Installing Emulators on the RetroPie Recall Box: A Step-by-Step Guide

The author of this article is excited to share their experience with setting up emulators on their RetroPie recall box. The process involved dragging and dropping ROMs onto the device, which was "very slick." They highlighted these ROMs to find the SNES folder, where they installed let's go, a popular NES emulator.

The author then navigated to the 64-bit folder, where they loaded up their Nintendo 64 (N64) ROMs. However, they encountered some issues with installation and formatting, which may be due to the wrong format. The author reassured viewers that this is not uncommon and that it can be fixed by reformatting the SD card.

Once the ROMs were installed on the SD card, the author loaded them onto the recall box using the network feature. They confirmed that the ROMs were now accessible for playback. However, they encountered some difficulties with controlling the game Mega Man 5 in NES mode, where the shoot button was set to B and the jump button was set to A.

The author tested the SNES emulator next, playing Joe & Mac. To their surprise, the emulation was spot-on, with no issues or glitches. They then attempted to test an N64 game but encountered technical difficulties, including slow performance and poor screen capture quality using the Game Capture feature.

The author suggests that if you want to run N64 games smoothly, consider getting a more powerful device such as an Android TV box, Amazon Fire TV, or the new Nvidia Shield console. They also mention that older consoles like the Dreamcast and Playstations work well with their Galaxy S 4 phone, which has MHL capabilities.

One of the standout features of the recall box is its built-in Kodi Media Center, which allows users to access various streaming services, watch videos, play music, and more. The author notes that they don't use Kodi themselves but appreciates its presence as a convenient feature for users who want to stream content while playing games.

The author concludes by stating that the recall box is capable of running a wide range of emulators, including NES, SNES, Sega Master System, NeoGeo, MAME, and Atari Super Nintendo. However, they warn that newer consoles may struggle with rendering sound and video due to optimization issues and hardware limitations.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on guys his ETA prime I'm back here again and today I wanted to show you how to install recall box on your Raspberry Pi 1/2 or Raspberry Pi zero now I'm using a Raspberry Pi 2 this is another version of emulation station but it has Kodi built in which is super awesome because you can switch right from the menu straight to Cody to watch your movies and then switch back play some video games so let's get right into it um you're gonna need no extra tools at all so that's a plus with this one I'm using a 8 gigabyte SanDisk SD card super cheap on the Amazon we're gonna need the install files so you're gonna want to open up whatever browser you use and go to recall box comm we're gonna go right over to the top here do it yourself recall box we're gonna scroll down here we're gonna click on the github links and I'm using version 3.3 points now I have already downloaded the zip file that it comes with so I'm gonna go ahead and close this out I've placed it on a in a folder on my desktop now it comes zip so let's go ahead and unzip it okay so as you can see here the folder that you the file you unzip has all these in it all you're gonna want to do is go ahead and copy and go straight to your SD card and paste all right now that it's done copying what we're gonna have to do is take the SD card from the PC or laptop place it into the Raspberry Pi and boot it up I'm gonna do that now okay so this is the first boot of the Raspberry Pi 2 running recall box I have my Ethernet plugged in my wireless keyboard and my xbox360 wired controller now in order to put roms on the unit itself you need internet set up on your Raspberry Pi 2 it uses network sharing so let me go ahead and fast-forward this and we'll get into the OS show you how to put roms on it and you'll be good to go guys this is the first boot SD car to install we want to go ahead and set up our controller so I have my Ethernet my controller and my keyboard plugged into the Raspberry Pi unit so from your keyboard press Enter scroll to controller settings and use the S key to select configure controller s one more time and it shows me that as found my controller now I need to set up the keys so I'm going to hold the a button and just follow the on-screen prompts and you should have no problem up down right all right so now that that's set up I'm gonna go back now in order for you to put roms on the unit you want to make sure that your internet is connected now I'm connected with Ethernet and it is connected you want to note your IP address and your hostname because you're gonna be installing from your PC over network so let's go back okay so before I add roms I'm gonna go ahead and go to my system settings I'm gonna overclock you don't have to overclock if you don't want to but it makes gameplay a lot smoother all right so now that that is done we're gonna go ahead and switch over to the PC so we can load some roms we're back at the PC let's go ahead and load some roms now I have set my roms in a ROM folder on my desktop now this is one of the coolest parts about recall box miry my Raspberry Pi is still powered on with the recall box hooked up and I'm running it with an Ethernet cable this will work over Wi-Fi also so what you want to do is go ahead and find the roms that you want to install go ahead and open up a browser window and type in forward slash forward slash re call-box now we are in my recall box that's set up and powered on so you can go here to monitoring see them do you know this is amazing they really did some work to get this running like this so in order to install roms you just want to go ahead and click on the roms folder up here find which ROM you want to install let go with SNES when I highlight these I want to find my SNES folder here I'm just gonna drag them over all right let's go back to my roms on the browser here let's find my Nintendo 64 which is here I'm gonna go back 64 roms drag them on over very slick setup I mean this is awesome I do miss the SD or the USB install but ok so this one didn't work but that's alright didn't install there must be the wrong format let's go back here and we're gonna load up my NES roms here and we'll just drag them on over and now your roms are installed on the recall box and they're on the SD card for good to you reformat it I'm gonna bring you back over to the recall box now and we are going to see how these roms perform now that we have the roms loaded onto the SD card over the network they're on the SD card for you to play you may have to reboot one time to get them to show up as you can see we have a Nintendo 64 showing up now and let's go ahead and test these emulators out real quick we'll start with NES and I'll play some Mega Man 5 all right see if our controls are working my joystick and my d-pad is working perfectly oh my gosh robot Tigers now the problem here is I have the shoot button set up as my B and my jump is my a so it's a little off for me let me get the hang of it that was horrible all right so you can see this plays very well let's go test out some SNES now I'm gonna back out of here with be on the controller and I'm going to try some Joe and Mac this was one of my favorite games all right so you guys can see this is running really good so no problems with running SNES and NES games now let's go ahead and test some in 64 games or at least just one game go ahead and back out of here by hitting the escape button on the keyboard or start and select on the controller we ran into some technical difficulties my Game Capture wouldn't capture the screen at the resolution that the n64 emulator was putting out and it was running super slow anyway if you want to run in 64 on anything I suggest getting an Android TV box Amazon fire TV Amazon fire TV - the new Nvidia shield console or even a Android phone that's able to output over HDMI or MHL now my old Galaxy S 4 ran in 64 fine Dreamcast and Playstations so problem is really the hardware the Raspberry Pi this is the Raspberry Pi 2 with the quad core it's just not a powerful unit so I suggest getting something else if you want to play all of those full-speed with great sound so one thing I wanted to show you guys was a Kodi Media Center built into this recall box now there's a bunch of great features for this the the online adding roms and everything but this has Kodi so go ahead and press Start on your controller or enter on your keyboard right at the top here it says Kodi Media Center press a on your controller or s on your keyboard Kodi 14.2 helix and you can run your videos or programs you can watch videos play music watch pictures off a USB or the SD card I don't use Kodi myself I have a TV that you plug a USB stick into and I plays pretty much anything I have a tablet my phone my xbox one my computers so I really don't have a need for kody but if you see a lot of people using this and this would just is a great add-on to have if you want to run some emulators and then you feel like watching a movie you don't have to swap out an SD card it's built right in so that's an awesome feature with this recall box you go back out here exit so that's pretty much it I have tested the Nintendo 64 doesn't run good at all Game Boy Advance works great Sega Master System NeoGeo MAME Atari Super Nintendo all the older emulators all the older consoles the emulation is spot-on with the Raspberry Pi 2 anything newer than the n64 it really has a hard time rendering the sound and video just due to the lack of optimization from the developers and the unit is very low power so like I said if you really want to get into emulation I suggest you getting an amazon firetv 1 or 2 or even that new Nvidia shield system is amazing so if this helps you out at all if you could help me out and hit that like button and subscribe that would be awesome I got a lot more coming I will show some more stuff running on retro PI and this which is recall box I've just been real busy lately so appreciate you guys watching and thankshey what's going on guys his ETA prime I'm back here again and today I wanted to show you how to install recall box on your Raspberry Pi 1/2 or Raspberry Pi zero now I'm using a Raspberry Pi 2 this is another version of emulation station but it has Kodi built in which is super awesome because you can switch right from the menu straight to Cody to watch your movies and then switch back play some video games so let's get right into it um you're gonna need no extra tools at all so that's a plus with this one I'm using a 8 gigabyte SanDisk SD card super cheap on the Amazon we're gonna need the install files so you're gonna want to open up whatever browser you use and go to recall box comm we're gonna go right over to the top here do it yourself recall box we're gonna scroll down here we're gonna click on the github links and I'm using version 3.3 points now I have already downloaded the zip file that it comes with so I'm gonna go ahead and close this out I've placed it on a in a folder on my desktop now it comes zip so let's go ahead and unzip it okay so as you can see here the folder that you the file you unzip has all these in it all you're gonna want to do is go ahead and copy and go straight to your SD card and paste all right now that it's done copying what we're gonna have to do is take the SD card from the PC or laptop place it into the Raspberry Pi and boot it up I'm gonna do that now okay so this is the first boot of the Raspberry Pi 2 running recall box I have my Ethernet plugged in my wireless keyboard and my xbox360 wired controller now in order to put roms on the unit itself you need internet set up on your Raspberry Pi 2 it uses network sharing so let me go ahead and fast-forward this and we'll get into the OS show you how to put roms on it and you'll be good to go guys this is the first boot SD car to install we want to go ahead and set up our controller so I have my Ethernet my controller and my keyboard plugged into the Raspberry Pi unit so from your keyboard press Enter scroll to controller settings and use the S key to select configure controller s one more time and it shows me that as found my controller now I need to set up the keys so I'm going to hold the a button and just follow the on-screen prompts and you should have no problem up down right all right so now that that's set up I'm gonna go back now in order for you to put roms on the unit you want to make sure that your internet is connected now I'm connected with Ethernet and it is connected you want to note your IP address and your hostname because you're gonna be installing from your PC over network so let's go back okay so before I add roms I'm gonna go ahead and go to my system settings I'm gonna overclock you don't have to overclock if you don't want to but it makes gameplay a lot smoother all right so now that that is done we're gonna go ahead and switch over to the PC so we can load some roms we're back at the PC let's go ahead and load some roms now I have set my roms in a ROM folder on my desktop now this is one of the coolest parts about recall box miry my Raspberry Pi is still powered on with the recall box hooked up and I'm running it with an Ethernet cable this will work over Wi-Fi also so what you want to do is go ahead and find the roms that you want to install go ahead and open up a browser window and type in forward slash forward slash re call-box now we are in my recall box that's set up and powered on so you can go here to monitoring see them do you know this is amazing they really did some work to get this running like this so in order to install roms you just want to go ahead and click on the roms folder up here find which ROM you want to install let go with SNES when I highlight these I want to find my SNES folder here I'm just gonna drag them over all right let's go back to my roms on the browser here let's find my Nintendo 64 which is here I'm gonna go back 64 roms drag them on over very slick setup I mean this is awesome I do miss the SD or the USB install but ok so this one didn't work but that's alright didn't install there must be the wrong format let's go back here and we're gonna load up my NES roms here and we'll just drag them on over and now your roms are installed on the recall box and they're on the SD card for good to you reformat it I'm gonna bring you back over to the recall box now and we are going to see how these roms perform now that we have the roms loaded onto the SD card over the network they're on the SD card for you to play you may have to reboot one time to get them to show up as you can see we have a Nintendo 64 showing up now and let's go ahead and test these emulators out real quick we'll start with NES and I'll play some Mega Man 5 all right see if our controls are working my joystick and my d-pad is working perfectly oh my gosh robot Tigers now the problem here is I have the shoot button set up as my B and my jump is my a so it's a little off for me let me get the hang of it that was horrible all right so you can see this plays very well let's go test out some SNES now I'm gonna back out of here with be on the controller and I'm going to try some Joe and Mac this was one of my favorite games all right so you guys can see this is running really good so no problems with running SNES and NES games now let's go ahead and test some in 64 games or at least just one game go ahead and back out of here by hitting the escape button on the keyboard or start and select on the controller we ran into some technical difficulties my Game Capture wouldn't capture the screen at the resolution that the n64 emulator was putting out and it was running super slow anyway if you want to run in 64 on anything I suggest getting an Android TV box Amazon fire TV Amazon fire TV - the new Nvidia shield console or even a Android phone that's able to output over HDMI or MHL now my old Galaxy S 4 ran in 64 fine Dreamcast and Playstations so problem is really the hardware the Raspberry Pi this is the Raspberry Pi 2 with the quad core it's just not a powerful unit so I suggest getting something else if you want to play all of those full-speed with great sound so one thing I wanted to show you guys was a Kodi Media Center built into this recall box now there's a bunch of great features for this the the online adding roms and everything but this has Kodi so go ahead and press Start on your controller or enter on your keyboard right at the top here it says Kodi Media Center press a on your controller or s on your keyboard Kodi 14.2 helix and you can run your videos or programs you can watch videos play music watch pictures off a USB or the SD card I don't use Kodi myself I have a TV that you plug a USB stick into and I plays pretty much anything I have a tablet my phone my xbox one my computers so I really don't have a need for kody but if you see a lot of people using this and this would just is a great add-on to have if you want to run some emulators and then you feel like watching a movie you don't have to swap out an SD card it's built right in so that's an awesome feature with this recall box you go back out here exit so that's pretty much it I have tested the Nintendo 64 doesn't run good at all Game Boy Advance works great Sega Master System NeoGeo MAME Atari Super Nintendo all the older emulators all the older consoles the emulation is spot-on with the Raspberry Pi 2 anything newer than the n64 it really has a hard time rendering the sound and video just due to the lack of optimization from the developers and the unit is very low power so like I said if you really want to get into emulation I suggest you getting an amazon firetv 1 or 2 or even that new Nvidia shield system is amazing so if this helps you out at all if you could help me out and hit that like button and subscribe that would be awesome I got a lot more coming I will show some more stuff running on retro PI and this which is recall box I've just been real busy lately so appreciate you guys watching and thanks\n"