Retrogaming, and retro in general, has been gaining momentum lately. Bearded men are collecting devices to run ancient games, NES and SNES mini came out, Nokia 3310 came to life. Of course, this movement did not pass me by either, especially since I also have a beard, some kind of beard, but there is. I’m building a "retro console" based on old junk on socket 478 in a case from an old amplifier. But due to the cold weather, and mostly because of laziness, that “project” is frozen for now. Yes, and it makes sense just for lulz. I wanted something more functional and ergonomic. And so my attention focused on the Raspberry Pi microcomputer. Of course, this will not be anything new, but it will be my personal experience and my own story.
Here I have already collected everything like this. I came home from school and sat playing Colin McRae Rally 2.0
I assembled the “console” on Raspberry Pi 3B and NESpi. And this method was not without problems.
The first problem is the price.
Unfortunately, Raspberry itself is expensive. But the roads are not in absolute numbers, but in comparison. Well, forty bucks is not something exorbitant. But the Orange Pi, which has similar characteristics and can do the same thing, costs almost half as much. But there is no authentic cover for the orange. And for raspberries there is. True, and it costs as much as half of this very raspberry. Just a piece of plastic, with a couple of basic “expansion cards” costing half the device itself… and at the same price as an analogue of this very device… Yes, for that money you can buy a new MicroATX case. They just… ate a fly!
But it’s not such a big problem. There are ways to get this iron cheaper. You can finish the cover so that an orange can fit in there. You can take a cheap non-authentic case. Yes, at least pull the board to the tree with self-tapping screws. And basically, sixty bucks isn’t that much money. But that’s just the basis. It won’t work on its own. The device needs to be powered from something, data needs to be uploaded somewhere, and in the end, games need to be played on something. And then the price tag can easily exceed a hundred bucks. And this is the price of a mini PC on windows, which, in fact, is a full-fledged workstation and also provides access to games on Windows, at the same time it is much more productive and has everything necessary for work included initially. In addition to software and gamepads, of course.
Here is my minimum set
In my case, all the accompanying persimmons were already available. In the end, it cost me about three thousand rubles “clean”. I’m ready to sacrifice this amount for a trinket, which, nevertheless, I will take out a couple of times a year and play with friends, introduce my nephews and other young (and not so young) relatives to gaming classics, with which I myself am not very familiar. And since you can also install a media center there at the same time, at the same time it will replace my old whistle on Android. In general, the thing turned out to be useful and relatively inexpensive.
Problem two – DIY
The fact is that Raspberry is https://77wcasino.co.uk/games/ positioned as a teaching computer. As a result, the delivery package includes a bare board and waste paper. Please get the rest and install it yourself. Overall, nothing complicated. There are ready-made bolt on kits available. They say that even flash drives with OS already installed are sold. Take it, assemble it and set it up with instructions that even the mentally retarded can understand – typical modern DIY.
At the mention of such DIY, somewhere in the world one Danya Kraster is sad
But this needs to be done, studied, configured. And, returning to the first point, if you want everything at once, pay more. If you want something better and cheaper, look for it and buy it in parts, saw and plan it – buy it like an adult, in short. There are many nuances and you will have to face some of them. On the circuit – bought it, connected it to the TV, I started looking for the reason why there was no video signal, then why Wi-Fi didn’t connect, then registration and wait three hours for the firmware to be updated, not counting the long download of games and you sit and play – it doesn’t look like… well, it really doesn’t look like it, everything will be cooler here.
Well, where have you seen (and if you have seen, how often have you seen) that games on consoles would not start? This is not uncommon with emulators. And, in principle, the breadth of possibilities gives rise to the magnitude of sexual intercourse with settings. Here you need to adjust the performance, tweak the graphics here, edit the file there, convert it, delete it, save the settings, etc., etc. But here you can play with four players online too. There are also restrictions on formats. But for the most part, everything works as is.
But the graphone is pumped up significantly. And this is far from the limit
As a result, you can still get a device with a set of games, so you can simply plug it in, plug in the gamepads and play, but before that you’ll have to dig a little (or a lot).
Naturally, these are not all the possibilities. You can download a bunch of different operating systems here, and keep them on the device at the same time. There are full-fledged working environments for programming and editing media files. There are media combines. There are browsers. There are different shells for emulating games. And this is only a small part of the list, what can be done with it in a couple of clicks. And if you bother with programming and GPIO, then the horizons of use will expand many times over.
Now more to the point
Returning to our Svens, this thing came to me. I glued heatsinks to the memory and Ethernet controller. I cut out a heatsink from the bridge of a donor motherboard for the processor. Instead of a 30 mm and 5 volt fan (the chickens laugh), I switched it to 40 mm and 12 volts. As a bonus, I received a slight buzzing sound, similar to that from the transformer power supplies that met the “dandy”. Moreover, a meter from the “console” this “feature” is already on the verge of audibility. +1 to authenticity.
A little bit of internal “collective farm”
Here it must be said that such fraud is wrong. If you hook up a 12 volt torque converter to 5 volts, then you would need to install a step-up converter up to 7 volts. It will spin much more vigorously, not louder, and most likely even quieter. But personally, in my case, the need for a fan is generally in doubt, because the radiators are much more massive than expected “from the factory.”. Several hours of chasing PS1 toys didn’t do anything bad. And, although it was not possible to monitor the temperature, nothing slowed it down either, because.e. throttling, along the way, did not turn on (but it is here). And the load on the CPU was unlikely to be serious.
–Next came a set of gamepads. These are two each similar to SNES and a couple more similar to old DualShocks. I used to buy them when they were the cheapest. Modified, reassembled, glued – and now they are fully functional and suitable for comfortable use. But this only applies to buttons. If you need sticks and vibration, then you shouldn’t skimp on gamepads.
–A flash drive needs 16 gigs. This volume is quite enough for a couple of operating systems, and for a dozen games for the PS1 (“trifles” from the NES and Sega Mega Drive can be ignored). But bigger is naturally better. I found as much as 64 GB.
–Good phone charging for a couple of amps or more, a long HDMI cable so you can place the device further away from the TV. That’s all, actually.
Lakka was chosen as the gaming OS. Not because it is somehow better, but simply because I am already familiar with it and I am completely satisfied with its functionality and convenience. This thing is simple, in fact, a ready-made solution on RetroArch, installed from the alternative PINN loader yourself (you can also find other options there). The only more or less serious and not obvious nuance is that you will need to find and upload several files with BIOSes, which, apparently, due to copyright problems, are not included in the original distribution. It’s very simple, t.To. support for ssh and smb is initially provided. The second protocol allows you to log into the device over the network using standard Windows tools and upload all the necessary files, including game roms.
