Best Retro Pie Build

This tutorial is geared towards beginners who want to install Retropie on their Raspberry Pi 3 or 3B+. This tutorial is for Windows users.

Materials:

Raspberry Pi 3 – https://amzn.to/3515u3Y or 3b+ – https://amzn.to/33VdDp3
Power adapter (2.5 x 5) – https://amzn.to/2Yt2sTA
SD card – https://amzn.to/2LxgDBD
USB Wired Gamepad – https://amzn.to/356t936 or WIreless – https://amzn.to/2sVPfXK

Optional:

Rasberry Pi Case – https://amzn.to/3411rmX

Software:

Latest Version of Retropie – https://retropie.org.uk/download/
Balena Etcher – https://www.balena.io/etcher/
Winrar – https://www.rarlab.com/
SD Card Formatter – https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/eula_windows/index.html

Step 1: Setting Up All Your Software

Before anything else let’s first set up all your software accordingly. Download The latest Version of Retropie from the link above. Make sure youre downloading the Retropie version for the Raspberry Pi 3/3b+. This will take a few minutes to download, I recommend downloading it to your desktop for easy access.

Next download Balena Etcher. This is the software program we will use to Flash (burn or copy) the Retropie download onto the SD card. Go ahead and select the Windows download then go through the installation Wizard. This should be a fairly easy process.

Now download SD card formatter from the SD card association. Also like you did for Etcher, just follow the installation Wizard. This software program is what we will use to format the sd card. You could also use CMD, or Disk Part but this seems to be the easiest way to do it for beginners.

Now download Winrar. This isn’t always necessary but to ensure everything goes accordingly let’s download it just to be safe. Select your operating system and follow the installation wizard as well.

Step 2: SD Card Prep

Now take your SD cardout of the packaging and insert it into your laptop/pc. Some of you may not had a micro SD card slot and will need to use a USB card reader. Once you popped the SD card in open up SD card formatter. Select the drive letter for the SD card and select for your format option “FAT32”.

Go ahead and click format and in a few seconds your card should be ready to use.

Leave the SD card attached to your PC and now open up Etcher, Select the file you want to Flash on the SD card. This will be your RETROPIEdownload. Then select the drive where you want to flash these files which should be the drive letter for the SD card.

Click the button to begin the flashing process which will take anywhere from 3-10 minutes depending on your SD cards classification.

Step 3: Plugging in your Raspberry Pi

Take your Raspberry Pi out of the box and connect the USB Controller, The power adapter(dont plug it into the power source yet), and connect an HDMI cable from the Pi to a spare monitor.

Take the SD card once its done flashing Retropie and place it inside yourraspberry pi.

Now that everything’s plugged in plug your raspberry pi’s power cable to a power source. You will see a rainbow splash screen flash for a few seconds followed shortly by the Retropie logo. After the Emulation Station boot screen your system will detect your gamepad and ask you to press and hold the A button. Hold the A button and it will then direct you to the game pad set up.

This can be confusing at first for some beginners. All you have to do is press and hold the button that it prompts you to. If you run our of buttons (for example youre using an SNES gamepad so you dont have analogs) just press and hold any key to skip it.

Very important!!! When you get to “Enable Hotkey” press and hold the start and select buttons. This will Allow you to exit games.

Once you have set up your game pad you will reach the retropie home screen.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully set upRetropie on your raspberry pi! Next week we will walk you all through the steps to adding games, Kodi, and changing the skins and other features of Retropie.