Part 2b: Installing and Configuring RetroPie

Installing RetroPie and getting it to work with the Adafruit 2.8" PiTFT LCD Screen ($34.95) was kind of a convoluted process. For one reason, the Raspberry Pi 3 was very new when I started and the wonderful folks at Adafruit.com had only just updated some of there documentation and images to work with the RPi 3 update. Initially, I had purchased a 3.2" PiTFT LCD Screen, but couldn't get it to work with RPi 3 and EmulationStation/RetroPie combo. I worked on it for 6+ hours, trying everything I could find online. During that attempt, I also butchered the header pins on the screen which may have also caused an issue. I really don't know. I gave up and ordered the 2.8" PiTFT as a replacement because I found a couple of threads on the Adafruit forum confirming they got it working with the RPi 3.

RetroPie

Overall, I'm very impressed with this distribution. It's simple, it works, and has a nice user interface. I'm not going to break down all the instructions for installation here as it would be just a poor facsimile of what others have already done.

RetroPie First Install Instructions

To actually get the image on the SD card, I used ApplePi Baker for Mac OS X. I'm sure there are similar tools for Windows, but I'll be damned if I know what they are.

So you followed the directions and have an SD card all baked up, next you're going to want to plug in a keyboard and HDMI connected to a monitor or TV. Power up the RPi with a USB adapter and you'll be presented with the Emulation Station boot screen. It's probably easiest to just plug-in a network cable to the RPi and your router. This is helpful later when transferring ROMs as they will transport faster.

Hitting F4 on the keyboard will take you to the command line. If you're not familiar with the command line, you might want to do some reading as a large part of the rest of this tutorial is all done in the via text editors and such.

First thing to do is to discover your IP address so we can login via SSH (see WinSCP or Putty for weendows users). Type in the command `ip addr sh` and look for en0 with an IP address.

Back on your computer, use a terminal window to ssh into the RPi.

 ssh pi@192.168.11.158  

Replace '192.168.11.158' with the IP address you found above. The password is "raspberry" by default.

PiTFT LCD Screen

Follow these instructions from Adafruit.com and that will get you some output on the screen when attached. To get the EmulationStation/RetroPie to display correctly follow these additional instructions. The only thing I did differently was used the following line for dtoverlay= in /boot/config.txt

 dtoverlay=pitft28r,rotate=270,speed=64000000,fps=60  

I installed my screen upside to get everything to fit better, thus "rotate=270", the speed=64000000 and fps=60 for smoother graphics. After making these changes I could no longer use my HDMI cable on my monitor. This is normal as far as I understand because my monitor doesn't support HDMI with such a low resolution. At this point I was working entirely in SSH anyways so it didn't make much of a difference.

With all of that done, I was about at the point in the end of Part 2 video.