#retrorangepi

Nintendo recently launched the Nintendo Classic Mini: Super Nintendo, which is a game emulator to play SNES games on 21st Century TVs.... and my recommendation is to not buy it. Why you ask? Well, it may be officially provided by Nintendo and it does look like a Super Nintendo but other than that you can literally do better for around the same price. Read on if you're interested....

The new Nintendo Classic Mini: Super Nintendo runs on exactly the same hardware as the NES Classic Edition (Check here), which is powered by a Allwinner R16 SoC chip (which includes four ARM Cortex A7s CPU cores with an ARM Mali 400 MP2 GPU), a 256MB DDR3 RAM module and 512MB of NAND eMMC storage. Now, this SNES Classic costs AUD$120 and includes 21 pre-installed games, which sounds all well and good...  until you learn that an Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 board (which runs an Allwinner H3 SoC, and is almost identical to the R16 but less restricted, has 512MB DDR3 RAM module and 8GB NAND eMMC Storage) costs just AUD$43.63! Add in two 8BitDo Bluetooth SNES Controllers for AUD$38.75 each + the free RetroOrangePi Operating System and the free and legal Super Nintendo ROMs (ie. digital copies of the games) from archive.org, and now you have a more capable Super Nintendo emulation system for about the same price as the SNES Mini but has wireless controllers instead of wired ones and can play the ENTIRE collection of Super Nintendo games, not just the 21 Nintendo selects for you!

TL;DR? Got confused by the big paragraph or want to know exactly how to get your (much) more capable Super Nintendo?

HOW TO GUIDE:

Buy a Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 from the manufacturer on Aliexpress here

Buy 1 or 2 8BitDo SFC30 Bluetooth SNES Controllers on Aliexpress here (these can also be bought locally from EB Games for $36ea on their mid-year sale or $54.95ea usually pickup or Core Electronics for $50.95ea including shipping). You can also get the SF30 Pro controller (which has analogue sticks and extra shoulder buttons for added compatibility with other console emulators for $30.75ea on Aliexpress)

Use a Micro USB 5V 2A Charger (ie. a Android phone charger) or purchase one from your nearest Altronics or Jaycar electronics shop

Download RetrOrangePi from here, plug a MicroSD card into your computer (using your Memory Card Reader, using a SD Card adapter or directly, or get Orico or Ugreen one for as low as AUD$4 from Aliexpress) and flash the downloaded RetrOrangePi image using Etcher

Download the SNES ROMs from Archive.org and extract the ones you would like to play to the /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/snes directory on MicroSD card (or if you have a MicroSD bigger than 16GB, you could extract all of them but I recommend keeping the total size used on the MicroSD under 6-8GB... we’ll explain that later)

Make sure your 8BitDo SFC30 Bluetooth SNES Controllers have been charged fully!

Plug your RetroOrangePi MicroSD Card into the Orange Pi Zero Plus 2, plug in the power and turn it on.

Emulation Station should load, at which point it will probably say it can’t find a controller. Plug in a USB Keyboard, then hit F4 to quit Emulation Station and then you’ll be presented the command line prompt. Type in this command: **sudo /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/retropie_setup.sh**

Press the Start button on your SFC30 Bluetooth Controller (the blue light on the top of the controller should start flashing slowly) and then hold down the Select button for 3 seconds to place it in Bluetooth pairing mode. The blue light on the top of the controller will be flashing rapidly now.

Then go Configuration/tools > Bluetooth - Configure Bluetooth Device > Register and Connect to Bluetooth Device

The screen will change to “Searching...” and then come up with the found Bluetooth devices. It will either list your 8BitDo controller by name or it will likely be the first one on the list. Select it and then it will ask to choose the security mode for the Bluetooth controller, to which you should select “DisplayYesNo”. Your 8BitDo Controller should now be paired with your OrangePi and the blue light should be staying on solidly (ie. not flashing).

Now you should be back at the “Configure Bluetooth Devices” menu, select option U - “Set up udev” and select your 8BitDo controller on the next screen.

You’ll be back at the “Configure Bluetooth Devices” menu once again, so select option M - “Configure bluetooth connect mode”. Change the connect mode from default to boot. (this way when you hit a button on the 8BitDo controller and start your RetrOrangePi, they will both automatically reconnect to each other when they startup)

Repeat this process for EACH controller you have to ensure they all connect correctly like this every time (you won’t need to go through this pairing process again if you follow each of the previously mentioned steps).

Once all Bluetooth Controllers are paired, keep going back in the menu until you get to the main menu, the one that has the Perform Reboot option down the bottom, then select it to reboot your RetrOrangePi.

Once rebooted, you should be returned to Emulation station and now your 8BitDo controller/s should be detected correctly. You’ll need to configure your controllers (basically mapping the buttons). Tap the buttons as listed, or if your controller doesn’t have that button, hold down another button to skip the button your controller doesn’t have.

You should now be ready to rock and roll. Select SNES from the Emulation Station menu and provided you extracted your ROMs in the directory mentioned in Step 5, you should be presented with the games you loaded on the MicroSD. Select one and get ready to play any SNES game you want in glorious HD with your wireless controllers!

If you chose to put only the games you want to play on MicroSD and they total under about 6-8GB, you also now have the option to copy everything across to the OrangePi’s eMMC storage... so you can take out the MicroSD card and use it elsewhere! (or load it up with a bunch of secondary games) + the eMMC memory is faster than the OrangePi MicroSD slot so your games will load faster if you do this. ;) So...