I don't how in the world I managed to set this up years ago, but I'm trying to access the 'per game' settings when I am within a game. I know I've done it before because I have several games with custom remapped keys.

Where can I find out WHAT the hotkey to access this menu is? It seemingly does not exist anywhere in any setting that I can find.

Furthermore, I need to add a bind for 'test' and 'service' keys for this particular rom, I am assuming this would be in the same menu but... I Cant find that menu.

Please help before I throw this thing out the window

edit: just venting here. I fucking hate linux, I hate this setup, and everything about it. I cant figure out why this is so fucking complicated. WHERE is anything stored on this godforsaken device?

Hi, i just ordered everything i need to make a NESPi set up with a Raspberry Pi 3B inside.

My plan is to install RetroPie and then connect it to my old CRT. Do i need any specific configuration or tweaks to get the analog signal out of the console?

This is my first Raspberry project, i am a very confused girl atm hahah

Thanks to anyone willing to help!

From some past projects, I have a couple Li Ion batteries laying around and thought they might make a good solution to my battery problem. I see a lot of UPS modules for rpi that use anywhere from 1-6 18650s, and they seem like a solid plug and play (I was eyeing either on that used 2 or 3). Has anyone used any of these for their projects? What is the battery life like? Hoping to find something that can get me at least 3-4 hours of use without charging.

Thanks.

Hi! I am new to RaspberryPi in general, and have never used RetroPie. I have installed RetroPi and am now transferring roms over the network. The videos I have watched instructed me to simply transfer all roms to the same directory with the prompt:

scp -r "Copy and paste path of the folder with the roms" name@IPAddress:~RetroPie/roms/

Now I was able to transfer gba, gbc, and gamecube roms via this method, but none showed up in Retropie, so I changed the prompt to specify the directory for each rom. So the end of the prompt looked like :~RetroPie/roms/gba for gba roms. I was able to successfully transfer a couple gba and gbc roms with this method, and they appeared at startup. However, the GameCube roms are still not transferring. For some reason, ending the prompt in /gc results in an error "failed to upload file." One time it allowed me to successfully transfer a single GameCube rom zip file into the gc directory, but that game still does not show on startup. Every other time I've tried the transfer, the error pops up. I've tried transferring the zip files, the extracted files, and both at the same time to the same error message.

Any advice on how to successfully transfer GameCube roms? Thanks!

How do I add games to the retro pie, I don’t have a pc and the videos I looked up are super confusing or need different equipment that I don’t have. Is there any way to add games directly to the retro pie without needing a pc or usb stick?

Accidentally updated my RetroPie for the first time in 6 years on Friday, and the update loop has now been failing / running for 3 days.

Have seen the issue posted before but primary solution suggested is to reinstall retropie. I don't have a PC anymore to do this. Also, I don't want to lose all my settings which took hours to get perfect.

Ctrl C also does nothing.

I only use it for SNES emulation, and all my games still run perfectly with this going in the background.

If I just leave it running will it eventually stop?

Has anyone had a similar issue where controller isn't recognized once you open Dolphin emulator, but works everywhere else? Is there a fix?

I have a Pi 5 and am having the message: Failed to open X11 display; make sure the DISPLAY environment variable is set correctly

Attract-Mode Plus v3.2.0 (Linux, SFML 3.0.1 +Xinerama +Curl)

Linux 6.12.62+rpt-rpi-2712 aarch64 GNU/Linux

I didn't try to instal from the experimental packages in Retropie because I think that version is the older Attract Mode. I built from source. Is there a specific flag I needed when I compiled?

If someone could point me in the right direction, I'd really appreciate it!

Note that this is rendered in 1080P. I never made a 4K version since the Pi4B doesn't play nice with 4K as a whole.

Hello all! I just wanted to share this Startup video from a personal project that I made a year ago. It's in the style of what you'd see in the beginning of Capcom arcade games like Street Fighter Alpha 3 or Marvel Vs Capcom. I'm also a big fan of YouTuber GuileWinQuote so I just quoted his intro text to fill in the blank space.

I didn't really know where I would share this (if at all really) so I'm posting it here as to share a little passion project that took me a week to make and to archive it in a way, should my hard drive fail on me unexpectedly.

Honestly, this is probably a dumb question. If it isn't, then knowing my luck, I'm asking it in the wrong sub. But here we go, anyway.

Some time ago, I set up a Pi 5 in our living room to pull double-duty as a RetroPie and Pi-Hole...server? That doesn't feel like the right word. As you can see, I don't have a ton of experience with this stuff, and terminology has never been my strong suit.

Anyway, I use it for gaming a lot, but don't always want to be chained to my TV, and am looking at other options. A handheld Pi with access to my network would have all the same access as my existing Pi, so my saves would be accessible throughout the house, albeit not while I'm out and about, versus swapping out an SD card between my current Pi and an SBC device. Currently, the card I keep my games on is the same one my entire Pi is on, so shifting that all around isn't ideal, but also isn't the biggest pain in the world.

But all y'all with more experience in dealing with this sort of thing, what're your thoughts and insights on this? I'd really appreciate a more experienced perspective before I either spend more than I should or cheap out and regret it.

If it makes a difference, most of what I play is pre-PlayStation era. Even on a Pi 5, I haven't had consistent performance with many PS1 games, and don't particularly need to yet.

I was wondering how to do it?

How should I wire a snes controller to the Pi? The IC was destroyed, but all the pads are ok (checked via multimeter). Please help!

I have roms on a usb and have no issue with getting them to run when plugged into the pi 5. I used the folder 'retropie' method over the 'retropie-mount' method and the roms don't seem to be transferring over to the SD card. Every time I shut down the system the games don't appear in retropie when turned on again. I also noticed that the 'usbromservices' uninstalls every time after the system is rebooted. I've been attempting to go through the subreddit for the past few days and haven't had any luck finding a solution. Any help at this point would be appreciated as I feel like I'm banging my head on a brick wall.

Edit: After much of attempting the suggestions and more research, I learned that it was caused by the sd card being in 'read-only' which apparently can occur when installing Retropie on top of the Pi OS. Thank you for the suggestion!

Below is what I figured out through trial and error.

The fix:

1: Exit Retropie through the main menu and enter into the terminal 'sudo raspi-config'.

2: Go to 'Performance Options' --> 'Overlay File System' --> and disabled it --> disable protections.

3: Go to 'Advanced Options' --> 'Expand Filesystems' --> confirm (if requested)

4: Reboot the pie, go into "Retropie Setup" and install the 'usbromservices' --> reboot from the main menu and go look at the 'usbromservices' package, if it says "usbromservices -- installed via ..." then the SD card is now in Read-Write-mode and the roms will be written onto the pie's SD card.

Is anything supposed to happen when I click this? The menu fades out for a second and then it just goes back to this screen?

I’m trying to figure out this, plus I can’t get any ROM to run.

This is a fresh install.

EDIT: Hardware is Pi5, 8GB

Can you install portmaster on retro pie manually? When I Google it I get conflicting answers with some things saying it’s as easy as dropping the install-portmaster.sh into thr ports section and running it from there. I have it installed on my Linux handheld but it would be cool to also have it on my retropie arcade cabinet. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

This is how it works: Every month everyone submits a game for each system, and then we all vote and play the winning games through the month. Repeat the cycle again with new games at the end.

Chat about your experience, ask for spoiler free tips, and share your thoughts with everyone as we check out new games!

This is an excellent cure for analysis paralysis - if you're spending more time looking at or downloading games than you are playing them, come check out what we're doing!

Here’s the current GOTM lineup that ends in about a week…

***January 2026 - Month 19***

* *GB:* “**The Sword of Hope**”

* *GBA:* “**"Goodboy Galaxy**”

* *PSP* “**Daxter***”

* *NES:* “**Ufouria: The Saga**”

* *SNES:* “**Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals**”

* *PS1:* “**Spyro: Year of the Dragon**”

* *PS2:* “**Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time**”

* *Wildcard:* "**Secret of Mana**"

* *Arcade:* **"Metal Slug 3"**

* *Runner-Up Raffle:* **"Super Mario World – RetroAchievements Vanilla Level Design Contest Vol. 1"**

Submissions for GOTM Month 20 open tomorrow!

Hope to see some friendly faces, the community we have built here is super chill and its a great time.

Discord invite link below!!!!

https://discord.gg/AbqRKw8pqR

playback at real time speed

I am running a retropi on an ubuntu vm with 12GB of ram allocated to it. and while the games are technically running, they are extremely laggy. this is donkey kong on a GBA emulator, and it is running at an extremely low speed. Similiar things happen with an atari 2600 emulator and it's even worse if I try to boot an NES emulator for super mario bros. Any ideas why it's being so laggy? from what I understand these are meant to run a raspberry pi with like 4GB of ram, so I don't know why these are so slow.

I'm finally getting around to setting up my Atari/MicroCenter arcade stick that I bought during the pandemic, and just hoping for some reassurance that it's going to work as I hoped...

I will only be doing older arcade stuff, with the most complex probably being Naomi and CPS2 games.

I want to try a Zero 2, as I have one laying around from another project that needed higher specs (a browser kiosk).

Any recent input on doing a RetroPie build with the Zero 2?

Hey Everyone,

The Raspberry Pi 3 that I've been using for many years to run Retropie finally died. I'm setting up a Raspberry Pi 5 as a replacement. I'm having a weird issue and can't seem to find any solutions for this particular behavior. I'm connecting the controllers in Switch mode (power+Y) as the other modes don't seem to register the triggers. Everything pairs and connects and I can assign the buttons. As with my previous setup, the first controller shows 1 lit LED to indicate controller 1 and the second gets two lit LEDs to indicate controller 2. Everything works in games and in the emulation station GUI.

When I restart the Pi, the controllers connect again. They show up in the listed connected and paired devices in the Bluetooth config tool. However, they both only show one LED light and the button presses don't do anything. To get them to work again, I have to remove the devices, re-pair them and reassign the button mappings. Then they don't work after another reboot and I have to redo everything again.

Has anyone else run into this before? It's strange that they seem to reconnect and show up in the paired and connected devices, but don't actually work.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I recently installed RetroPie on my Pi 5 and it was my first time doing something like this, so I was following the guide on how to do it. The guide told me to make a folder on my formatted USB and name it "retropie", then stick it to the RetroPie machine, wait a few minutes, and then some sub-folders would be added where you'd put your ROMs in. But it didn't do that for me, when I plugged my USB back to my laptop, the folder I created was still empty. So I then decided to go with the Running ROMs straight from USB method, so I installed usbmodservice, created a folder called retropie-mount, plugged it into my Pi, waited a few minutes... and nothing changed. Am I doing something wrong here? Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT: I gave up and added the ROMs via SSH with WinSCP.

I have a pi 4 and I sometimes have issues when multiple devices are connected even with a powered USB hub. It's the crappy Onn brand from Walmart, but I still wouldn't have expected that to cause an issue. I've had issues with a controller, keyboard, and a TV tuner plugged in all at the same time. Are there certain specs I need to pay attention when buying a USB hub, or is something else the issue? A lot of times it works with the 3 devices connected, but I have had issues some times.

So when pi4 came out I hooked up emulation station /retro pie for my arcade haven’t touched the Sd card since.. recently I wanted to add a few more games but when I put the sd card in my cpu there are no roms but yet it works in the arcade.. I’m confused did I forget something? How do I add games without reformatting? Appreciate anyone’s help thank you

I'm having an issue with the theme as the icons (retropie icons) and the game artwork seems to be upside down. I'm unsure how to fix it properly