Porting RetroPie to other SBCs

George

Hello all,

I've been looking at some other SBCs out there, specifically how to get RetroPie working on them. These are all ARM based SBCs that run Debian/Ubuntu/Armbian. While they may have some similarities to Raspberry Pis, their ARM processors and GPUs are not Broadcom based. I should probably also note that some only have a 64-bit OS available.

I've gone through the code to see where changes were made to accommodate the ODroid devices. It seems most of the changes were done in scriptmodules/system.sh. After making my own additions to that script, I'm able to run RetroPie-Setup and start compiling emulators and playing games.

Thanks in advance for the advice.

- George

Are there any other places I should look when porting RetroPie to another SBC? My goal would be to eventually contribute my additions to the RetroPie repo via pull request, where others would be able to install it using instructions similar to the ones available for ODroid.

ExarKunIv

@George there is one group that does focus more on other boards then the pi.
you can take a look at them for ideas on how they get them to work

https://techtoytinker.com

mitu

In addition to the system detection in system.sh, where you specify the detection method and the capabilities, you'll need to decide which distro (and flavor) you support and set the debian/ubuntu_ver. The platform flags in system.sh also have to be able to differentiate the platform so that different packages can be built with the proper make/cflags/ldflags parameters. Some emulators have makefiles that take into account the SBC platform and set compiler options themselves (i.e. Amiberry).

You should also take a look at _mapPackage in helpers.sh to make sure that kernel headers package are properly detected and installed. Armbian has a different naming strategy for kernel package names than Ubuntu/Debian and they also provide different distro options for the same SBC (Debian/Ubuntu flavor).

Lastly, you'd need to check what packages should be enabled via each package's flags and make sure they're working properly.