I’ve loved Nintendo games for as long as I can remember being alive.
I can wax nostalgic all day long about the various game systems over the years and my undying love therein, and I’m sure I will one day – but not today.
This is simply to share my idea I’m starting and will start posting instructions, HOWTOs, and various links to and about: Project RetröΠörteR.
As a way of distracting myself and working on something productive, I’ve been working on building a bar-top Retropie cabinet, as I had finally purchased the cabinet hardware two years ago when Vilros had it on sale for one-third what it retailed for.
Currently, I have a Raspberry Pi 4/8GB installed with a 32GB SD card. Connected to the USB2.0 port is a plethora of items on a 7-port powered Belkin USB hub:
A 1TB USB 2.0 Lacie Hard Drive
A 2TB USB 2.0 Western Digital Hard Drive
A 8BitDo SN30 Pro in USB Mode
An Apple Keyboard
And at any time, any of these five Vilros controllers of varying type.
Lastly, the internals of the Vilros Table-top Arcade cabinet I mentioned.
As I write this, the mighty little 4 ARM cores are chugging away at scraping my collection of 60,000+ ROM files. I suspect this is going to take multiple days to complete, so she’s sitting for a bit to complete processing.
Given the nature of how long this takes, I’ve setup SkyScraper to cache all the requests locally, as to have a local copy to move amongst my various emulator systems.
Doing all of this, I had to relearn how to do it, as I had last looked at this pre-2020 pandemic, so my memory was rusty, and the software had changed.
As such, as I was working my way through the various configurations, I found myself all over the place, domestically and internationally, trying to find answers, configuration files, updated shaders, High definition texture packs, etc, and realized that if I need to do this again, I didn’t want to have to go searching again.
As such, the aforementioned Project RetröΠörteR was conceived.
Sitting here on Suberb Owl Sunday, I was working on a name, went down a rabbit hole, and here we are.
One of the projects I was working on before the Pandemic kicked our collective asses was a controller autoconfigurator – plug in a controller, and the software would recognize what it is and configure the controller for the various emulators within Retropie. This all stemmed from those aforementioned Vilros controllers, and not being able to get the N64 controller to function correctly without a HELL of a battle for some reason.
After trying to get the 8Bitdo controller and the Mayflash operating correctly between EmulationStation and Retroarch, I’m again inspired to work on this.
I also plan on documenting and archiving all the work I do to get my little tabletop, and ultimately a MAME full-sized cab, operational.
Come along if you’re interested.
Once I have the extra cash to register a domain, I’ll get it proper. At the moment, it’s going to be using new.space, Github, and this site to do all the documentation and storage.
