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badcrc
22
Aug 26, 2017
Thumbs down so far, I think this will be my last drop. I just got mine last night and stayed up until 2am excited to get it together. The overall kit seems pretty nice at first glance and all the parts came in a clear plastic reusable case like a cheap tackle box. Not great but it's a nice touch. The buttons aren't that great as discussed by boskr earlier. Definitely not "arcade quality" but they all work and don't stick, they just aren't high quality. The joystick is a little nicer. The buttons seem to fit snug in the holes at first but they pop out slightly very easily which I don't like. Once it's together this isn't a problem but it bugs me.
After I got everything built I found a tiny bag of heatsinks that are clearly meant to go on the rpi and I was about to throw this thing across the room. No where is this heatsink addition mentioned that I saw, including their youtube video. I had to carefully take it all apart and unmount the rpi to install the copper heatsink on the underside (not easy with 4 panels of buttons wired to the boards). I was pretty pissed off at that point.
I thought this would be a "build and play" type kit but I've been working on getting the controls working since last night. The controls don't work in any rom with any emulator I've tried so far, and since I can't exit the rom I have to unplug the pi to restart it each time I test it. I'm sure this is just a configuration issue since all the controls work in the menus, just not in the games. Also the built in speakers have a hissing sound that makes them completely useless. I feel ripped off at this point. So far I've spent probably 6-8 hours screwing around in linux getting everything to work just so I can debug the non-functioning control issue. I had to configure wifi, bluetooth, ssh, pretty much everything from scratch just so I could use this thing normally without using just a joystick with buttons. All that and I've basically just got a networked raspberry pi right now. In the video they build it, plug it in, configure the controls and start playing. Ya right, what a joke.
The instructions are complete crap just throw them away and watch the youtube video. Really all you need to do is pause the youtube video on the part with the wiring diagram because it's all pretty obvious how it assembles.
badcrc
22
Aug 26, 2017
badcrcOh ya, and I wanted to say the way the hdmi connects to the pi is not a great setup because there's no support for the jack, but I knew that before I ordered. I plan on making an hdmi extension that mounts somewhere so the port on the pi doesn't get broke. That's assuming I can even get this crap working.
badcrc
22
Aug 27, 2017
badcrcWell I got fed up and installed a new image of retropie on the included sd card (wiped the old card completely). Now everything seems to work much better, but I still have some settings to tweak. At least now I can exit a rom. Ridiculous the image they include doesn't even work out of the box with their controller. For anyone needing help setting this up here's what I did:
1) install fresh copy of retropie overwriting what's on the sd card: https://retropie.org.uk/download/ You can use etcher to write image to sd card in linux or win32diskimager in windows, I just used the following command in linux: sudo dd bs=4M if=/home/"your_username"/Downloads/"retropie_image_name".img of=/dev/sdb Replace "your username" with your home directory, "retropie_image_name" with the name of the image file you downloaded and unzipped, and replace /dev/sdb with the sdcard device name in linux (check with df command).
2) Enable bluetooth if you have a BT keyboard: RetroPie menu option->Bluetooth->Register and Connect
3) Enable SSH (allows you to login remotely using SSH to edit files, restart, etc): RetroPie menu option->RASPI-CONFIG->#5 Interfacing Options->P2 SSH More info: https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/ssh
4) Enable wifi: RetroPie menu option->WIFI->Connect to a wifi network
5) Copy some roms to the proper location (you can do this with sftp but you can use samba without installing anything): Windows: type "\\retropie" into explorer address bar Linux: type "smb://retropie" into file manager address bar Bring up another window with your roms and copy away.
6) You can change audio output to HDMI output or the controller's speakers by using the HDMI or headphone option on RetroPie menu option->Audio
Hope that helps someone, but I'm far from done so far. I still have to figure out how to get mame emulators to work correctly with both the controller and keyboard.
I_love_stuff
33
Aug 27, 2017
badcrcI agree with you about the buttons, they work but are very low quality. I'm glad you had good luck with the joystick. My joystick is defective. It doesn't respond in the diagonal positions which makes this virtually useless for playing shooting games. I made sure the restrictor plate was set to 8 way but this didn't help. I'm not sure if the switches are defective or the restrictor plate is not allowing actuation of the switches in the diagonal direction.
Retropie should have auto detected the controller board and allowed you to configure all the inputs on the controls. You can bring up the control configuration by pressing the start button which will bring up the main menu and choose "configure input." I had very few issues concerning the software side of things. I was even able to attach a hori arcade stick via usb and it worked flawlessly which makes me wonder why I even bought this when I could have just installed retropie on a microsd card and attached the hori to the raspberry pie. I do like the form factor and portability of this kit. It's too bad that it is hampered by very low quality controls.
As for the sound quality of the speakers, the problem lies with the sound processor of the raspberry pie. This is a known issue and hopefully the makers of the raspberry pi will replace it in a future revision of the product.
badcrc
22
Aug 27, 2017
I_love_stuffI'm familiar with mame configuration but the problem is getting to that menu. None of the buttons will bring it up for me and the kb lets me but it doesn't seem to work with the controller buttons. Do i need to set the restricter plate to 8 way? Funny i was just looking into thay last night because i noticed some games i did get working were not registering diagonal so i was looking up 8 way joysticks.
badcrc
22
Sep 3, 2017
badcrcI finally got this thing sort of working. Mame works ok now. The joystick is pretty bad, mainly stiff and hard to do diagonal after up/down/left/right movement. The buttons are low quality but they're not as bad as I first thought and work pretty well. Except for the speakers and the joystick I can't knock the kit itself too much. Most of my frustration is because retropie is a mess, especially since this is the first time I've used it. It's a mish mash of text and gui programs with varying configurations and key setups and the emulators are all wildly different. At least I got mame working after hours upon hours of screwing around. One example besides mame is atari 5200 emulator which is "atari800". You actually have to pick the type of cartridge for each game...you would think that would be done already since all roms are known for that system. After fighting that emu for hours I find out the joystick doesn't work unless you do a keyboard to joystick mapping. I did get it to work finally with keyboard which sucks.
I_love_stuff
33
Sep 3, 2017
badcrcI know what you mean. Retropie is still stuck in the 80's in terms of UI. Emulation station is a front end that tries to modernize it with good success in my opinion. Once you leave the front end and delve into the underbelly of retropie, you are one step above from editing config files in a command line environment lol. It kinds of reminds me of MS DOS 3.1. That being said, I love retropie. Once you have it setup to your liking, it's one of the best gaming systems you can get and it's free!
DiRtYMeATCuRTiN
26
Oct 25, 2017
badcrchey, can we get an update a few months later?
like did the joystick ever break in? i know some of the nice joysticks ive bought in the past started out pretty stiff but after a few weeks of gaming on them they more or less broke in a bit and had a really nice feel to them from that point on...
have you looked into replacements buttons and speakers? i'd really like to get on this as it's about the same price as a nes classic but is capable of so much more....but the reviews im reading are making it sound pretty borderline in reguards to actually being usable....
badcrc
22
Oct 25, 2017
DiRtYMeATCuRTiNI haven't had a lot of time to break it in. I've used it a handful of times for playing so I can't say. Most of the time when I turn it on I'm trying to get the rest of the emulators configured. What I can say is games like super sprint are really difficult to play with that joystick. Movement in all games doesn't feel responsive and accurate. I've looked into a new Sanwa joystick for $24 on Amazon that looks like it would plug right into the geeekpi board ( http://a.co/gY9Sbic ) on the LRUDG connector, maybe someone can verify that? The buttons aren't a major concern because they work. I haven't got around to the speaker issue yet but the speakers appear to be good quality. I think some shielding on the wires and/or magnets would fix that issue. Does anyone have some tips for cheap shielding?
badcrc
22
Oct 25, 2017
DiRtYMeATCuRTiNAlso, I still really like the design of the kit. It's really cool looking. I sound negative about it because I had to spend so much time on the software configuration that I got really annoyed. I didn't realize retropie would be that convoluted, but I should have known that with my history using linux. It's definitely not bringing up a couple config menus and you're done. Once you factor in the price of replacing the joystick you have to determine for yourself if it's worth it or not. The potential of a kit like this, whether you build one from scratch or buy one, is limitless. For example, using Intellivision with an arcade stick would be almost impossible, but for $62 I can buy the "Ultimate PC Interface" (http://www.intellivision.us/intvgames/interface/interface.php) and plug it into the raspberry pi. That will let me connect real Intellivision, Colecovision, Atari, Sega, etc. controllers and play those games using the real controllers using this kit. I plan on doing this for Intellivision because those controllers can't be duplicated with a gamepad or joystick and I grew up with that system. The Intellivision Flashback (2014 console release with 60 games built in) controllers are $14 on their site.