After discovering the Raspberry Pi, I would often look and try to find new ways to use it. This is when I came across RetroPie. RetroPie is a way to run Emulators of old gaming systems, like the SNES and MAME on the Raspberry Pi. Seeing RetroPie instantly took me back to those fond child memories, of playing emulators on an Xbox. I was greatly intrigued.
A co-worker of mine had went to a hacker/cybersecurity conference called SAINTCON a few times. When you go to hacker events they usually have some cool project using Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, and other electronic gadgets to make name badges for their participants.
For the 2017 SAINTCON Badge they used a Raspberry Pi Zero W, with a 2.8” TFT 240×320 Color Display. The PCB has buttons that match the SNES controller layout. Naturally when my co-worker gave these to me, my mind immediately thought about turning the badge into a RetroPie.
I began by flashing the SD card with a fresh install of RetroPie, and booting up the Raspberry Pi. To my dismay the screen that was attached on the badge didn’t turn on. I then proceeded to SSH into the Pi. Did a sudo raspi-config, found the settings for enabling SPI, and rebooted the Raspberry Pi Zero W. Upon reboot still no screen. I decided I was going to get RetroPie working on this setup no matter what. So, I dissembled the badge by removing the Raspberry Pi and display.
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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!