Upgrade raspberry from pi 3 B to pi 5
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Hi all,
I have a fully working Retropie on a Raspberry pi 3 B, installed on August 2020. I don't know which version of Retropie is installed (how to check it?).I would like to upgrade the hardware with a Raspberry pi 5 8Gb, is it sufficient to move the SD card, or should I do something else?
Maybe is better to install a fresh Retropie and move everything on it? I'm scared because I did a lot of tuning for emulators, joypad config, game settings and I don't remember everything I did...
Thanks a lot for your help
g4b0 -
@g4b0 said in Upgrade raspberry from pi 3 B to pi 5:
I have a fully working Retropie on a Raspberry pi 3 B, installed on August 2020. I don't know which version of Retropie is installed (how to check it?).
You can check by starting RetroPie-Setup and look at the first screen's top heading, where the version is displayed.
I would like to upgrade the hardware with a Raspberry pi 5 8Gb, is it sufficient to move the SD card, or should I do something else?
The Pi5 is not officially supported and only works with a manual installation of the RaspiOS lite version. Moving the card is not going to work.
Maybe is better to install a fresh Retropie and move everything on it? I'm scared because I did a lot of tuning for emulators, joypad config, game settings and I don't remember everything I did...
You can copy some your
configsub-folders over to keep your settings, though with some things is better to start from scratch. Input configuration is one of the things I'd advise to start anew. -
@mitu Thanks a lot, I didn't know that raspberry pi 5 is not officially supported. What about switching the sd card into a pi 4? Should it work?
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@g4b0 said in Upgrade raspberry from pi 3 B to pi 5:
What about switching the sd card into a pi 4? Should it work?
It might work if you're fully up-to-date - what version of RetroPie do you have installed right now ?
EDIT: Do note that if you do the switch, you'll have to re-install everything, since the Pi4's packages are different than the ones for the Pi3. EmulationStation will probably not even start the 1st time around.
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@mitu I don't have access to my Retropie box right now, but I'm not fully up-to-date. During time I just upgraded the system through apt update/upgrade, but if I remember correctly EmulationStation is not upgraded by debian packages.
Can you kindly point me to the documentation about upgrading EmulationStation?
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@g4b0 Ok, nevermind, I found it: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Updating-RetroPie/
Is it generally a safe task, or something can brake? My son can kill me if he can't play bubble booble :D
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@g4b0 said in Upgrade raspberry from pi 3 B to pi 5:
Is it generally a safe task, or something can brake? My son can kill me if he can't play bubble booble :D
On major upgrades, it's advisable to take a backup. Same page has some backup options - taking a full sdcard backup is usually the safest and easiest option.
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@mitu Ok, I can dd my sd card and then try to upgrage. Thanks for your time
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If I can add my contribution... I recently tried (like 2 weeks ago) to Update the RetroPie (I'm on 3B+ and had it since 2020 like you). I even had a message stating that my version (Stretch, I think I was on 3.8) was not supported anymore, but I still did it.
Unfortunately it took hours (building from source was the only option) and broke everything.
So I flashed and restarted from scratch (made a copy of my configs and bios/roms folder first), using latest image from the RetroPie website... now it looks like a charm but I need to redo all the custom setup I had. I use the configs backup only as a reference since configs parameters might have changed and didn't want to break things again.
I wish you luck :)
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