This instruction is short version of Retropie Wiki Page that you can see it Here.
What is RetroPie?
RetroPie allows you to turn your Raspberry Pi or PC into a retro-gaming machine. It builds upon Raspbian, EmulationStation, RetroArch and many other projects to enable you to play your favorite Arcade, home-console, and classic PC games with the minimum set-up. For power users it also provides a large variety of configuration tools to customize the system as you want.
What Is An Emulator?
An emulator is software that makes a computer behave like another computer, or in the case of RetroPie a computer that behaves like a video game console such as the Super Nintendo. The RetroPie SD image comes pre-installed with many different emulators.
What Are ROMs?
ROMs are digital versions of game cartridges. Loading up a ROM in an emulator is the equivalent of putting a cartridge in a game console.
ROMs are copyrighted content and as such are not included with RetroPie.
Configure Controllers
On first boot your filesystem will be expanded automatically, you will then be welcomed with the following screen- this menu will configure your controls for both Emulationstation and RetroArch Emulators:
Hold down any button on your keyboard or gamepad and the name will appear at the bottom and then open up into a configuration menu:
Follow the onscreen instructions to configure your gamepad- if you run out of buttons just hold down a button to skip each unused button. When you get to OK press the button you have configured as "A".
If you wish to configure more than one controller, you can do so from the start menu of emulationstation. For more details on manual controller configurations see this page Here.
See the following diagrams for reference:
| SNES Controller |
|---|
 |
Hotkeys
Hotkeys enable you to press a combination of buttons to access functions such as saving, loading, and exiting emulators. The following chart shows the default hotkey combinations. By default, the hotkey is select so that means you hold down select while pressing another button to execute a command. Note that hotkeys are only specific to the retroarch/libretro based emulators.
| Hotkeys | Action |
|---|---|
| Select+Start | Exit |
| Select+Right Shoulder | Save |
| Select+Left Shoulder | Load |
| Select+Right | Input State Slot Increase |
| Select+Left | Input State Slot Decrease |
| Select+X | RGUI Menu |
| Select+B | Reset |
EmulationStation
| Where are the systems? |
|---|
| When you first see EmulationStation you may wonder why you don't see systems like the SNES or Game Boy- worry not- they are installed on the system, roms just need to be added to their respective rom folders before they will become visible. Transferring roms are described in the following steps. |
 |
Wifi
If you wish to use wifi to transfer roms over the network rather than a USB stick or Ethernet cable you'll need to setup your wifi- which can also be done from the Retropie menu in emulationstation:
| Connect to Wifi Network: |
|---|
 |
| Choose your SSID from a list: |
|---|
 |
| Type your Wifi Password (may take a moment to connect) |
|---|
 |
| Once configured you will see your IP address |
|---|
 |
For more WiFi configuration options see this page HERE
Installing additional Emulators
On RetroPie 4.0+, not everything is installed by default. The pre-made images contain the best working emulators for each system supported by the hardware. This should cover everything most users would be doing. Ports like quake and doom and some other emulators like ScummVM can be installed later.
Software can be installed from the RetroPie-Setup script - which is accessible from the RetroPie menu on EmulationStation. Once there you can navigate to "Manage Packages" where you will see various sections. In each section are lists of packages that can be installed (and it will show what is currently installed). Stable additional packages are under the "Optional" section, with more unstable packages listed under experimental. The packages are ordered first by type (emulators / libretro cores / ports), then alphabetically. By selecting a package you can choose to install it, or remove it. Some packages also have additional configurations.
Transferring Roms
Due to the nature/complexity of Copyright/Intellectual Property Rights Law, which differs significantly from Country to Country, ROMs cannot be provided with RetroPie and must be provided by the user. You should only have ROMs of games that you own.
There are three main methods of transferring roms:
USB
- (ensure that your USB is formatted to FAT32 or NTFS)
- first create a folder called
retropieon your USB stick - plug it into the pi and wait for it to finish blinking
- pull the USB out and plug it into a computer
- add the roms to their respective folders (in the
retropie/romsfolder) - plug it back into the raspberry pi
- wait for it to finish blinking
- refresh emulationstation by choosing restart emulationstation from the start menu
see this video for reference:
SFTP
NOTE you need to enable SSH in order for SFTP to work.
- Wired (needs ethernet cable)
- Wireless (needs wifi dongle) There are many SFTP programs out there, for windows many people use WinSCP for mac you can use something like Cyberduck
Default username: pi
Default Password: raspberry
You can also log in as root if you wish to change more files than just the roms, but you first need to enable the root password which is explained here
Samba-Shares
- if on windows type
\\retropieinto the computer folder. You can also replaceretropiewith your Raspberry Pi's IP address
- if on MAC OS X open finder, select "Go" menu and "Connect to Server". Type
smb://retropieand hit "Connect".
PLAY!
After you've added your roms you need to restart emulationstation in order for them to show up. You can restart emulationstation from the start menu, or by rebooting your pi with sudo reboot.
See the rest of the docs for more detailed information on individual emulators, advanced settings etc. If you still can't figure it out, the RetroPie community is very helpful on the forum.