Starter Guide - Raspiboy - Retropie with Pi Zero W

Here is all the tutorials, FAQ and support for RaspiBoy Kit
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ktempleton
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun 30 Sep 2018 05:32

Starter Guide - Raspiboy - Retropie with Pi Zero W

Post by ktempleton »

Received my Respiboy yesterday and thought I'd share my experiences with fixes.

Putting together was pretty straight forward no issues there. My Retropie isn't a fresh one and added the lines to my config.txt to make the screen and sound work.

I did however run into a problem with mapping the Dpad in Retropie. I would press up and then down fine but when I pressed left or right it said that it was already taken. Took apart and everything seemed how it should so tried again and same thing. Seems the conductive pads were touching other contacts somehow.

So I examined the PCB and noticed that where the conductive pad presses for DPAD down is very large so thought maybe the left/right pads were touching. So I took some small pieces of electrical tape and placed them on both sides of the PCB where the down DPAD presses to further isolate where the conductive pads press. This did the trick and I was able to map the built in controller with no issues.

Noticed if you have the screws down to tight the DPAD becomes pretty loud. Just unscrew and adjust until the DPAD becomes quieter.

Now I had a working Raspiboy woo hoo! I noticed the default carbon theme in Retropie is horrible on the 3.5 tft screen. So I looked to see ways of adding themes. Thought the best way was to use the Retropie Setup but couldn't find a good theme for tft screens. Since I have a Pi zero w I could add the Themes folder to Samba shares so I could just drop them into the Themes folder in Windows Explorer. Here is how I did that.

First I used Putty to remotely access the command line. Then I typed sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf. Once that is open scroll all the way down and add :

[themes]
comment = themes
path = "/home/pi/.emulationstation/themes"
writeable = yes
guest ok = yes
create mask = 0644
directory mask = 0755
force user = pi

Now I hit ctrl-x then y to save changes then press enter to overwrite. Now just sudo reboot and now the Themes folder will appear when accessing via IP with Windows Explorer.
The attachment themes.PNG is no longer available
I found that the GBZ35 was highly recommended so went to https://github.com/rxbrad/es-theme-gbz35 to download. Then placed in my newly created themes folder and rebooted EmulationStation. Changed to GBZ35 in EmulationStation and was amazed that everything was looking great.
themes.PNG
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Last thing I did was overclock my Pi Zero W and It seemed to help with the screen blurriness as part of it is overclocking the GPU also. Here is what I added to config.txt and what to seemed to work for me. The Pi seems to keep cool and have had no freezing or locking up issues. It'll probably affect the battery performance but have played for hours without the low battery light coming on.

arm_freq=1000
gpu_freq=500
core_freq=500
#force_turbo=1
over_voltage=6
sdram_freq=500
sdram_over_voltage=2

That's it. Just wanted to share my experiences in hopes it helps someone. I'm always open to tips and tricks also.
Sinkin
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu 11 Oct 2018 12:33

Re: Starter Guide - Raspiboy - Retropie with Pi Zero W

Post by Sinkin »

Spent 2 or 3 hours trying to make Samba work on my Pi the other day, turns out that Windows 10 have that protocol disabled by default, and the Pi was OK from the start :?

If someone else is facing this problem, Go to : Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows Features on or off and then check or uncheck the box for "SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support"

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