Insert a microSD card – 8GB will be fine if you plan to limit yourself to 8- and 16-bit games, but if you want to emulate more powerful consoles in future, a 32GB card is a good investment.
Image your RetroPie driveĭownload the Raspberry Pi Imager for your operating system. Among these are RetroSouls, the team behind Old Towers, and Miniplanets publisher Playonretro.
There’s a small but lively industry releasing cartridges for retro consoles, and a number of developers and publishers make the ROM files available online, either for free or a small price. On the homebrew side of things, projects such as Retrobrews and sites like and compile collections and lists of homemade games for classic consoles, but watch out for the odd unauthorised port slipping into their catalogues. And unlike Sega, Nintendo doesn’t look fondly on ROM hacks, fan games, and the like. It’s a wonderful example of a lost NES game that was recovered by its creators and released as freeware to the fan community, but it’s also rare to find Nintendo games from that era re-released with their creators’ blessing.
In the tutorial, we download Mystery World Dizzy by the Oliver Twins. That’s not the only place that you’ll find releases for those platforms.
These include both commercial and freeware games, plus a couple of open-source titles: We’ve made itch.io collections for each of those platforms, going out of our way to avoid unauthorised ports and ROM hacks. Games are also available for the 8-bit Sega Master System and 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The Nintendo Entertainment System is the most popular 8-bit console for modern developers, while the Mega Drive has won the hearts of 16-bit devs. If you’re after new games for classic systems, itch.io should be your first port of call. Rename all files with ‘.68K’ and ‘.SGD’ extensions to ‘.bin’ and copy them over to Raspberry Pi using a USB stick or via its Samba share. You’ll find all the ROMs in the clearly labelled uncompressed ROMs directory. Once bought, to find the ROMs, open the title’s Steam Library page, clear the gear icon on the right, select properties Properties, select the Local files tab, and then click Browse local files. You can buy 50 classic Mega Drive games on Steam, either individually or as a pack. Sega is incredibly supportive of its emulation community, and is happy to just sell you some classic Mega Drive ROMs, included in the Sega Mega Drive Classics collections for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Sega’s Mega Drive Classics collections include ROM images of the games that you run on any emulator you like, and brand new commercial releases for Sega and other platforms are thriving, as are active homebrew scenes bringing innovative new games to console formats that went out of production over 25 years ago. So let’s set up a RetroPie console and play some classic games. Some can be purchased legally, while others have been developed and are distributed for free. In this tutorial we’re going to look at a much broader range of legal console ROMs.