Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

And by using the Raspberry Pi and freely available software, you can build something capable of doing a whole heck of a lot more than playing the same 30 NES games over and over again. It turns out that the NES Classic Edition is just a little Linux-powered board inside a cute case, and it’s totally possible to build your own tiny Linux-powered computer inside a cute case without spending much more than $60.

3 again,” and “ Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is probably the weakest of the three NES Castlevania games.” Since it’s not entirely clear if or when those little mini NESes will become readily available, I decided to funnel that small wad of expendable cash and the desire for some nostalgia-fueled gaming into a DIY project. In both cases, I failed.īut the dumb itch of nostalgia can’t always be scratched by logical thoughts like “do you really need to pay money for Super Mario Bros. Configuration is fairly straightforward if you know the numeric codes for all the buttons on your gamepad.Further Reading Hands-on: NES Classic Edition puts old games in a very small packageĪgainst my better judgment, I’ve tried a couple of times to snag one of those adorable little $60 mini NES Classic Editions-once when Amazon put some of its limited stock online and crashed its own site, and once when Walmart was shipping out small quantities every day a couple of weeks ago. Its configuration file is in the same directory as te executables, and is called snes9x.cfg. You’ll also need to configure PiSNES to work with your gamepad, and possibly to fit your display.

Just comment out the COMMAND line that’s currently in use and uncomment the one that points to PiSNES. Fortunately, the RetroPie-Setup script adds the command for you as an alternative. To run PiSNES from EmulationStation, you’ll need to edit the ~/.emulationstation/es_systems.cfg file to point to it instead of RetroArch. gui version has its own interface and is meant to be run from x11 or directly from the terminal, whereas snes9x is meant to be run from RetroPie or as part of a command line argument like “snes9x /path/to/your/rom/”. Inside you’ll find two executables: snes9x and snes9x.gui. PiSNES is installed in ~/RetroPie/emulators/PiSNES. Then run the installation, and exit RetroPie-Setup. Select Install from sources and deselect everything except Install PiSNESEmulator. You can either install it from their Google Code page, or from RetroPi-Setup. I highly recommend installing and configuring it. It’s recently been incorporated into the RetroPie-Setup script, though it’s not (as far as I know) currently the default. Currently, the best SNES emulator available for the Raspberry Pi is PiSNES, a nicely done port of an early (faster, less accurate) version of SNES9x.

Mac emulator retropie