 So I'm here with G. LaCroix from LearnLinux.tv. Hello. And this is going on both for channels. So if you're watching this on LearnLinux TV, you already know where we're at. We'll have links to each other's channels in the show notes here. So if you're checking mine, check out his channel and vice versa. So basically doing a little cross channel promotion, but it's actually going to be a very fun topic today because I'm often asked, what's my favorite Linux distribution? And people expect answers like maybe Debian, Arch, or Ubuntu. It's actually RetroPie. And that's what I wanted to go over. I've been wanting to do a video about this for a long time. I've really never been able to because I just didn't really know how to do this. But basically, Tom knows a lot more about this kind of stuff than I do. He actually taught me everything I know about video editing. So if you notice on my channel, it's actually slightly more professional now. That's actually why. Early on in my channel, everything was done in one take and I was professionally done. So he has to know how he set up this little environment for us to record. We thought some cross channel promotion would be cool because this is a very fun topic. It goes in line with his channel about how tos and tech and gadgets. And also mine, it's a Linux distribution technically. So it's something that I wanted to do a video about as well. Yeah, and I learned Tmux from this guy, everything I know about Tmux completely and a lot of other. He covers some of the in-depth sysadmin stuff. And so you'll see some more cross promotion here. But this is a hardware part because I like to RetroPie and this guy did way better than I did. I just talked about having one. This guy, he got the right hardware for it. So we're gonna get right into this in a second, but I am a big retro gaming collector. I have physical games. I'm not a freeloader that just runs ROMs. And I'm not necessarily seeing there's anything wrong with that, but I actually have the physical hardware. Yeah, Nintendo might have a problem with that. But sometimes there's some challenges with this stuff, like save batteries that don't work in cartridges anymore, disks that no longer read, systems that no longer boot media. RetroPie is very useful to keep the retro games alive. So I've been very passionate about setting this up and getting it done perfectly fine. So in this video, I'm going to show you specific hardware. So I'm not gonna have a bunch of different cases to show you the pluses and minuses of each. I'm gonna show you one specific case, one controller, obviously the Raspberry Pi that powers the whole thing. So I'm gonna give you what I recommend are the best pieces of hardware to combine to get the best possible experience. So getting right into that, right here, I actually have a case and controller that comes in one box. This is by RetroFlag. It'll be in the show notes. And so it comes with a really good controller. I mean, obviously if you go on eBay or Amazon, you'll see no shortage of USB controllers that look like the old game controllers. Some of them are pretty good. The Buffalo one has been very good as well. But the one included in here is very good. So I'm gonna do an unboxing of this, but this is actually the case. And I'm gonna go ahead and go ahead and open it right now. Show you what it comes with. So here we have the controller. Try to line this up to the cameras here that it comes with. I'll show this off first. So this is basically the, obviously it's modeled after a Super Nintendo. In this case Super Famicom because it's got the colored buttons which are specific to the Japanese market. Maybe European too, I don't remember. So you can also buy the English Super Nintendo version of this as well, which will include the color scheme from the English version. The case is functionally exactly the same. But this is a solid controller. So when you plug this into a Linux machine, for example, it actually comes up as a Xbox 360 controller. So I don't know what they did, but something in the circuit board tells you, this is an Xbox controller. It's clearly not an Xbox controller. It doesn't look anything like that. But this is something that, it's just a really great build quality. It feels, you can feel it yourself. It doesn't feel so light. It feels kind of heavy like the original controller did. Buttons, the key travel. It's really solid and I've seen that before. Some of them, especially like the start select buttons felt like I was going to break them like I was bending plastic. But this, I could have some good time on that. Yeah, it's very, very solid. So in one, in the main point here is this case. This case is cool. Yeah, so this case is modeled after the Super Famicom or the European Super Nintendo, which had this form factor, the English Super Nintendo had its own look in its own market. And you could buy one or the other. So I'll have links to both. Again, functionally, they're exactly the same. There's an Eject button. Yep, the Eject button is for storing SD cards. Yes. So you could put your SD cards in here and store them. Looks kind of weird. I'd be kind of afraid to close this on top of an SD card if it wasn't exactly something that I put it in there. But I don't really have a use case for that, but the case is really good. Now this case has something called Safe Shutdown and Safe Restart. And what that allows you to do is you could actually turn this off. Up is on. If I turn it off and I didn't shut down RetroPie, this actually runs a script and it safely shuts it down for you. The power light will blink. So the power light's right here. It'll start flashing to let you know that it's shutting down. And then once it's confirmed it's shut down or the timer goes off, however it works, then it cuts the power. So to take a look at how that works, I'm gonna open the case. And right here on this little corner, upper left, or depending which way the camera is facing, but this actually intercepts the power button or the power cord. So the power cord goes in here. It's not gonna go directly into the Raspberry Pi. It actually goes here, which goes into this little chip, which then connects to the circuit board. I'm not really sure how exactly that works. For some reason it knows to keep power long enough for it to shut down. That's one feature that this has that's really amazing really the reason why I recommend this case because the issue becomes, if you give this to a family member and they don't know much about computers or something and they don't know to shut it down. So if you're using a different case and they just unplug it, well there might be some file system corruption because they didn't shut it down properly. So this case makes the experience a little bit more foolproof. Yeah, it actually initiates a shutdown script when you hit this. So moving that button is a process where we get the shutdown script. And it looks like we have two USBs in here. So besides the connector, we have two USBs that would interface with. So there's the front USB. So you look how the controller ports would normally be right here. So on the inside these connect to the Raspberry Pi on the inside. And that just maps the controller ports up here. So actually plug your controller in to port. And it's labeled one and two but retro Pi is not gonna know which one you plugged it into. So if I'm not mistaken, the order whether you're on player one or player two is just the order in which you plugged them in. So not necessarily gonna correlate with this. Yeah, it's detect order. Detect order, exactly. So another thing I wanna mention too is that there's an NES version of this. So it's modeled after the Nintendo Entertainment System has the same features, safe shutdown. I don't recommend it because I have seen personally because I own this case, power distribution issues where it'll have random resets. It'll lose power. You get the little power indicator on the actual display telling you that the power is not working or not enough. And I'm not really sure why other people have complained about this too. Maybe they'll get it fixed. But don't buy that one because there's issues and the issues might just be the plastic. So you'll see that there's little cutouts for the cutout right here for the power. That's not very far recessed but one of the theories with the NES cases that's too deep and it can't make a connection. Yeah. And it's a prop, it could be just a mold issue where when they did the injection molding that it's just, it's a hair thicker but you're right, it's recessed in there for the USB power that could be enough to cause the power issues on there. And it doesn't seem like they would use different circuitry for each one, but you know, that's right. We can get the, this is referred to as the Famicom one you said. The Super Famicom. Yeah, Super Famicom one. So. I don't know how they label it on the Amazon. We'll make sure we leave you a link to the right one. So another thing to show too is that there's this little switch on the bottom. And it's really, it's marked on here safe shutdown. So it's a no brainer. You can, that's an ability to bypass it. So it defaults to off. So the safe shutdown feature, you actually need a plugin for that. We can show you how to do that in this video. But in order to take advantage of that feature, you actually have to turn this on in order for that to work. And you have to have the plugin. Both things have to be in place for that feature to work. Otherwise, if not, and you shut, you hit the power button, it's literally going to cut the power abruptly the same as if you just pull the power cord out of the back. So that has to be set up in order for that to work properly. So that's another thing to keep in mind. So another thing, obviously, I have a generic power cord here. I just ordered one from KanaKit. And it's very, you need a very specific power cord ampage. It's like 2.5 amp for the Raspberry Pi 3. If you don't have that, you'll get the power issues and maybe your games don't run as well or you have, I'm not sure what all the issues are, but it's just not going to run efficiently. And you'll stress out some of the weaker adapters not all of your USB adapters have 2.5, some of them are only 1.5 and two. So this is important. It's not that expensive. Just order the one for the Raspberry Pi. I think there's like four or five, I think they're like $4 or $5 or less than 10, something like that. And it's rated for the power that you have. You don't want to just get an Android charger or something and just think it's going to work. It's possible it could. It's also possible it might not. And it could lead to file corruption if it's not being powered. So you definitely want to make sure 2.5 amp power cord for that. And then of course I have the Raspberry Pi 3 which is the brains of the operation. I'm not very good at my unboxing here. I'm carrying the box. But basically here we have the Raspberry Pi 3 board which is going to be what, you know, the magical thing that makes it all work. SD card goes here on the bottom, which I also brought one with me. I brought a 128 gig SD card. This is overkill. You only need eight or 16 and you're probably fine. I use 128 because I run a lot of PS1 games. So those things are ginormous. So if you're not doing that, then you really don't need 128. So it's just 128. Yeah that comes on a preference of how many games you plan to load. Now do you leave the chip at the stock speed or do you increase the speed on the chip a little bit? I haven't done that. I haven't done any overclocking. I'm not really an overclocking kind of person because I'm more, I want the long term stability. I don't want it to basically over time wear out the board even though they're inexpensive. And I'm not really sure how much of a performance increase you can get. Now one thing I'll mention, Nintendo 64 and PlayStation portable for me run like crap. And I've seen many YouTube videos. They will show you, well, this is what you do for how to increase the performance of Nintendo 64. I'm telling you, I have spent hours on YouTube. As of today, I can guarantee you I've watched every single one of these videos that have claimed to improve Nintendo 64 performance. They do not work. Now I do feel like they did work when they were recorded. So I don't feel like these videos are misleading anybody but they literally in RetroPie newer versions they disabled some of the features that these YouTubers were actually utilizing to get that performance boost. So tread carefully if you're doing anything newer like than PS1, PS1 for me works great. I have no problems with it. Anything newer than that though, you're gonna actually have possibly some issues. So hopefully one day that'll get better. I know Nintendo will probably do like a Nintendo 64 classic console. I'm sure as soon as they do that all the hackers are gonna get ahold of it and they're gonna reverse engineer it the Nintendo 64 emulation will be completely flawless by then but until now I don't recommend running PlayStation portable or Nintendo 64. Dreamcast is also another one that runs like crap. I've run Nintendo Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Genesis, Sega CD, 32X, PS1, Super Nintendo, Virtual Voting, PC Engine, I've run PC Engine mainly for Castlevania Rondo of Blood because it's the best one. I like Bonk. Yeah and I have that on there too. So all those games run flawlessly but it's when you get the further up the 90s you go the less the performance will be. So with that said that's basically everything you need. We'll have links to all the stuff you need and to buy all this, to get all the stuff you need for it. I did when I built my first RetroPie not that I overclocked it but I knew I potentially might because I'd seen it suggested for a lot of people. If you, I can leave links to probably the heat sink kit. They still have a heat sink kit to go on and it's really inexpensive. It was like a couple dollars when you're buying the kit so I wouldn't have glued them on there but I've never overclocked it. My RetroPie is probably two years old now. Not kind of what I've had no problem with it. Never a problem putting a heat sink on something. I don't use it daily but it probably may not hurt to put a heat sink to dissipate it. It's not like it needs a fan but just generally because you're getting the heat away from the chip, they're a little stick on so we don't have them for this project but you can always get there to be in better shape. You can run a fan on it. I could tell you this. I have heat sinks on some of them and some of them not. I have multiple of these. This will probably be like my fourth or fifth RetroPie in my fleet right now. I have some of them have it, some of them don't. I've not noticed anything really different. I have run some fans from time to time. Again, I never really noticed much of a benefit but my mindset is if you can dissipate the heat, you may as well because it's only going to help you. It's never going to hurt you. So if you can do that, feel free but we're not going to include that here in this setup here. So. All right. We're ready to assemble it now. We're ready to assemble it. All right. Okay, so now we're ready to assemble. But before we do, I want to let you guys know about a very important first step before you get started. There is a screwdriver that's actually included with the kit. When you buy the case with the controller you also get the screwdriver as well. So the first step is that you toss this in your nearest trash receptacle and dispose of it. Do not use it because, but I don't know why but this screwdriver is so cheap. It will strip your screws. They will be hard to get off. Do not use it. Very poor quality. It's just, it's a disaster. There we go. There we go. Get rid of it. So get a actual decent Phillips screwdriver because that's what you're going to need. And for those of you who didn't recognize this these are the screwdrivers that you can get at Harbor Freight. So shockingly the Harbor Freight screwdrivers are quite a notch above that one. Yes. So don't use the one that comes with it. Strips, it's bad. So I'm going to grab, I'm going to get this Raspberry Pi board. I'm going to go ahead and lay this in here. So I'm just going to move the wires out of the way. So it lays this way. And what you'll notice is that the, once I actually get it lined in, lined up here we go. You'll notice that everything is kind of recessed right here. We're not worried about that yet. The ports in the back will have to line up. So you can see that they do power, HDMI, audio, everything lines up. So the first thing you're going to do is you're going to get these black screws that it comes with. And what you're going to do is then proceed to screw the Raspberry Pi into the board. And make sure you leave this top screw empty so nothing goes here. Now that I actually plugged in the USB cables this time now I can actually proceed to put the screws in. Remember that USB cables, then screw it. USB cables and then screw it in, yep. So the next thing that we want to do is make the decision whether or not we want to use the safe shutdown. So just so you don't forget right now it's off. That's the default. I'm going to flip this to on. It is a feature that I want to use. And now we need to connect the actual circuit board here at the front to the Raspberry Pi. So you want to make sure that you get this in there right. There is a little instruction sheet that's included with this. So basically you could just look at that. But what you're looking for, there's two of these blank little holes right here. And they face toward the network port. Okay. So basically just make sure that we line this up perfectly. Push that down in there. At that point everything from the board level is installed. Now what you want to do is make sure that the power is off. So I have had this little port or this switch here flipped down. Just going to make sure that because when you put on the top cover you basically want to make sure that lines up. So I'm going to just kind of, this is kind of awkward here because this sticks right up and it's really hard to get this in there. So you got to kind of try your best to comfortably push this down to make room to actually get the case on. And at this point, we also have this little cover. I'll go over that in a minute. So we're just going to leave that off for now. Just kind of press it firmly and you'll see that all the ports here should line up. We have our network port and two more USBs over here on the other side. That's actually the side of the board. So directly to the side of the board. So at that point I'm just going to turn it upside down and then I'm going to screw in these little silver screws onto the bottom to basically secure it. So now I have all the screws in. Now there's one last thing to do. They give you these little black rubber feet that you actually then put in these little recessed things down here. You'll notice though that two of the recessed things here actually covering the screws. So you should not actually put these in until you've had a chance to boot this up, test it out, make sure you have everything wired in because it's going to be really hard to get those back up. I have no idea why they decided it is a good idea to do that. But whatever, you know, it's a good case. Otherwise just don't put these in just yet. Just kind of wait a bit and then test it out, make sure the safe shutdown works and all those different features work before you actually do that. In case you plug something in wrong. Which I have done twice my first time setting this up. So. All right, and we have a card here already prepared with Etcher. Yeah. We'll insert right here. Like it's pretty easy to get the link. We'll give a link to where you can get the image and you download and use Etcher to break the image to the SD card. There's a little groove right here on the side. Yep. That's where the SD card goes. I already have all the ROMs and everything I need on here, but we'll show you how to create one from scratch in just a moment. So I'm going to go ahead and slide this in there. Just push it in. So now the SD card is installed and this guy's actually ready to boot up. So we'll start with etcher.io and I'll leave links to this in the description below. So you can download etcher for Linux, Windows or Mac and it's great utility for flashing images to thumb drives or even SD cards in the case here for the RetroPi. And then retropi.org.uk slash download. Leave a link to this as well. This is where you can get the Raspberry Pi zero image or the Raspberry Pi two or three image. We're using a Raspberry Pi three. So I download this one here. Then here's what it looks like to run etcher. We're going to select the image. I'm going to go over here to downloads. Select RetroPi open. I have a flash disk in here and hit flash and it copies the image to there. And yes, I know I did this for an example because the flash disk I happen to put in is a one gig and this is a two gig image. And like Jay had mentioned, if you really want to put a lot of ROMs in here, you're going to want to get a larger card like a 64 or 128 so it can accommodate all the different games you may want to load on there. And no, don't ask where to download the games here on your own for that. So I plugged it in and the magic is happening. Beware of the invasion. Is that something custom you did? That's actually a custom splash screen that you can download within RetroPi. There's an extra splash screens thing in the settings. And then you basically just, yeah, you just basically set it to that. There's a bunch, over a hundred of them in there. That's neat. It's trying to access my local network. Which we have no networking turn on on us, so. Yeah, so if it doesn't get an IP address if you've already set up networking, it's going to keep trying and trying and eventually it fails. So let's go ahead and try some MAME. So I have a lot of games that I'm into here. So I'm a big Mortal Kombat fan. So of course that's what I'm going to gravitate to. So I'll go ahead and do that. You got King of Fighters too, that's great. Oh yeah, Samurai Showdown. It's a great one for arcade fighters. Street Fighter of course without everybody who has anything arcade has Street Fighter by default. So I don't even mention it. I spent so many quarters with this game. This glitch right here is perfectly normal with this game. It's a MAME issue. This happens on all platforms with this specific game that only in that one specific spot. Doesn't always happen, but. All right. That's cool. And that's it, you are on your retro pi game. That's cool. So just a couple other things I've set up here just to show you guys. So that was arcade and then we, I have all these systems set up. So pretty much everything, you know, that's a value to the 90s, at least most of them. Some of these I won't show you because, you know, Nintendo. But, whoops. Yeah, this controller's got a little bit of a sticky D-pad here. But basically here's PlayStation. So I have all these games set up. And yes, they all work. I've tried every single one of them. I have had no performance issues with any one of these games at all. So if I wanted to load up Final Fantasy VII, for example, it works. And I even downloaded these games such that you can change disks and multi-disk games without any issues. So actually hitting the menu, it'll actually allow you to switch disks. Oh, that's nice. Without having to like, you know, quit the game and like change your save file manually. It's kind of interesting to me, like this game when it came out blew me away. I thought it was like the best looking game ever. And I was so fascinated by it. And to now be playing it on what's considered a retro gaming solution is actually kind of fascinating to me. Because when this came out, everybody was talking about it. I bought it on release day. It took it home. My entire weekends were like spent doing nothing but playing this game. It holds up pretty well. I mean, it looks a little grainy. There's pre-rendered environments, but the retro pie is keeping up with it, no problem. And I could tell you, now getting too much of it into the gameplay, even PlayStation 1, which you think might be a performance bottleneck on such slower hardware, it works perfectly fine. I've had no issues working so far with any of the games that I've tested. Yeah, this is great. Who can get shot by a machine gun twice and still be standing by a fantasy? That's pretty cool. All right. So thanks for tuning in. We're gonna go play games now. We're gonna go play some games, yeah. All right, thanks. Thank you.