“It turns out that the NES Classic Edition is just a little Linux-powered board inside a cute case,” writes Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica, “and it’s totally possible to build your own tiny Linux-powered computer inside a cute case without spending much more than $60.” An anonymous reader writes:
Andrew used a $42 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B — “it’s relatively cheap and relatively powerful, and it can easily handle anything from the original PlayStation on down” — plus an $8 case, and a microSD card. He also purchased a pair of gamepads — there’s several options — and reports that “Putting our little box together is ridiculously easy, and you ought to have no problem with it even if you’ve never opened up a PC tower in your life.”
“Making retro game consoles is a fairly common use case for the Pi, so there are a few different operating system choices out there,” Andrew reports, and he ultimately chose the Linux-based RetroPie OS, which includes a number of emulators. Basically the process boils down to dropping a RetroPie boot image onto the SD card, putting it into the Pi, and then plugging it into your display and connecting your controllers — plus configuring some menus. “The default quality of the emulation looks just as good as it does on the NES Classic Edition,” and “the emulators for these older systems are all advanced enough that things should mostly run just like they did on the original hardware… I’ve been having a ton of fun with mine now that it’s all set up, and its flexibility (plus the quality of those USB gamepads) has made it my favorite way to play old games, outpacing my Apple TV, the pretty but not-living-room-friendly OpenEmu, and the old hacked Wii I still have sitting around.”
The hardest part may just be finding a PC with an SD card slot — and of course, the resulting system gives you lots of flexibility. “By using the Raspberry Pi and freely available software, you can build something capable of doing a whole heck of a lot more than playing the same 30 NES games over and over again.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
https://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discuss&id=10494337&smallembed=1