The Setup and Transfer of ROMs to Raspberry Pi's Emulation Station

In this tutorial, we will be discussing the process of setting up an emulator on a Raspberry Pi, specifically focusing on the Neo Geo system. The first step is to transfer our BIOS and ROMs to the Raspberry Pi. To do this, we can use the "monitor" option, which allows us to see our CPU usage, memory, temperature, and file system. We can also drag and drop our bioses directly onto the SD card.

One of the really awesome things about this is if we scroll down, we can see exactly the file name of the BIOS we need for the corresponding emulator, along with the MD5 checksum to ensure that we have the correct BIOS. It's a really cool little reference chart that we can use to verify the integrity of our ROMs and BIOSes. Additionally, we can also transfer our ROMs directly to the SD card using Network. We simply press start, scroll to game settings, scroll to the very bottom, and click on "update games list". However, if we have transferred our ROMs to the SD card via USB, clicking on this option will not do anything.

We then plug in our USB stick and restart the system. If everything has been set up correctly, when we reboot, we should be able to scroll over and see FBA Li Retro and Neo Geo icons under the Emulation Station front end. We can start playing games by selecting them from this list. In this article, we will focus on setting up the Neo Geo system, specifically Metal Slug 5.

Running Games with Neo Geo System

To run our game, we need to select it from the emulation station and then insert a coin by pressing the Select button on our controller. If everything has been set up correctly, the game should start without any issues. In this case, we can see that our credits are being displayed at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.

However, if for some reason the game does not work, it's possible that there are a few reasons why this might be the case. The ROM may be corrupted or incompatible with Neo Geo. To overcome this issue, I recommend using Final Burn Alpha instead of Neo Geo. Every Neo Geo game that I have tested has worked perfectly in Final Burn Alpha.

In addition to Metal Slug 5, we can also run other games from the same system using the same method. We simply select the game and press start, and it should boot into the BIOS and load the ROM.

Running Other Games with FBA Lib Retro

Another emulator that I want to highlight is Final Burn Alpha's (FBA) LiRetro. This emulator is specifically designed for running games on the Neo Geo system, but also supports other systems such as SNK VS Capcom. We can start our game directly from this folder and press start to boot it into the BIOS.

In FBA Lib Retro, we get a green garble effect for a split second before the Neo Geo logo appears. This is a sign that the emulator has successfully loaded the BIOS. At this point, we can play our games using the same controller layout as the original Neo Geo system.

Blazing Star in Final Burn Alpha

One of my favorite games on the Neo Geo system is Blazing Star. In FBA Lib Retro, we can start this game directly from the emulator and press start to boot it into the BIOS. As before, we get the green garble effect before the Neo Geo logo appears.

Blazing Star is an excellent example of a great shoot 'em up game on the Neo Geo system. It's an action-packed game that requires strategy and skill to overcome the challenges. I highly recommend trying out Blazing Star when you have the chance.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, setting up an emulator on a Raspberry Pi can seem daunting at first, but with the right tools and resources, it can be done easily. The process of transferring BIOSes and ROMs to the SD card is straightforward, and we can use the "monitor" option to verify that everything has been set up correctly.

The Neo Geo system is an excellent choice for retro gaming enthusiasts, offering a wide range of classic games to play. By using Final Burn Alpha or FBA Lib Retro, we can access these games with ease and enjoy them on our Raspberry Pi. I hope this tutorial has helped you understand the process of setting up your own emulator and running classic games on your Raspberry Pi.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on guys it's etaa Prime back here again today I want to show you how to run Neo Geo games on your Raspberry Pi running recall box we're going to go over two different emulators first one being obviously Neo Geo and the second one being my alltime favorite arcade emulator final burn Alpha final bur Alpha will run your Neo Geo games and in my opinion it's the best way to go we're going to need to transfer some ROMs to the Raspberry Pi running recall box depending on how you want to go about this I'll show you two different ways lately I've been using a USB stick if you check out my video I'll leave an annotation on screen now on how to set that up but some of you may just want to use the SD card and transfer your ROMs over Network I'll go over both of those also before we go to the computer and transfer our ROMs one important thing is to go ahead and get your network IP and your host name so take a picture of this remember it if you have a screen beside your laptop or your computer leave this up you're going to need the IP address or the host name so we're going to be moving to the PC now we're going to transfer our ROMs and our Neo Geo bios and we'll get started playing some awesome games all right now it's time to transfer some games to the Raspberry Pi I'm using a USB stick as shown in my last video I enjoy doing it this way you can transfer them to the SD card and I will show you how to do that over Network we need to collect a few things obviously we need a few Neo Geo games now these need to stay zipped do not unzip them and do not rename them or they will not work and the most important thing the Neo Geo needs to run is the Neo Geo bios this is neogeo.zip bios looks just like this do not extract it leave it like this I cannot tell you where to get ROMs or biases but I can tell you that Google is your friend so since I'm using my USB stick I will open it up in a new window and I'll open my recall box folder here we have our bios folder we just need to drop our Neo Geo bios in here now I always do this and I'm not sure if I need to do this with the Neo Geo but I've always put it in here it can't hurt so just drop it in your bios folder we'll go to ROMs and we'll scroll down till we see Neo Geo open your Neo Geo ROMs folder you also need need your Neo Geo bios in the ROMs folder this is important it will not work you will just see a black screen so your Neo Geo bios also goes in your Neo Geo ROMs folder we'll just drop our ROMs in here also your folder should look like this I mean obviously you're probably going to have more games but you need your ROMs and your Neo Geo bios in the Neo Geo ROM's folder back up because I did mention FBA and I myself love FBA I run MIM Neo Geo and tons of other arcade games with the final burn Alpha emulator it is amazing hands down almost every game that I've thrown at it works recall box has two versions built in and I've tested both of them and the FBA lib retro seems to work a lot better we're going to open up the FBA Li retro folder if you want to try out final burn Alpha we're just going to drop our Neo Geo games in here or our Neo Geo ROMs we will also need our neoo bios in the same folder so we have our Neo Geo bios and our games in the ROMs FBA Li retro so if you're not using a USB stick and you want to transfer these games to to your Raspberry Pi over Network most important thing is the computer that you're transferring the ROMs from needs to be on the same network as the Raspberry Pi that's why I had you look up your IP address earlier so we have your IP address and your host name pretty much from the top of any file browser window you can go to the quick access bar and type in back slashback slash all capital recall box and press enter you'll see a share folder if you are unable to access the share folder from typing in back SLB SL recall boox you can type in back SLB SL and your IP address that's why I had you look it up earlier you may need it open the share folder we are now inside of the SD card on the Raspberry Pi right now so my Raspberry Pi is still running in the background here and I've just accessed my SD card from my computer over Network we'll do the same thing here I'll drag this over here I will open up my Neo Geo ROMs folder on my computer bios take your Neo Geo bios and drop it in your bios folder ROMs find your Neo Geo and drop your Neo Geo ROMs and your Neo Geo bios in this folder same thing with FBA same way we did it with the USB and real quick I wanted to show you guys something really really cool that's built into recall box that I haven't seen on many other emulator setups we're on the same network obviously we're able to transfer ROMs over our Network I'll open up Chrome or pretty much any browser and at the top here I'm going to type in SL SL recall boox all capital press enter we are inside of the SD card now from our browser now this is really cool we have a lot of options here we have monitoring we can see our CPU usage our memory our temperature and our file system how much memory we've used on our SD card bios folder you can drag and drop your bioses directly here and they will go onto your SD card now one of the really awesome things about this is if you scroll down you can see exactly the file name of the BIOS you need for the corresponding emulator and the md5 check sum just to make sure you have the correct bios it's a really cool little reference chart chart you can also do the same ROMs we could have just came right here and dropped our FBA Li retro and our Neo Geo games right here so I just wanted to show you that this is really cool here so now that we've transferred our Neo Geo bios and our ROMs to the Raspberry Pi we can go over there now now I'm using my USB stick even though I transferred them to my SD card I'm going to delete them before I start recording the Raspberry Pi and I'm just going to access them from my USB stick we're going to the pi now we're back if we scroll through here we will not see our Neo Geo icon or FBA icon if you transferred your ROMs to the SD card over Network Press Start scroll to game settings scroll to the very bottom and you can update games list now I'm going to do this but nothing's going to happen because I have them on my USB drive just wanted to show you that you can do the update games list if you transfer them to the SD card over Network it'll do a quick reboot and all of your games should show up under Neo Geo and FBA here since I have mine on a USB drive I'm going to plug it in right now I'm going to press start and I'm just going to go to quit and restart system it will not update the games list using a USB drive so you have to restart the system when I restart I'm going to scroll over and I should see FBA Li retro and a Neo Geo icon up on the emulation station front end I'm rebooted now with my USB stick in if this does work I'm going to be able to scroll over and see my FBA Li retro icon right there and my Neo Geo system icon so I wanted to focus on the Neo Geo real quick you can start your games and play now we're going to start with metal slug 5 and by the way if you haven't tried blazing star go ahead and get it one of the best sidescrolling shoot them up games ever made and my favorite shoot them up game but everybody loves metal slugs so we're gonna go with this here's our bios here you can't run your bios it needs to be in this folder though Metal Slug five it's now loading and if we did everything correctly the game should start there we go insert a coin by pressing select on your controller you can see at the bottom right hand corner that my credits are going up just pressing my select button press start and I will choose Marco this guy looks crazy and you see it runs pretty good so yeah um that's pretty much it you're going to run into games that will not work and sometimes there's just no way around it um either the game is either the ROM is corrupted or it's just not compatible but I found a way around that at final burn Alpha that's why I had you set it up now I really do recommend using final burn Alpha over Neo Geo every Neo Geo game that I have tested has worked in final burn Alpha perfectly to exit your emulator hold your hotkey button and Press Start SNK versus Capcom we're going to try this in the Neo Geo system and it works now there were a few games I could not get to run a neoo and they worked in final burn Alpha I cannot remember what it was I'm going to exit this game and just show you final burn Alpha running really quick and here's FBA lib retro same thing we can just start these games directly from here and I want to start blazing staros in this folder also you'll get this green garble for a split second and then it'll load the Neo Geo logo there so it's booting the BIOS and you can start playing so that's it for now guys I really appreciate you watching I hope this helped you out and I hope you get your neoo emulator running within recall box um setup is pretty much a breeze I know these videos get a little long but I just want to explain everything so if you're new to this you can just get right into it watch these videos and pretty much understand everything you need about running these emulators I like to explain thoroughly just to make sure everybody gets to experience these awesome games and as easy as possible so if you could hit that like button and subscribe and like always thanks for watchinghey what's going on guys it's etaa Prime back here again today I want to show you how to run Neo Geo games on your Raspberry Pi running recall box we're going to go over two different emulators first one being obviously Neo Geo and the second one being my alltime favorite arcade emulator final burn Alpha final bur Alpha will run your Neo Geo games and in my opinion it's the best way to go we're going to need to transfer some ROMs to the Raspberry Pi running recall box depending on how you want to go about this I'll show you two different ways lately I've been using a USB stick if you check out my video I'll leave an annotation on screen now on how to set that up but some of you may just want to use the SD card and transfer your ROMs over Network I'll go over both of those also before we go to the computer and transfer our ROMs one important thing is to go ahead and get your network IP and your host name so take a picture of this remember it if you have a screen beside your laptop or your computer leave this up you're going to need the IP address or the host name so we're going to be moving to the PC now we're going to transfer our ROMs and our Neo Geo bios and we'll get started playing some awesome games all right now it's time to transfer some games to the Raspberry Pi I'm using a USB stick as shown in my last video I enjoy doing it this way you can transfer them to the SD card and I will show you how to do that over Network we need to collect a few things obviously we need a few Neo Geo games now these need to stay zipped do not unzip them and do not rename them or they will not work and the most important thing the Neo Geo needs to run is the Neo Geo bios this is neogeo.zip bios looks just like this do not extract it leave it like this I cannot tell you where to get ROMs or biases but I can tell you that Google is your friend so since I'm using my USB stick I will open it up in a new window and I'll open my recall box folder here we have our bios folder we just need to drop our Neo Geo bios in here now I always do this and I'm not sure if I need to do this with the Neo Geo but I've always put it in here it can't hurt so just drop it in your bios folder we'll go to ROMs and we'll scroll down till we see Neo Geo open your Neo Geo ROMs folder you also need need your Neo Geo bios in the ROMs folder this is important it will not work you will just see a black screen so your Neo Geo bios also goes in your Neo Geo ROMs folder we'll just drop our ROMs in here also your folder should look like this I mean obviously you're probably going to have more games but you need your ROMs and your Neo Geo bios in the Neo Geo ROM's folder back up because I did mention FBA and I myself love FBA I run MIM Neo Geo and tons of other arcade games with the final burn Alpha emulator it is amazing hands down almost every game that I've thrown at it works recall box has two versions built in and I've tested both of them and the FBA lib retro seems to work a lot better we're going to open up the FBA Li retro folder if you want to try out final burn Alpha we're just going to drop our Neo Geo games in here or our Neo Geo ROMs we will also need our neoo bios in the same folder so we have our Neo Geo bios and our games in the ROMs FBA Li retro so if you're not using a USB stick and you want to transfer these games to to your Raspberry Pi over Network most important thing is the computer that you're transferring the ROMs from needs to be on the same network as the Raspberry Pi that's why I had you look up your IP address earlier so we have your IP address and your host name pretty much from the top of any file browser window you can go to the quick access bar and type in back slashback slash all capital recall box and press enter you'll see a share folder if you are unable to access the share folder from typing in back SLB SL recall boox you can type in back SLB SL and your IP address that's why I had you look it up earlier you may need it open the share folder we are now inside of the SD card on the Raspberry Pi right now so my Raspberry Pi is still running in the background here and I've just accessed my SD card from my computer over Network we'll do the same thing here I'll drag this over here I will open up my Neo Geo ROMs folder on my computer bios take your Neo Geo bios and drop it in your bios folder ROMs find your Neo Geo and drop your Neo Geo ROMs and your Neo Geo bios in this folder same thing with FBA same way we did it with the USB and real quick I wanted to show you guys something really really cool that's built into recall box that I haven't seen on many other emulator setups we're on the same network obviously we're able to transfer ROMs over our Network I'll open up Chrome or pretty much any browser and at the top here I'm going to type in SL SL recall boox all capital press enter we are inside of the SD card now from our browser now this is really cool we have a lot of options here we have monitoring we can see our CPU usage our memory our temperature and our file system how much memory we've used on our SD card bios folder you can drag and drop your bioses directly here and they will go onto your SD card now one of the really awesome things about this is if you scroll down you can see exactly the file name of the BIOS you need for the corresponding emulator and the md5 check sum just to make sure you have the correct bios it's a really cool little reference chart chart you can also do the same ROMs we could have just came right here and dropped our FBA Li retro and our Neo Geo games right here so I just wanted to show you that this is really cool here so now that we've transferred our Neo Geo bios and our ROMs to the Raspberry Pi we can go over there now now I'm using my USB stick even though I transferred them to my SD card I'm going to delete them before I start recording the Raspberry Pi and I'm just going to access them from my USB stick we're going to the pi now we're back if we scroll through here we will not see our Neo Geo icon or FBA icon if you transferred your ROMs to the SD card over Network Press Start scroll to game settings scroll to the very bottom and you can update games list now I'm going to do this but nothing's going to happen because I have them on my USB drive just wanted to show you that you can do the update games list if you transfer them to the SD card over Network it'll do a quick reboot and all of your games should show up under Neo Geo and FBA here since I have mine on a USB drive I'm going to plug it in right now I'm going to press start and I'm just going to go to quit and restart system it will not update the games list using a USB drive so you have to restart the system when I restart I'm going to scroll over and I should see FBA Li retro and a Neo Geo icon up on the emulation station front end I'm rebooted now with my USB stick in if this does work I'm going to be able to scroll over and see my FBA Li retro icon right there and my Neo Geo system icon so I wanted to focus on the Neo Geo real quick you can start your games and play now we're going to start with metal slug 5 and by the way if you haven't tried blazing star go ahead and get it one of the best sidescrolling shoot them up games ever made and my favorite shoot them up game but everybody loves metal slugs so we're gonna go with this here's our bios here you can't run your bios it needs to be in this folder though Metal Slug five it's now loading and if we did everything correctly the game should start there we go insert a coin by pressing select on your controller you can see at the bottom right hand corner that my credits are going up just pressing my select button press start and I will choose Marco this guy looks crazy and you see it runs pretty good so yeah um that's pretty much it you're going to run into games that will not work and sometimes there's just no way around it um either the game is either the ROM is corrupted or it's just not compatible but I found a way around that at final burn Alpha that's why I had you set it up now I really do recommend using final burn Alpha over Neo Geo every Neo Geo game that I have tested has worked in final burn Alpha perfectly to exit your emulator hold your hotkey button and Press Start SNK versus Capcom we're going to try this in the Neo Geo system and it works now there were a few games I could not get to run a neoo and they worked in final burn Alpha I cannot remember what it was I'm going to exit this game and just show you final burn Alpha running really quick and here's FBA lib retro same thing we can just start these games directly from here and I want to start blazing staros in this folder also you'll get this green garble for a split second and then it'll load the Neo Geo logo there so it's booting the BIOS and you can start playing so that's it for now guys I really appreciate you watching I hope this helped you out and I hope you get your neoo emulator running within recall box um setup is pretty much a breeze I know these videos get a little long but I just want to explain everything so if you're new to this you can just get right into it watch these videos and pretty much understand everything you need about running these emulators I like to explain thoroughly just to make sure everybody gets to experience these awesome games and as easy as possible so if you could hit that like button and subscribe and like always thanks for watching\n"