How to install RetroPie on Ubuntu – Tutorial

Overview

We still have our favorite childhood games we love to come back to. Lucky for us, we are able to enjoy our old favorites even this day even if we don’t have the game console for it or the game is not supported by the system anymore. For that we can use emulators. But most of the emulators are for a single console only and not many support GNU/Linux.

So, if you fall in that category – a Linux user who still enjoys console classics, try – RetroPie. It’s a powerful emulator which supports many popular consoles(Atari, SNES, NES, Nintendo 64, GBA, Game Boy Color, PS1, PS2, Xbox etc…) and not only you can install it on your Debian/Ubuntu PC. You can also install it on a Raspberry and make yourself an arcade/console machine. The best part is – RetroPie is open source and free to use.

In this post, we will cover the process of how to install Retropie on Ubuntu PC, configure it and how to load games.

Underneath you can also find the video tutorial :

Downloading RetroPie

First step is to start the terminal(Ctrl+Alt+T keyboard shortcut), download the install files and install the RetroPie. There are set of terminal commands which are displayed down bellow:

Install the needed packages for the RetroPie setup script:

sudo apt-get install -y git dialog unzip xmlstarlet

Download the latest RetroPie setup script:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup.git

Enter the folder with the setup script:

cd RetroPie-Setup

The script is executed with:

sudo ./retropie_setup.sh

Retropie installation

When you start the installation script, first you’ll get this screen.

Hit ok to continue

Installation will prompt you do you want to continue with basic installation – select Yes and hit enter.

Installation will start and it can take a while – in my case it took around 20 minutes to complete. After the installation is finished – you’ll return to the first screen of the setup. You can exit the setup.

Starting the retropie

You can start the retropie via terminal and from the app menu as well. To start the retropie using terminal, start the terminal and change directory to the folder where you installed the retropie and type in the command.

emulationstation

Retropie will start and it will ask you to setup your gamepad controler. You can also setup the keyboard and use it to play games. If you want to use keyboard or a gamepad, press any key on it so that Retropie can detect it.

On the next screen you need to configure gamepad mapping.

This is the starting screen. Now the next step is to add games.

Adding games

In order to play games using Retropie – you need ROM images to download and copy them in the retropie folder.  Default folder location is /home/RetroPie/roms. In that folder, there are folders for each an

every game console(playstation, nintendo, xbox etc…). Copy the ROM image in the corresponding folder. ROM image must be for the proper console.

When you copy the games(ROM images), start the RetroPie emulator again. This time the welcome screen will be different. Retropie will automatically detect added ROM images and recognize for which game console are they. Menu will display consoles which contains games.