After a month of on-again, off-again attempts to get my RetroPie upgraded to the latest version—which included not only changing the Raspbian OS from Raspbian Stretch to Buster, but also migrating hardware from Raspberry Pi 3B to 4B—I’m now running RetroPie 4.8 on a RaspberryPie 4B. Huzzah!
For this week’s stream on Reclaim TV I wanted to document installing RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi 4B from scratch.* After that, I went through getting the Atari 5200 console running correctly. All of that was done in less than 30 minutes, which surprised me. The next part of the stream was showing off how I was able to pull in a feed of not only the Raspberry Pi 4B, but also feeds of both Atari 5200 and Atari 7800 consoles I have setup in my office.
Finally, I ended the stream comparing various console versions of a particular game like Pac-man, and demonstrating how some of the gameplay experience can be compromised in emulation. All in all it was a very fun stream and I was pretty fired-up the various complexities of getting the old technology plugged into the stream worked fairly seamlessly.
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*After hours of lost time, upgrading from Raspbian Stretch to Raspbian Buster OS is not worth the hassle. Just be sure to backup all your ROMs, configs, and BIOS files, and start fresh. Most emulators work out of the box, and the more complex setups like Atari 5200 are easier on the latest version.
†The two small issues were the fan I had in my office to cool things down was making noise on my wireless mic, and the Elgato HN60X capture card that was grabbing the Raspberry Pi went in and out a few times—I need to see why that was. But if that is the worst of it for this setup, I’ll take it!
I caught the first 35 minutes and was super impressed at how quickly you setup a RetroPie from scratch! I figured like a kitchen show with dual ovens you’d be showing one prebuilt with all the roms installed but it was cool to see it all seamlessly get installed and working live, not to mention seeing the differences between real consoles and the emulated versions. Sick setup!
I have to say this stream benefited from both early stream prep, and going through the RetroPie setup process the morning before the show to ensure I had no kinks. I find you can wing a stream, but more times than not you pay for it with digressions, technical glitches, and general fumbling. The fact that was limited in this session is simply testament to preparation, who knew 🙂
Thanks for watching, and long live the retro gaming streams!
And the EDU connection, always takes me back to all the centers for preserving these bits of media. Making sure the ROMs and code inside them are accessible STILL all these years later long after CRTs are gone and the physical game consoles too. But kudos to round up the bits/bobs that connect things together. And that Panasonic VCR! So very, very cherry (like a souped up Deuce Coup on the strip baby!) Rock-n-Roll! And sharing it with others on YouTube.
I do love the archiving aspect of all this stuff, and defintiely a reason to go down the MisTER path with the FPGA stuff, which is seemingly next level. That said, my stuff is too unstructured to be of any real use. But centers like the Media Archaeology Lab (https://www.mediaarchaeologylab.com/) in Boulder, Colorado do the real works in this regard, and I jut try and “emulate” the work they are doing with the old consoles and hardware. In fact, they also stream their experiments on Twitch, which I think is brilliant.