Putting a spare SBC to repurpose an old device has always been a joy for me. I have an old monitor that doesn't fit into my current setup, but can still serve as an excellent wall-mounted gaming station. Once the repainting finishes, I intend to put it in a corner of my drawing room. I also thought of building a simple retro gaming corner in my house where I, or my niece, can play some old but good games in my spare time.

I chose the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W for this project because it can handle basic retro gaming well and doesn't need much power to work. The retro gaming setup won't have many elements except the Pi and gaming controller connected to it, and that's the kind of simplicity I was expecting from this project. Let's discuss how the project shaped up and what you need to remember when building a retro gaming corner.

Picking the right operating system

Multitude of options

Several game-centric operating systems are available for Raspberry Pi, and RetroPie is undoubtedly one of the popular ones out there. I picked it because of its extensive community support and integration of all the popular emulators, paired with a clean interface. I used the Raspberry Pi Imager tool to write the RetroPie on the SD card, and I suggest you do the same. The tool will download the required files and write and verify your installation in one go.

If you have an unstable network connection, you can download the official image file and then use a tool like balenaEtcher to write it to the SD card. I found the download speed excruciatingly slow while downloading the image from the official site.

After that, eject the SD card, plug it into the Pi, and connect the monitor via HDMI cable. Note that you'll need a game controller to set up the RetroPie machine for the first time. You can also try with a keyboard, but the controller route is much simpler. Since I used a generic controller, I had to manually map keys, which took 4–5 minutes to set up and boot to the interface.

Setting up RetroPie

It needs a little effort

You need to take care of a few things before you add game ROMs to your RetroPie. You must set the region and enable SSH on the Pi for remote access. Before setting up the Wi-Fi, I used the controller to select the Raspi-config option and launch the BIOS settings.

I set the correct region using settings and enabled SSH on the Pi by accessing the system settings section. SSH is necessary if you want to run commands and control the RetroPie via terminal and don't want to physically connect a keyboard to the system. While the gamepad is usable, I prefer SSH to control it from my PC, which has a keyboard.

After enabling the necessary settings, you need to enable Wi-Fi as well. It'll be useful for several things, including updating the system, remote access via SSH, and scraping game content.

To add a Wi-Fi network, select the option from the menu and then search for all the available networks. This step saves you the trouble of entering a complicated SSID, after which you can enter the password using the on-screen keyboard. Once done, use the Show IP option in the RetroPie menu to learn the correct one for SSH or transferring games.

Adding Games to the Pi

Bring all your favorite ROMs

There are several ways to do it, including network sharing or physically copying the files. But I find the USB method easy because RetroPie does half the work for you. To start, you need a USB drive formatted as FAT32, which is easy to do in any operating system.

After that, you must plug the USB drive into the RetroPie and wait a few seconds. Why so? That's because the OS creates several folders that match the actual folder tree on the Pi. It includes folders for all the game devices where you must paste the available game ROMs.

Wait 30 seconds or so, then remove the USB drive and re-plug it into your computer. Now, paste all the game ROMs in their appropriate folders on the USB drive and reconnect it to the RetroPie. Now, it will automatically copy all the ROMs from the proper folders on the USB drive to the SD card.

If you copied a lot of games, give the Pi 10–15 minutes to copy everything, and then remove the USB drive. Restart your Pi after using the configuration menu or running the reboot command via SSH, which I prefer.

The RetroPie menu will display the available device games in the carousel. If you aren't sure about the copy session, use the File Browser utility and check the ROMs folder for available games.

Another neat trick is to simply access the RetroPie storage using File Explorer on Windows. Type \\IPaddressofPi (eg - \\192.168.x.x) in the address bar and hit Enter to access the folders. Type your credentials, which are usually Pi and Raspberry by default. You can then transfer all the ROMs to the designated folders using drag and drop or delete the ones you don’t want.

Gaming on the Pi

Nostalgia hits

Now everything is in order, and you can go ahead and run games. I tried a few from the MAME project, and they ran fine without any issues. I did have to learn the button controls in the first few attempts before getting the play through right. Since RetroPie offers so many emulators, you can always try using a different one in the launch window.

It is capable of running fairly popular arcade games without any hiccups. The temperature hovered in the 50-55 range most of the time, but I didn't try overclocking the Pi. It might get a small boost from that, but since the games I like worked fine with it, I chose to stay with the default settings. I also used the Scraper utility to fetch information cards and images for the games present in the library.

RetroPie is a breeze on the Pi Zero 2 W

It's a clean, wall-mounted retro gaming setup with only one dangling wire belonging to the gamepad. I can power the setup via a switch and close the system from the OS settings or via SSH. I am glad that the Pi Zero 2 W handled it so well, despite being an entry-level SBC. Surely, some demanding N64 and PlayStation titles will pose a challenge, but that doesn't ruin the fun when you have so many options.