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Over the holidays, I got a Raspberry Pi 2 in order to experiment with various projects. One thing I was interested in was seeing how it would work for classic game console emulation, since the 900MHz ARMv7 should be enough to handle most of the older consoles pretty well, and the form factor of a small fanless box which can connect via HDMI and use an existing (e.g. DualShock 3) wireless controller seemed ideal.

I used the following hardware to get up and running:

With that, setup was pretty easy.1 For most packages, you just download and image the SD card from a computer then put it in the RPi2 and boot up. Here’s all the existing all-in-one emulation frontend packages I was able to find for the Raspberry Pi 2, collected in one place:




PiPlay (formerly PiMAME)



  1. I initially tried using the preloaded NOOBS bootloader/installer that came on the CanaKit microSD card, but accidentally installed an RPi1 version of Lakka which wouldn’t boot, and then apparently messed things up more trying to fix it. I found just wiping and imaging the microSD card each time was easier.