Installing RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi 4: A Step-by-Step Guide

To start, we need to exit the setup script and exit RetroPie. We will go all the way down to the bottom of the screen to exit and then start RetroPie by typing "emulationstation" in the terminal. This will bring us back to the desktop where we can add some games and get into gameplay.

We are using an Xbox One controller connected over USB, but you can use a PS4 controller connected via Bluetooth. The controller setup process is straightforward, and the device will walk us through setting up the controller. We need to press in on both analog sticks and set them to our preferences. As for the hotkey, we usually use "Select" or the Xbox menu button.

Once we have completed the controller setup, we exit RetroPie by pressing "Start" and then quit EmulationStation. This will bring us back into the Raspberry Pi desktop. Now it's time to add some games to RetroPie. We need to plug in our USB hard drive containing our games and navigate to the RetroPie folder where our ROMs will be stored.

We open up the Raspberry Pi file manager and find the RetroPie ROM folders, which include Arcades, Atari 800, NES, PC Engine, Sega CD, and our own custom folders for SNES and PlayStation. We transfer some ROMs from our hard drive to these folders. The Retropie GUI makes it easy to manage our games and add new ones as we like.

Next, we open up a terminal window using Ctrl+Alt+T or the Raspberry Pi logo. We navigate to the text document that lists our configuration options for RetroPie and select the LXDE option. This will automatically start RetroPie when we boot up our Raspberry Pi 4. To confirm, we add the command "emulationstation control X" to the file and then press "Y" and enter. Now every time we start up our Raspberry Pi, it will boot directly into RetroPie.

For now, the official Retropie image is not available, so this configuration method works around that issue. However, an official image should be released soon, making this process even easier. We appreciate your viewers for watching and encourage you to check out the links in our description for further information and potential questions.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on guys the CTA praten back here again today I'm gonna show you how to install retropie on your Raspberry Pi for now this is gonna be a bit different from installing just a retro PI image to an SD card because we're gonna have to install RasPi and Buster and then install retro pie inside of that operating system this method should get a lot of people up and going until retropie officially releases their retro pie image for the Raspberry Pi for like I said this is a bit different but if you want to install retro pie right now this is how we can go about it for this tutorial you're obviously going to need a Raspberry Pi a 1 2 or 4 gigabyte model will work I recommend at least a 32 gigabyte SD card I'm going to be using a 64 and we'll also need another computer to install the raspbian image to the SD card I'm gonna be using Windows but this will also work on Linux or Mac alright so with all that out of the way let's go ahead and get started first up we need to download the raspbian image and we're also going to need to download an application to flash that image to an SD card we're gonna be using h or all links for everything I mentioned will be in the description now I'm gonna go ahead and grab the raspbian buster with desktop you could get the one with recommended software but I'm just gonna be using this one next thing we need to download is at your this works for Mac Windows or Linux so I'm just going to download the Windows version here and once both of these are finished I'm gonna place them on my desktop for easy access all right so both of the files are finished downloading I have a chore and I also have the raspbian image she's gonna be zipped up don't worry about it because it sure is gonna take care of everything for us so first thing we're gonna do is start at your and you need to make sure you have the SD card you want to flash insert it into your PC from inside of etcher we're gonna go to select image and we're going to navigate to where we have that raspbian image mine's on my desktop right here raspbian buster I'm gonna double click now I'm gonna make sure I have the correct SD card chosen I'm using a 64 gigabyte P&Y card and we're gonna click flash atures now going to install the operating system to the SD card this could take a little while depending on how fast the SD is so just let it finish up when this is done we can shut everything down and move over to the Raspberry Pi for okay so our SD card is now finished flashing with a chore you may receive a few warnings on here like Windows can't read the drive just go ahead and close these down now it's time to move over to the Raspberry Pi 4 we're going to take this SD card place it into the Raspberry Pi 4 we'll plug in our HDMI keyboard and power the first boots going to take a little longer than normal and has to resize the partition and get everything ready so just let this finish up and it'll bring us right into the raspbian Buster desktop so now that we have raspbian booted up it's going to walk us through setting this up we'll just click Next choose your country language time zone I'm going to use English language and I'm going to use the u.s. keyboard you can change the password of your raspberry pi the stock password is raspberry I'm going to leave it here but I recommend changing it remember the password you changed it to now we need to connect to our Wi-Fi network if you're using Ethernet you can skip this I recommend doing the software update but for this video I'll skip it and our setup is now complete do a restart and now we're ready to install retro pie like I mentioned at the beginning one of the good things about having retropie installed inside of raspbian is the ability to just plug in a USB Drive and transfer our roms very easily we don't have to use network transfer or anything like that but by the end of this video I'm also going to show you how to automatically start retro pie when you boot your Raspberry Pi up alright so let's go ahead and install retro pie this is actually pretty simple to do and I'm also going to leave a text document and everything you need to know in the description you can download the text document directly to your Raspberry Pi so you have it and you can copy and paste each one of these lines it'll just make it a lot easier on you so the first thing we need to do is open up terminal we can do that from the very top or from our keyboard we can press ctrl alt T so the first thing we need to do is get the retropie setup script we're going to do that by putting in sudo git clone depth equals 1 the github for retropie and we'll press enter that just downloaded the retropie setup script we need to CD into that directory we're going to go to that directory by typing in CD retropie setup now we need to edit that script a little bit we need to tell the retropie setup script that we're using a Raspberry Pi 3 even though we're using Raspberry Pi for so we're going to nano into that retropie packages from here we need to find the version and we're going to use our keyboard arrow keys to navigate right underneath it and we're going to input underscore underscore platform equals our pi/3 press control X Y and enter now we can run the setup script sudo retropie setup Sh this may look very familiar to a lot of people who've used retropie in the past we're in the retro pie setup script we'll press ENTER for okay and we're going to do a basic install the very top line you can use your arrow keys to navigate we'll go to basic install make sure okay is highlighted at the bottom press Enter make sure yes is highlighted and press Enter now this could take up to 20 minutes depending on your internet connection so just let it finish up all right so now that we have retropie installed it's time to exit the setup script we're gonna go all the way down to the bottom to exit and we can start retropie right now by typing in emulation station I'm going to do that real quick and then we're going to come back to the desktop we're gonna add a few games and then we'll get into some gameplay the controller I'm using right now is an Xbox one controller connected over USB but you could use a ps4 controller and connect the inside of raspbian using the logo up in the top right hand corner for Bluetooth I'm gonna set up my gamepad and it's gonna walk us through setting up the controller so my d-pad up-down left-right start select a B X Y L R I'm gonna press in on my left analog stick right analog stick and now we'll just set up both sticks and as for the hotkey I usually use select but since I'm using an Xbox controller I'm going to use my Xbox menu button I'll press a and now we have retropie installed on our Raspberry Pi 4 but we do want to add some games so from our controller we're gonna press Start and we're going to quit emulation station this is going to bring us back into the raspbian desktop now it's time to add some games to retropie I've just plugged in my USB hard drive I'm gonna take this over to the right hand side this is my hard drive that contains my games I'm going to open up the raspbian file manager and right here in PI will see retropie our roms are gonna go here as you can see we have arcade Atari 800 NES ng PC Sega CD and our bios's will go in the BIOS folder so I'm gonna go back to my roms I'm gonna find my SNES folder and from my hard drive I'm just gonna transfer a couple SNES games so I've just placed three SNES games and my retropie roms SNES folder I'm gonna do the same with a couple more I'll grab a PlayStation 1 game put it in my PSX folder pc-engine games Game Boy Advance so now I have some games and dolt that I can play with retropie him to close these windows down well open up terminal and we'll just go right back in here and then I'm going to show you how to automatically start up retropie when your Raspberry Pi boots so as you can see I got my Super Nintendo my Game Boy Advance PC engine and PlayStation games right here if you want to scrape the artwork for each of these games press Start on your controller go to scraper scrape from the games DB or screen scraper I'm gonna go with screen scraper scrape now and for this video I'm just going to scrape one so I'll deselect these three and I'm just gonna scrape Super Nintendo will click back and start and we'll go into gameboy advance as you can see I got those four games nothing has scraped yet but I did scrape my Super Nintendo so I have box art for all three of these games you can start playing from here we'll get into Joe a Mac two and we're now playing SNES in retropie on our Raspberry Pi 4 and yes sound is working I just have it turned off in my Game Capture so in order to exit we're gonna press our hotkey and start so I'll press the hotkey that I set up and start it'll bring us right back into emulation station so now it's time to set this up so it automatically boots in the retropie when we start off our raspberry pi we're gonna exit and like I said there is a text document in the description we're going to open up a terminal ctrl alt T we're going to nano into the Alex session or LXDE PI session and from here we're going to use our arrow keys all the way down to the bottom underneath point our pie and we're going to add LX terminal minus e user bin emulation station control X press y enter and now every time we start up our Raspberry Pi it's going to boot directly into retropie so I'm going to go ahead and restart the Raspberry Pi you can type in sudo reboot or we can go up to the little Raspberry Pi logo and restart from here and there you have it you now have retropie installed on your Raspberry Pi 4 this is a bit different we're still waiting on an official image from the retro PI guys and that should be coming soon but for now you can use this method without any issues I really appreciate you guys watching like I mentioned I have all links in the description I'll also have a text file and the text listed in the description below if you have any questions at all let me know in the comments below but like always thanks for watching youwhat's going on guys the CTA praten back here again today I'm gonna show you how to install retropie on your Raspberry Pi for now this is gonna be a bit different from installing just a retro PI image to an SD card because we're gonna have to install RasPi and Buster and then install retro pie inside of that operating system this method should get a lot of people up and going until retropie officially releases their retro pie image for the Raspberry Pi for like I said this is a bit different but if you want to install retro pie right now this is how we can go about it for this tutorial you're obviously going to need a Raspberry Pi a 1 2 or 4 gigabyte model will work I recommend at least a 32 gigabyte SD card I'm going to be using a 64 and we'll also need another computer to install the raspbian image to the SD card I'm gonna be using Windows but this will also work on Linux or Mac alright so with all that out of the way let's go ahead and get started first up we need to download the raspbian image and we're also going to need to download an application to flash that image to an SD card we're gonna be using h or all links for everything I mentioned will be in the description now I'm gonna go ahead and grab the raspbian buster with desktop you could get the one with recommended software but I'm just gonna be using this one next thing we need to download is at your this works for Mac Windows or Linux so I'm just going to download the Windows version here and once both of these are finished I'm gonna place them on my desktop for easy access all right so both of the files are finished downloading I have a chore and I also have the raspbian image she's gonna be zipped up don't worry about it because it sure is gonna take care of everything for us so first thing we're gonna do is start at your and you need to make sure you have the SD card you want to flash insert it into your PC from inside of etcher we're gonna go to select image and we're going to navigate to where we have that raspbian image mine's on my desktop right here raspbian buster I'm gonna double click now I'm gonna make sure I have the correct SD card chosen I'm using a 64 gigabyte P&Y card and we're gonna click flash atures now going to install the operating system to the SD card this could take a little while depending on how fast the SD is so just let it finish up when this is done we can shut everything down and move over to the Raspberry Pi for okay so our SD card is now finished flashing with a chore you may receive a few warnings on here like Windows can't read the drive just go ahead and close these down now it's time to move over to the Raspberry Pi 4 we're going to take this SD card place it into the Raspberry Pi 4 we'll plug in our HDMI keyboard and power the first boots going to take a little longer than normal and has to resize the partition and get everything ready so just let this finish up and it'll bring us right into the raspbian Buster desktop so now that we have raspbian booted up it's going to walk us through setting this up we'll just click Next choose your country language time zone I'm going to use English language and I'm going to use the u.s. keyboard you can change the password of your raspberry pi the stock password is raspberry I'm going to leave it here but I recommend changing it remember the password you changed it to now we need to connect to our Wi-Fi network if you're using Ethernet you can skip this I recommend doing the software update but for this video I'll skip it and our setup is now complete do a restart and now we're ready to install retro pie like I mentioned at the beginning one of the good things about having retropie installed inside of raspbian is the ability to just plug in a USB Drive and transfer our roms very easily we don't have to use network transfer or anything like that but by the end of this video I'm also going to show you how to automatically start retro pie when you boot your Raspberry Pi up alright so let's go ahead and install retro pie this is actually pretty simple to do and I'm also going to leave a text document and everything you need to know in the description you can download the text document directly to your Raspberry Pi so you have it and you can copy and paste each one of these lines it'll just make it a lot easier on you so the first thing we need to do is open up terminal we can do that from the very top or from our keyboard we can press ctrl alt T so the first thing we need to do is get the retropie setup script we're going to do that by putting in sudo git clone depth equals 1 the github for retropie and we'll press enter that just downloaded the retropie setup script we need to CD into that directory we're going to go to that directory by typing in CD retropie setup now we need to edit that script a little bit we need to tell the retropie setup script that we're using a Raspberry Pi 3 even though we're using Raspberry Pi for so we're going to nano into that retropie packages from here we need to find the version and we're going to use our keyboard arrow keys to navigate right underneath it and we're going to input underscore underscore platform equals our pi/3 press control X Y and enter now we can run the setup script sudo retropie setup Sh this may look very familiar to a lot of people who've used retropie in the past we're in the retro pie setup script we'll press ENTER for okay and we're going to do a basic install the very top line you can use your arrow keys to navigate we'll go to basic install make sure okay is highlighted at the bottom press Enter make sure yes is highlighted and press Enter now this could take up to 20 minutes depending on your internet connection so just let it finish up all right so now that we have retropie installed it's time to exit the setup script we're gonna go all the way down to the bottom to exit and we can start retropie right now by typing in emulation station I'm going to do that real quick and then we're going to come back to the desktop we're gonna add a few games and then we'll get into some gameplay the controller I'm using right now is an Xbox one controller connected over USB but you could use a ps4 controller and connect the inside of raspbian using the logo up in the top right hand corner for Bluetooth I'm gonna set up my gamepad and it's gonna walk us through setting up the controller so my d-pad up-down left-right start select a B X Y L R I'm gonna press in on my left analog stick right analog stick and now we'll just set up both sticks and as for the hotkey I usually use select but since I'm using an Xbox controller I'm going to use my Xbox menu button I'll press a and now we have retropie installed on our Raspberry Pi 4 but we do want to add some games so from our controller we're gonna press Start and we're going to quit emulation station this is going to bring us back into the raspbian desktop now it's time to add some games to retropie I've just plugged in my USB hard drive I'm gonna take this over to the right hand side this is my hard drive that contains my games I'm going to open up the raspbian file manager and right here in PI will see retropie our roms are gonna go here as you can see we have arcade Atari 800 NES ng PC Sega CD and our bios's will go in the BIOS folder so I'm gonna go back to my roms I'm gonna find my SNES folder and from my hard drive I'm just gonna transfer a couple SNES games so I've just placed three SNES games and my retropie roms SNES folder I'm gonna do the same with a couple more I'll grab a PlayStation 1 game put it in my PSX folder pc-engine games Game Boy Advance so now I have some games and dolt that I can play with retropie him to close these windows down well open up terminal and we'll just go right back in here and then I'm going to show you how to automatically start up retropie when your Raspberry Pi boots so as you can see I got my Super Nintendo my Game Boy Advance PC engine and PlayStation games right here if you want to scrape the artwork for each of these games press Start on your controller go to scraper scrape from the games DB or screen scraper I'm gonna go with screen scraper scrape now and for this video I'm just going to scrape one so I'll deselect these three and I'm just gonna scrape Super Nintendo will click back and start and we'll go into gameboy advance as you can see I got those four games nothing has scraped yet but I did scrape my Super Nintendo so I have box art for all three of these games you can start playing from here we'll get into Joe a Mac two and we're now playing SNES in retropie on our Raspberry Pi 4 and yes sound is working I just have it turned off in my Game Capture so in order to exit we're gonna press our hotkey and start so I'll press the hotkey that I set up and start it'll bring us right back into emulation station so now it's time to set this up so it automatically boots in the retropie when we start off our raspberry pi we're gonna exit and like I said there is a text document in the description we're going to open up a terminal ctrl alt T we're going to nano into the Alex session or LXDE PI session and from here we're going to use our arrow keys all the way down to the bottom underneath point our pie and we're going to add LX terminal minus e user bin emulation station control X press y enter and now every time we start up our Raspberry Pi it's going to boot directly into retropie so I'm going to go ahead and restart the Raspberry Pi you can type in sudo reboot or we can go up to the little Raspberry Pi logo and restart from here and there you have it you now have retropie installed on your Raspberry Pi 4 this is a bit different we're still waiting on an official image from the retro PI guys and that should be coming soon but for now you can use this method without any issues I really appreciate you guys watching like I mentioned I have all links in the description I'll also have a text file and the text listed in the description below if you have any questions at all let me know in the comments below but like always thanks for watching you\n"