Today we're making a retro gaming setup that will allow you to play nearly any console or handheld older than a DS or PSP. This setup will let you bring your own controller and play local multiplayer and possibly play split screen but online with somebody else. It will also let you add upscaling to get some really nice and crispy gameplay, apply whatever shaders you want and integrate retro achievements. A wickedly cool online service that adds a unified achievement system to retro titles. Yes, even if the games never supported achievements in the first place.

And of course you can play pretty much any game ever released on these consoles, you just need to go and legally acquire the ROMs yourself. Welcome back to Core Electronics, I'm Jared and today's mission is to see how much 2048 I can play on company time without getting fired. Editor, can we get a little counter going up here? Thank you very much. To follow along this build you'll need a Raspberry Pi. We're using the Pi 5 here for its speed, but there is support for older models as well. This guide will be about the Pi 5 though because we could run pretty much any title we pleased with resolution upscaling as well and we didn't run into any issues.

In terms of RAM, 4GB is going to be optimal. You could get away with 2GB but you might run into some issues with newer consoles and certain heavier titles, which is why Recalbox themselves recommends 4GB. It will of course work on an 8 or 16GB model but that is so much overkill that you're not ever going to use that much RAM in this setup. We're also going to need a microSD card to boot the Pi off and hold all of our games. Older games like ones for the N64 will be maybe a few megabytes per game, but newer games for systems like the PS1 or Dreamcast can be up to a good gigabyte or so. I think a 64GB microSD is probably a good size here. Get a larger card if you wanted to store newer games, it's up to you here.

We're going to need a way to keep the Pi cool as well. The Active Cooler is a great option, but if you do want to be all classy and get a cool retro case for it, they often come with an appropriate cooler. And we'll also need a USB power supply for the Pi, as well as a keyboard, mouse, microSD card reader and controllers. Most Bluetooth and USB controllers will work and Recalbox has a list of supported controllers that you can go and check out. Now, I want two shirts in my life, MicroPython Shilt and 8BitDo Shilt. 8BitDo controllers are just next level, my favourite premium controllers by far and I can rave on about them for a whole video. Crazy underrated controllers, so that's what I'm using here. But again, you can use whatever you're comfortable with. I guess it's okay if it's not 8BitDo. I think the guide might still work.

You can find everything you'll need in the written version of this guide, which also has some more in-depth instructions if you need a hand with anything. That's linked below. Starting off, let's install Recalbox. Now, Recalbox is the operating system that kind of weaves everything together. It's what makes a lot of this a clean and effortless experience. There are some other big alternatives to use like RetroPie and Batocera. There are pros and cons to all of them, but they're all pretty good nowadays. I do, however, think Recalbox has the easiest and smoothest out-of-the-box experience.

To install Recalbox, plug your microSD card into your computer. And then we're going to go ahead and download and install the official Raspberry Pi imager. Once you've installed it, choose your device. We're going to be choosing the Pi 5 here. And under Operating Systems, we're just going to go down to Emulation and Game OS and then select Recalbox and Recalbox, whatever version you want. Then under Storage Device, we're going to choose our microSD card. Please ensure you select the correct device here because you will erase absolutely everything that is on there. So back up anything and don't accidentally overwrite a USB or something like that.

Once that's done installing, go ahead and install your Pi's cooler and case or whatever you got with it. Insert your SD card, plug in your power and connect it to your TV and hit that power button. Recalbox is then going to go through a first-time setup and then we'll enter our homepage with all of our systems. Now, before you go ahead and connect your Bluetooth controller, you need to start with a USB controller or keyboard first. I'm going to be using my keyboard here and I'm going to press Enter to open up the menu. And then I'm going to use the arrow keys to go down to Controller Settings and press A to confirm. A and S are your A and B keys here on your keyboard. And I'm just going to select Pair Bluetooth Controller, run through, and I'm going to enter my Bluetooth controller into pairing mode. Hey, there we go. I'm going to go through and do its thing. Automatically pair, come on. Beautiful. Now we can use our Bluetooth controller. We can get rid of this keyboard now. I'd much rather use my 8BitDo. And obviously, once you've paired your controller, it should automatically connect every time, just like a regular console.

While we're here, we're going to go ahead and change our pad OSD type. I'm going to set this to Xbox because I'm using the Xbox layout. This is just going to make all of the menus more friendly to this type of controller selected here. I'm going to go ahead and connect another controller here. And as you can see, it's going to automatically just pop up here. It's just a wired controller. And if you want to reassign which player has which controller, you can just do so in the menu here. Just a handy little thing to know. Something worth doing here is reconfiguring your controller. By default, it should work out of the box, but there might be some key or button conflicts here. For example, the hotkey, which is a very important button, is assigned to my power button, and you're going to be using that a lot, and that's probably not a good thing.

So I'm going to back out of this and go back into it. You need to kind of do that the first time you pair a controller. So we'll go ahead and configure our controller. So we'll press the button on the controller we want to configure, and then super straightforward, just go through and press all the buttons that it's asking for. And then for the hotkey, I'm just going to assign it to select, and remember what you used as a hotkey because it's going to be very important later. And with that, we can go ahead and jump into a game. Now in our menu, you only see consoles that you have games for. So no PS1 games means I don't have a PS1 selectable on here. Wait a minute though, I haven't installed any games yet, so why am I seeing all these consoles? Well, that's because Recalbox comes with a few open source games that can be distributed legally. So let's just test this and go ahead and boot up my favorite game on the NES 2048, and hey, look at that, it works. All right, let's go ahead and play a game of 2048. Happens to the best of us.

To load your own ROMs into Recalbox, you just need to transfer it into a specific file on your SD card. The easiest way to do this is actually through your local network. So go ahead and plug your Pi into Ethernet, or you can connect it via Wi-Fi by going to the start menu, going to network settings, and enabling it in the configuration details there. Once you've got it connected to your home network, on a desktop PC, go into the file explorer, and in the address, type backslash backslash, and then the IP address that you see under network settings. Beautiful. By the way, usually once you've punched this in, you can also instead go backslash backslash Recalbox, like so, and get to the exact same place. What we're looking at here are the files on your Pi, which is just really handy that, you know, you can download it on any PC and just push all your ROMs to your Recalbox. Go into ROMs internal, and you will see all the systems that you can have ROMs for, and all you really need to do is just copy it into one of these files. Just be aware that the console you're after might have a bit of a weird name, like the PS1 isn't actually called the PS1, it's called the PSX. Inside each of these is also a super handy readme file, if you open it up. It says what, you know, emulators are supported, and more importantly, what ROM extensions are supported. So you're going to need to ensure that your ROM is one of these here.

If you can't connect your system to the internet, you can also shut down your Pi, take out your micro SD card, plug it into your PC, and you'll see the exact same files and can just copy it over like that instead. Once you've copied over what you want on your Recalbox, hit start, go down to UI settings, and you want to update your game list, like so. And it'll go ahead and do a quick reboot, and you'll have all your games there when it's finished. Alrighty, so I've gone ahead and copied over a ROM for a little open source game jam from 2024, and as you can see, it's appeared here. Now let's go ahead and run it. I don't know how that happened, I'm sorry, I was just itching to play some 2048. Now, some quick tips while you're gaming. First of all, how to save, that's probably an important one. When I boot up 2048, Recalbox started up an emulator, which is just a program that virtually simulates console hardware. And my 2048 ROM here is then just loaded as a game onto that virtual console, and then we go off and play it. If you press your hotkey and A buttons, you will bring up your emulator menu. Different consoles will use different emulators, but chances are it'll look something like this, which is based on RetroArch. In this menu are a whole bunch of things that you can change to tweak how your console works, just something really handy to know and possibly to dive deep into later. And I'll press those buttons again to exit our menu.

Now, to save a game, we're going to need to do it through our emulator by creating a save state with hotkey and X, like so. You can see the confirmation in the bottom left. And then let's say we go through and do a few things like that, be a bit of a 2048 wizard. Beautiful. And to load our state back, all we need to do is press hotkey and Y. And that takes us back to that snapshot that we created when we saved the game. There are also save slots that you can use. So I'm going to press hotkey and up to change to slot one. And if we press hotkey and down, we'll go back to save slot zero. So let's go to save slot one and just do a few random movements and then hotkey X to save it and then do a few random movements. I'm going to press hotkey Y to revert back to our save. And then if I go to our other save slot instead and revert it, we'll go back to a different state. And if you want to exit your game, you can press hotkey and the start button to go back to your recall menu. And if we open up our game again, we can simply press hotkey and Y to load back into wherever we just left off. And just a cool little thing, you can actually fast forward the game with hotkey and right, which we're not going to really...

anything going on here. And if I just do a few things, we can also do the reverse with hotkey and left, which is a bit more noticeable. And with that, you should be able to get going playing 2048 or, you know, really whatever game you want to play on this. But that's not all we can do. So let's look at a few nice little things that we can add. First of all, let's look at BIOS. When you launch some games, you might be told that it doesn't have the required BIOS files. Now, most games can probably work without these files just fine. But if you run into some games having, you know, maybe launching issues or instability or any sort of weird artifacts, it's probably worth setting this up. In the main menu, if you head on over to BIOS checking, you can go through and see a list of all the consoles that you have here and all the BIOS files that may or may not be present. And it's going to tell you the name of the file that's missing as well as where it needs to go. All the information is on the right there.

Now, Recalbox includes the BIOS files that it can, but distributing BIOS files is kind of like distributing ROMs. So we can't tell you where to get copies of these from. But once you have your BIOS files, you can just get them into your Pi exactly the same way you do with the ROMs. But you need to head on over to the BIOS folder instead. Next up is scraping. When you hover over these default games here, you'll see like this little nice box art and some information. However, if you copied over any games like our Game Jam here, you'll find that it doesn't have this. This can be fixed with Scraper. In your main Recalbox menu, go ahead and select Scraper. And you've got a few options here if you want to do something custom, but if not, just leave it as it is. If you select Systems, you'll be able to select consoles that you have missing art for. Or you can just select all like that. And when we're ready, we'll go ahead and scrape that. And it should automatically grab what it can. You will, of course, need to be connected to the net for this.

Also in this main menu under Game Settings is another fantastic setting that you should try. And that is HD Mode, which we're just going to enable like so. This tells your emulator to try and do a bunch of different things to enhance the quality of your game. Most of the time it involves upscaling. Unfortunately, this difference is not very noticeable in 2048. Sorry, let's just go and check that. I'll probably need to go and double check that real quick. We can't show you footage where it is noticeable, but some games, it just reveals detail that you never knew was even there. It does have varying results though, depending on your console and your game. Just give it a go and disable it if you encounter any stability issues.

Another cool thing to try out in Game Settings is Shaders. Essentially, this distorts your game's image, but in a good way. You can choose from a preset shader pack like so, and then you can also go and apply your own custom shaders on top of that. Let's choose something really ugly and green to kind of really demonstrate this and open up again 2048. And it's a bit subtle. We might need a side-by-side comparison here, but there is a difference in our image here. It's worth just having a play around with shaders to see if there's anything you like. Now let's look at something wickedly cool, Retro Achievements. This is a third-party community-built program that enables achievements for games that never had achievements in the first place. Essentially, it checks the state of the memory in your game, and it looks for certain conditions to let you unlock certain achievements.

To set it up, the first thing you need to do is head on over to retroachievements.org and create an account. Then in your Recalbox menu, go down to Game Settings and go to Retro Achievements Settings, enable it, and punch in your username and password. Once you've punched in the details, the next time you boot up a game, let's go into 2048 again, what else are we going to play? You will get that little notification in the bottom left that you successfully signed into Retro Achievements. And let's give it a run. We should be able to merge for an achievement here. Oh, look at that, look at that! And let's build an 8 up. Let's get that clear. 8. Oh, look at that, look at that! If you open up the RetroArch menu with hotkey and A, you should also be able to go down to Achievements. Where are we? Achievements, there we go. And see all of the achievements that are available. Some are locked, some are hidden like that. It's a nice little ecosystem of achievements that unifies across games. Super cool. It just really adds another layer of playing retro games.

But this is where it starts to get a little bit hit and miss. Retro Achievements can be very picky about which ROM it works with. Sometimes it needs to be a specific region of a game and sometimes even a specific edition of a game within that region. If you can't see the achievements here, you might need to do a bit of Googling to see how to get that title working. Speaking of things getting a little bit hit and miss, Netplay. You'll find it in game settings as well. And you go through and set it up there. This is essentially going to let you set up a peer-to-peer connection with somebody else's Recalbox so that you can both play online but as if you were playing on the same console in the same room. It's kind of just like playing a couch game but online. Super cool, but it can be extremely finicky.

is even more picky when it comes to ROMs, even which emulator you're using, and it would need an entire video of its own just showing you how to set it up. Unfortunately, we aren't going to cover that, and we're just going to make you aware of it, and we'll have some links in the guide to get you started. And with that, we can finally shut down our Recalbox by hitting select and going to shut down. Beautiful. Well, that about wraps us up. You should now be equipped with the know-how to go and start some retro gaming, and we encourage you to go through and explore those menus as well. We're just covering the main things of Recalbox, but there's a ton of cool settings and features in there to get a better experience and just make everything a bit nicer and personalized. It's really awesome just how streamlined everything has become. The first Pi I ever actually bought was in 2014 to set up something like this, and it was quite a frustrating experience and just so much hassle, but nowadays it's just plug and play. It's super easy, and these systems just have such nice UI. It's just great. Regardless, we hope that you go out and have some fun with this, and until next time, happy making.