The past couple weeks I have been researching different options to create a game emulator. Initially, I was hoping to get an emulator running on one of Intel's Galileo boards. After hours of research and some communication with someone at Intel, this task seemed much harder than I had initially hoped for. The problem with the Galileo is that it has no native visual capabilities. It's hard to create a game station without a screen! Along with that, there were a couple other issues holding this project back. I could not find any software package that was already made to run games on a Galileo. The Galileo is simply not built to run things like this. As much as I wanted to see this happen, it was out of the scope of this class to actually write software, so I had to turn to plan B.
After I got the software downloaded, I started working on making a game controller. Luckily there was a set of buttons and a joy stick sitting in the closet in the lab! The finished product was quite the mess; it was not a very effective game controller. Nonetheless, it was exciting to see it together. It was not long before I put all the buttons in a cardboard box to hold everything in place. But, before I got to putting that all in a box I wanted to test out RetroPie! One of the best parts about using the Raspberry Pi is the simple video capabilities it has. All I had to do was plug the Raspberry Pi into an HDMI screen and it was up and running. I started to configure the emulator in class using the projector, but I ran into some trouble that kept me from playing the games. As I was downloading the RetroPie software, I found one hole in the tutorial. They took a big leap getting from the download to playing the games, because the games are not initially configured in the package. This was a small hurdle, but I figured it out after doing a couple Google searches. I'll talk more about the actual configuration of the emulator in my next blog post, but for now enjoy this video of me making the game controller!
Those big buttons and that joystick are so exciting to use. Maybe in the future I would make something more permanent for them. But they were really just for me to figure out how the Retro Pi software works. In the end of my project, I would like to learn more than about the RetroPie. I want to learn about soldering and 3D printing, as well. My next project is to order smaller components to create a handheld emulator. I would like to be able to take what I have learned from here and apply it to fitting these smaller components into a smaller shell with a screen like a GameBoy. I am already having so much fun with this project and I know that once I start learning about soldering and 3D printing things are only going to get more exciting!
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