64,Ocarina of Time,Super Smash Bros,Blast Corps and none of them booted up at the moment. I’ll see if there is an update available in the repository and try again, but at this time it looks like n64 is a bust.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 1 month ago by modeltfordman.

I thought with the pi2 you get a download of windows 10 developer edition. So i figured any emulators for windows would work just maybe not that well. I know Saturn will run (though not well on the rpi b (it may of been a special mod emulator). And now that I’m thinking about it I remember there were certain settings for the n64 emulator that you had to toggle for certain games, apparently this made a world of difference in performance. You may have to Google it but n64 runs very well on pi2 and I remember Mario 64 and Star fox specifically. So don’t give up on the n64 you just need to tweak it.

BTW I’m saving my money and being extra nice to the wife in hopes of getting a mini arcade. Wish me luck (I just got the Flash Boy a couple of weeks ago)

My guess is the n64 emulator I have is what the problem is. I have seen others running n64 games and have had no problems, so I’ll still have to fiddle with it. I am in no way proficient with linux, so I’m learning as I go. Good luck on the mini arcade. I still need to get a flash boy, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Hey man, are you still playing your mini arcade? I need an update on how well the controls are on the Porta Pi and do you notice a significant difference in the rPi 2 compared to rPi B?

I so want this!!!

I haven’t had too much time to mess with it alot, but the pi 2 can run pretty much all psx games flawlessly. You can setup the controls in most of the emulators themselves. There are 4 usb ports to use so all you need is controller. I see a lot of people using ps3 or xbox 360 controllers all the time. I still have not had luck getting n64 to work, but it is possible with certain games. I saw a youtube vid of mario kart 64 and it played fine. I myself just play nes, snes, genesis, gbc, gba, gb, and mame mostly. With these systems, the rpi b+ model is more than adequate to run these games. The biggest improvement is the gui os of the rpi2. It is a lot faster than the b+ pi.

Hey I was checking out Ryan’s site and it looks like he is about to release an update image for the rpi2 for the Porta Pi. Hopefully this will be a decent boost in performance. I like the support he does for his system.

Update! Finally got n64 working! I tried Ryan’s updated image and that did the trick. I didn’t get to test the games out, but Smash bros loaded up, as well as Zelda 64. I would have to say that emulation of these games is really slow at the moment. Hopefully the people over at petrock get all the bugs worked out.