How non-techie people can contribute to RetroPie project

meleu

Regardless of our degree of IT knowledge we all love this awesome, helpful, and friendly community, right?

I see some guys here in the forum saying that they don't have any programming skills but would like to contribute with the RetroPie project some other way (this topic and this one). I'll try to put here some suggestions of how non-techie people can contribute even with no programming knowledge. I tried listing in ascending order of difficulty.

Keep in mind that I'm just an average RetroPie user/contributor. This is my personal opinion on how you can contribute. Maybe the RetroPie team members, forum moderators/administrators can suggest other ways to contribute.

Donate

The easiest way to contribute! :)

https://retropie.org.uk/donate/

Help others in the forum

The easiest way to help the project here in the forums if you don't have any specific knowledge is: do not post or let other users post about where to get illegal ROMs. This is against the forum rules and puts at risk the project's longevity.

If you feel so newbie that you think you're unable to help others with configs, you can at least alert those who ask poor questions with incomplete info. People who request help without reading and following the advice in the read-this-first post don't contribute to the forum quality.

If you are able to help, go ahead! If you have the quick and short answer for the issue, nice!, but try to provide a link to the docs too. Other users may have a similar issue but with a more complex solution, and then the docs can help for future references.

Improve Wiki/Documentation

If you find some out of date/inaccurate info in the docs, you can report here in the forum. If you feel confident, update that info. Same thing for broken links.

You can even improve just the presentation of the current info with some markdown formatting knowledge.

Reporting bugs

If you find a bug, crash something or your system behaves in a way you believe that is not correct, report it here in the forum. Be sure to detail what happened and provide logs and the steps to reproduce the issue. There are some developers around here and probably they will try to fix/improve the software

Testing new stuff

If you are comfortable with RetroPie configs and are OK with getting your setup screwed sometimes, maybe you can be a beta tester.

Example 1: Recently the RetroPie's EmulationStation branch is getting new features. You can help testing and reporting bugs about these features before they are merged into the official RetroPie's EmulationStation. I've wrote a tool for ES testers and posted about it here.

Example 2: There's a new frontend named Pegasus emerging in this topic here. It looks very promising.

Ideas and suggestions

Feel free to suggest improvements to RetroPie, but there are some points that must be very clear in your mind before suggesting new features.

The RetroPie image that you can download and install on your SD card is just a convenience offered by the RetroPie team. RetroPie is NOT an Operational System! The actual OS on the RetroPie image is Raspbian but RetroPie can be easily installed in a Debian-based Linux distro. That being said, there's no reason to suggest the installation of a software that has nothing to do with retrogaming. Just install it using your Linux distro package manager.
RetroPie-Setup is just a set of shell scripts that installs several emulators, a frontend (currenty EmulationStation), and many other tools to make the installation and configs of a retrogaming environment a lot easier. Most emulators in RetroPie are RetroArch cores. Then before requesting a feature for RetroPie, try to figure if it would not be a request for the RetroArch project.
EmulationStation is the current official frontend but RetroPie developers have a strong conviction that the RetroPie-Setup should be frontend agnostic. That being said, there's no reason to request a feature for EmulationStation to configure some other part of the system (unrelated to the frontend itself). The only accepted exception for this conviction was the input configuration. If you really don't like those command line interface dialog boxes maybe you should take a look at the recalbox project.

I don't know how to code but I like to play with graphics software.

Maybe you can create a cool splashscreen/launching image and post it here in the forums.

If you feel ambitious you can create your own EmulationStation theme. There's a guide here: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Creating-Your-Own-EmulationStation-Theme/

I'm learning to code. How can I contribute?

If you're learning shell scripting (specially bash), you can implement cool stuff on your own system before contributing with the RetroPie-Setup code. Playing with runcommand-onstart.sh, -onend.sh and runcommand-menu scripts can be fun/useful to practice your bash programming skills. You can read about it here: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Runcommand/#runcommand-onstart-and-runcommand-onend-scripts

And here are some topics that may interest you:

Yeah! I'm getting better and better. What's the next step?

The answer for that question is: Learn how to use github!

Create a github account and learn how to use it.

Perhaps this fact is not properly publicized, but github is one of the main responsible for the rapid evolution of modern open source projects, and this is no different in RetroPie. So if you feel that you are more than a non-techie guy and want to contribute, then learning the basics of github is highly recommended.

Even people who don't write code (like theme makers) have to learn the basics of github to share their work and keeping them up to date.

Now if you're feeling confident with your coding skill, read this page about how to contribute with the actual RetroPie-Setup development.

ortsac

And let us not forget Hardware Issues as well. There are also issues/questions that pop-up involving the hardware side of RPi or the console/controller. So if you have the solution or had experience the same issue, do not hesitate to share that knowledge or information.

PetroRie

I'm learning Python programming now. I'm also learning C/C++ and Assembly, I really hope I will be able to code something for this community in the future.

Python isn't really that hard if you understand it it will be easier to learn other programming languages.

meleu

@ortsac said in How non-techie people can contribute to RetroPie project:

And let us not forget Hardware Issues as well. There are also issues/questions that pop-up involving the hardware side of RPi or the console/controller.

Sure! I think that my info about helping others here in the forums includes hardware issues as well. ;-)