Hi team
Looking for thoughts and advice on these units. They're available from JayCar for $109. Does anyone have one? What's it like and can I set it up even if I haven't used Raspberry Pi? Thanks in advance
https://www.jaycar.co.nz/raspberry-pi-retro-arcade-game-cons…
That kit is really just a glorified raspberry pi enclosure, power supply, and fightstick, latter of which may or may not be very good quality. I've seen them on display at Jaycar in Australia and tested them — the buttons don't feel very good and some of the inputs don't work consistently. Although that could be why it's a display unit.
You will need to provide your own:
Raspberry Pi 3 or Pi4 (can be a little hard to source due to stock shortages globally)
SD card with retropie image https://retropie.org.uk/download/
Video game ROMS . For very obvious reasons I'm not going to tell you where to obtain them.
The Retropie subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroPie/ is a good starting place if you want to ask questions about building your own retro game console
Annnnd there you go. Thank you both very much. May have to give it a miss at the moment due to Pi shortages.
Buy one from AliExpress. They seem to get most of their stock from the same suppliers anyway (really).
Personally I think they're a bit shit. Quality of the buttons and sticks isn't the best, and the layout is terrible for 2 players (and I can't really see it getting much one player use).
Personally I'd skip it, get couple of good controllers, and emulate via my PC (or even phone).
Thanks for your thoughts. Not getting much positive feedback at all.
$109 from Jaycar is priced very well compared to buying off Aliexpress though.
They've gone down massively. They were asking at least twice that last I looked.
Buttons and stick would be the issue for me still though. They get some punishment and won't last long if they aren't good quality.
I got one and found that the software they use to do the controls over the GPIOs starts to lag compared to a USB gamepad on some games. This is on a pi3b+ so you may be better on a 4. Also the metal box blocks the already terrible wifi/BT of the pi so you will be adding a dongle if you want to use bluetooth controllers reliably at more than a meter away from it. The controls seem ok, and the Jaycar price is cheaper than aliexpress + shipping would be so is one of the few times I have bought something from Jaycar that I could get elsewhere.
As someone who has built a few RetroPi installs I'm somewhat interested, especially since it doesn't limit your ability to add BT gamepads also. Don't know why it has HDMI: 1280 x 720 listed when it looks like its just a standard HDMI cable from the pi to the exterior, you'd need to get an adapter with the Pi4.
Biggest thing would be good luck getting your hands on a Pi. I've been trying to get a Pi4 for months now.