emulator posts

Raspberry Pi: playing with BerryBoot, RetroPie, and OpenElec

Played with my Raspberry Pi a bit more this weekend. I bought another micro-SD card and installed BerryBoot, a bootloader / OS installer sort of like Noobs, on it.

I installed RetroPie, a project that is built on top of Raspbian but with numerous emulators and a special interface that can be operated by a gamepad. It seems like it would be cool to condense all of my video game systems and even my oldest Mac (an SE) into a tiny box. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do much with it since I have to figure out how to get games onto it. It doesn’t have a web browser or other normal Linux stuff accessible from its special interface.

I also installed OpenElec, a media center. It has a dedicated interface meant to be operated by a remote control, though since I don’t have one of those, it operates a bit slowly by mouse. It has various media applications that can be installed from its interface, basically one for each of any online services. I installed quite a few and watched some old commercials on GetTV.

I’m thinking maybe I’ll eventually get a second Raspberry Pi to use as a media / gaming center. It’s easy to dual boot them using BerryBoot. It would be cooler if I could figure out a way to more easily switch between them, rather than rebooting. opensource++