What gaming OS to install on PI 5?

KohChangArcade

I'm new to Raspberry PI in general and i just realized that retropie doesn't support PI 5 yet. Any advice on what to install on my PI 5 for now? I want to emulate retro games and consoles like Nintendo and PlayStation 1 games.

hawkes_84

@KohChangArcade you probably won't get any recommendations for others OS' to play on it here. Google might help though :)

abj

@KohChangArcade

RetroPie supports RPi5, but we don't have an iso image yet, because some things needs time to be 100% ready for a new image release.

For now, you have to install manually RetroPie on top of Pi OS Bookworm Lite 64 bit.

Check this instructions that someone wrote, they are very nice, detailed with pictures: https://github.com/danielfreer/raspberrypi5-retropie-setup

Please read and the RPi5 topic here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/34627/raspberry-pi-5-official-announcement/378
And the official RetroPie manual installation guide here: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Manual-Installation/

Ashpool

@abj Haven't followed the Pi5 Topics in detail (don't have one so far), any specific reason to use the 64 bit instead of the 32 bit one?

abj

@Ashpool If i am not wrong, some emuators like Dolphin, beetle-psx needs 64 bit. Generally, system is faster, atleast on Pi4 that i have try both 32 and 64.

mitu

@Ashpool said in What gaming OS to install on PI 5?:

any specific reason to use the 64 bit instead of the 32 bit one?

With the new RaspiOS, the 64bit variant is recommended by the RPI folks for both Pi4 and Pi5. Furthermore, Pi5 cannot run a 32bit kernel so you'd end up with a 64bit kernel and 32bit OS/userland, which will

cause confusion for source installation, since most emulators/ports assume that if the kernel is 64bit, the OS is also. As a consequence, some source installations will outright fail since they compile for aarch64 (64bit ARM), but that won't work since 64bit dependencies are not installed.
break the installation of kernel modules, because dkms doesn't know how to handle 64bit kernel modules on a 32bit OS.

TL;DR - if you have a Pi5, 64 bit is the recommended OS.