Bitbugs Lab

I was one of those who charged after the Nintendo Classic Edition plug’n’play consoles that came out last year, but like most others I was also one the people who did not manage to get on before they were discontinued.

However I soon learned that building one yourself using a Raspberry Pi makes much more sense. Not only does is that cheaper, but it also gives you a device that can emulate many other low bit gaming consoles (C64, Atari, SNES, Game Boy etc.).

So I found this nifty guide from the How To Geek site and stocked up on the basic materials needed to get started:

The controllers are USB-based mockups of the classic NES-controllers. I prefer the ones from Retro-Link, which can be found on eBay. The Raspberry Pi microboard and all internals I bought from the excellent Danish vendor raspberrypi.dk (which is an Approved Reseller).

Furthermore you’ll need the Retropie software and some NES-game roms (= games), which can be downloaded in bulk from many sites across the webz, for instance from this 3,538 games-pack. I also put some SNES roms on there from this pack of 777 games.

Putting the thing together is fairly quick; I spent roughly an hour on it using the above guide (flashing the software onto the Pi using the open source Etcher tool, which works well for OS X, finding the right roms, etc.).

In addition I spent some time learning to use the built-in file manager of Retropie, which is easy if you are used to using the linux shell (terminal), which I can but don’t do often. You mainly need to copy roms onto the board, and a good resource for such basic shell comments can be found here. I also used the Retropie documentation and this instructional video. Note: The Raspberry Pi defaults to US-keyboard (as opposed to my EU/Danish keyboard), so when using the shell it’s useful to have this image of the US-keyboard layout handy, so you’ll hit the right keys.

Lastly, I want to use my great new retrogaming kit on the go, so I searched around a bit for handy bag to carry it in. In the end I opted for one of the old Game Boy carry bags, which are easily found sold on used gear-sites, for instance this Danish one called RetroBros.dk. I also picked up a neat Raspberry Pi case off of Etsy vendor theC4Labs (although was very tempted to opt for this 3D-printed one, too).

Happy retrogaming!