Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny, low-cost computer designed for teaching computer science to students. It also has myriad practical applications in the modern home.

Talks

Retro Gaming With RetroPie

This talk is about playing retro games with video game console emulators on the Raspberry Pi. It explains what emulators are, how to buy a Raspberry Pi, how to install RetroPie, and how to configure and customize the system.

The RetroPie project comes with EmulationStation and makes heavy use of libretro to create a seamless experience across multiple emulators.

If you want to build a retro gaming computer from scratch, this talk has everything you need!

Extra Resources

raspi2png

This simple program reads the Raspberry Pi's graphics buffer to create a screenshot. It does not require any desktop environment or GUI to be present, and can take screenshots of anything.

I used this along with the below shell script to create all the screenshots for my RetroPie talk. The shell script was an infinite loop that took a screenshot every 3 seconds and then beeped, allowing me to perform an action, wait for the beep, and perform another action. This made it very easy to get all the screenshots I needed without having to switch between game controller, keyboard, and laptop.

#!/bin/bash
# burst.sh - Take a burst of screenshots
# Usage:
#   burst.sh <delay> <basename> <count>
delay=$1
basename=$2
count=$3
for NUM in $(seq 1 $count); do
    sleep $delay
    name=${basename}_$NUM.png
    raspi2png -p $name
    echo -ne "\a"
done