A SNES Themed Retropie Build
With the recent launch of the SNES Mini. Now seems a good time to post some details of the SNES themed Retropie box I recently built. People had seen my retropie setup and enjoyed playing the old games again. With a friends birthday coming up, I thought it would be
nice to build them their own setup to play at home.
For my own build I went with a standard case as the box would live in the television cabinet out of the way. #I’d used wired SNES style joypads. These worked fine but did mean sitting rather close to my television.
For this build, I whated to go with a SNES / Super Famicom case.
After some searching I did find a 3D printable case but didn’t end up going with that in the end. With the controllers, since the Pi 3 has built-in Bluetooth I went with some wireless joypads
Assembling the case and Pi was very simple and only took a few minutes. Setting up the software took a little more time. For the first boot of Retropie, it was useful to have a keyboard attached. The keyboard made entering the WiFi details much simpler. Pairing the joypads to the Pi and then configuing the button mapping was also less hassle.
I’ll leave finding suitable ROMs as an exercise for the reader. Once the ROMs were on the machine. I went and downloaded artwork for each ROM to give the setup a more professional look. One thing to not was you need to exit Emulation Station and not reboot to save the metadata. I only found that out after I’d done most of the games.
Parts
- 2 x SNES Bluetooth Gamepad
- 1 x Raspberry Pi 3
- 1 x 32 GB Imaging microSDHC Class 10 Memory Card
- 1 x SNES / Super Famicom 3D printed case
- 1 x Heatsink
- 1 x HDMI Cable
- 1 x USB 2.0 A-Male to Micro B Cable
- 1 x USB Charger PowerPort 5
- 4 x Self adhesive feet