@nickgash
If there some special characters in your PW then try to hash the password. Read here ... HowTo

@smiler79 It shouldn't be. Is the PSU ~2.5Amps? Is it a hardwired dedicated PSU or a plug and USB cable combo? Some USB cables just cannot transfer enough power as they are designed for phones and tablets that draw a lot less juice.

@nwgalloway nope. Not until an on-screen keyboard is integrated

This is the only solution in the interim.

https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Wifi#method-2-connecting-to-wifi-without-a-keyboard

@herb_fargus I forgot about that herb. Think I set my Zero up before this was implemented.

@neobium Please use the @+name-sign or click on reply so the user you might want to talk is mentioned. If the WIFI IP is the one you've setted in the config and you can't connect to the Pie via WIFI then your security key (=WLAN Password, WPA passphrase.... ) might be wrong. Please check this first.

To varify use CLI and use ping command
ping your router first
ping 192.168.1.1
or via router hostname
ping myrouter.ip
ctrl+c stops ping command!

or you can try wget command to download some files
wget http://www.retropie.org.uk/
you will get index.html from retropie

Or are you behind a company proxy and want to play some games while in work? ;)
Or is your subnet mask the right one? Is your router setted to only pass trusted devices?

Are you able to optain a connection via DHCP? if yes then use the method @hansolo77 and myself explained. Change the hostname with raspi-config and you can use any IP you want .

Instead oft using standard Charakters you can try to hash the key. So the key will be transformed to a HEX string that contains only Charakters from 0 to 9 and A to F

Im still on vacation ;D

i figured it out- By default the default localization options were set for England. I changed it for UTF 8 and all is well now. I checked my wpa-supplicant.conf and saw a foreign symbol in place of my #. problem solved.