Questions about Retropie emulation on laptop
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Recently I got an idea to install an emulator on my laptop or on a raspberry pi 3, but I got a few questions before I start my plan. Firstly, will the Retropie emulator replace windows on my laptop and erase all the data or it will just run as a window? Secondly, if I created a Retropie emulator on a Raspberry Pi 3, can I run it using the monitor of my laptop? As a student studying in a boarding school, I wanted to know about this and build a tiny retro console without being too obvious about gaming, thank you<3
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RetroPie is not an emulator. RetroPie is a script that installs emulators. If you want your windows PC and to run Retropie then you'll want to dual boot it with Ubuntu.
The guide for installation is here:
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/RetroPie-Ubuntu-16.04-LTS-x86-Flavor/
If you don't want to learn Linux you really have no business using retropie on a PC. I have a USB equivalent for Windows which covers the majority of the systems
https://github.com/HerbFargus/Portable-Game-Station/releases
And no you can't use a laptop as a secondary monitor as it doesn't have an hdmi in. Most are just output.
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Retropie is specifically for the pi hardware. Laptops do not have ARM processors. There are a great many good solutions for emulation on intel/AMD hardware, but it's largely beyond the scope of this forum.
Also, I don't know of too many laptops that allow you to hijack the panel as a monitor. Not saying they don't exist, I just haven't seen one.
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@Lyle_JP laptops can run Linux though which means they can run Retropie. See post above
If you read the documentation it will answer 99% of your questions: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/
Also if you want a solution to your problems read this first: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first
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@herb_fargus I was under the impression that all the binaries for Retropie had been created for ARM processors specifically.
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@Lyle_JP we build binaries for RPI. Other platforms can build from source.
To help us help you - please make sure you read the sticky topics before posting - https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first
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@Lyle_JP the binaries generated for the SD image we provide on our site yes, but the setup script can be installed on most debian based platforms and there are different flags in the scripts that will compile the emulators specific to the platform they are installed on. We only prebuild binaries for the pi but if you run the setup script on a PC it will compile them from source
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@BuZz @herb_fargus Thanks so much for that information. I did not know it worked on so much hardware.
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@Lyle_JP I also have it running on my odroid c+ ;)
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I have RetroPie running on a Chromebook running GalliumOS and it works very well. As long as the operating system is Debian-based, you should be ok. Updates take a long time because everything recompiles from source, but aside from that it's fantastic.
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