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Wanting to turn old PC to retropie machine

Phoenix66
By Phoenix66
in Operating Systems
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Posted

I've got a old PC someone gave me with a 20GB hard drive in it. I'm wanting to install retropie onto it, and use it as a emulator machine. Problem is, the software I want to use is RetroPie, designed for the raspberry pie. I obviously don't have a raspberry pie, so I'm wondering what the process would be like to get this on a PC. 

I was thinking installing Raspbian on the computer, than retropie on top of that. I want to use the hard drive in the computer to store all the roms/system files, rather than using a SD card like the Pi does to hold all the files. Is there anybody out there that could help me with this? 

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I don't know much about this stuff, but if it has the same type if architecture, which I still don't know much about. It might work.

Someone told Luke and Linus at CES 2017 to "Unban the legend known as Jerakl" and that's about all I've got going for me. (It didn't work)

 

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raspberry pi is ARM your old PC is x86 (I would assume) the two are not interchangeable

 

you would need to run something like qemu and then run retropie

 

or raspbian in a virtual machine then retropie (unlikely you will ever manage this)

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Instead of trying to get something designed for the raspberry pi to work on your computer, you could instead use RetroArch (http://www.libretro.com/), and whatever x86 operating system you feel like. It does not support all of the systems that retro pie supports, for example Amiga,  apple II, and Atari 800 emulation are absent from retro arch, but it does support most of them.

Build Logs: PCX - A HTPC/Low End Gaming PC in a Playstation 1 Chasis (90-ish% done) | Yamaha PC-350 (Computer in a RD-350 engine) --> Coming Soon | Mediocre Terrors: Yet Another Prodigy Build Log
 

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  • 1 year later...
Posted

No Raspberry Pi OS will work on a non-ARM processor; your computer is almost guaranteed to be either an x86 processor, or an x86_64 processor.  You might be able to get it to work if you download the source code for RetroPi or Piplay or the like and re-compile it all for your architecture, but I don't know for certain that that would work.

 

Your best bet would probably be either buying a Pi to run RetroPi/Piplay directly, or download some emulators for your computer and use those.

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