The RetroTink Ultimate NTSC pi3 hat gets my paw stamp of approval.

[chopperthedog]

A little over a year ago, I purchased the ArPiCade unit from HighScoreSaves.com and installed it into my Donkey Kong cab. I rotated the sanyo ezv20 to horizontal and incorporated a VS. panel that originally came with this cab years ago, set the arpicade with 24 nintendo VS. games and was quickly impressed with how good emulation can be in the RGB realm. Played excitebike to death and felt no lag, saw no screen tearing or jitteryness in the scrolling, things just played well. That was my first dive into a pi.

About a month ago I had a work delivery near a microcenter and made my run through and they had a bin full of pi3B's for $30, didn't know it was that cheap and snagged one and found some zebra black ice case that was open and priced at $6 (all parts were there) on the bargain bin. Played around with a couple of the popular premade hip images that the kids dig and learned the ssh thing along with some other stuff, but I just couldn't play the games via hdmi. I did enjoy some of the pretty menus and all the historical information you could read for each game and system.

I did a search for s-video on the pi and figured I'd run into some easy hackery way to accomplish it... Nope, but I did discover the RetroTink hat (pi hat was another completely new term for me) and ordered one up, yes a bit pricey, I was curious though.




Received the RetroTink hat and luckilly that bargain bin case had a cut out for hat's, yay me. Booted the pre configured version of lakka from the RetroTink site and I was instantly impressed.






Learned that the maker of the bargain bin case (C4 Labs) has an etsy.com store and they sell an expansion kit to the case I had already that could be customized for a pi hat. Worked out ok.




I used the 1/8" audio jack for about a week, but instantly saw its short comings. It didn't output a full signal and the jack was scratchy and sucked. Had a planned trip to Fry's to grab some components and found a Sabrent usb audio dongle for $4.99, did a quick google search and saw people use them with a pi. I can't recommend this little thing enough, sounds great through my system, nice strong full range signal.




I didn't like that the audio dongle was too wide and rendered the next usb port useless, dug up a 6' usb extension cable from my stash and made it 3" attaching it to the side of the case with double sided clear vhb tape.




The low res lakka/retroarch menus are fine and look like an everdrive menu. This thing is ready to launch a game 8sec after power up and switching from game to game or launching a game from another system happens instantly, it's like a multi-system-everdrive :p . While I was trying the pre configured bloat stuff via hdmi you could tell there was just too much sh!t going on. I'd go to quit a game (select/start) and the screen would go black for 7seconds til it got back to reloading all that sh!t to get back to the menu and within that time span I'd forget what game I wanted to play next.




I didn't know a pi does ps1 emulation quite well, found myself in the garage digging through boxes hunting down my old favorite driving controller from 20 years ago. I remember buying that blue usb thingy in the early 2000's so I could use the controller to play pc driving games on the cash register pc's at a retail job I had. The pi saw the set-up instantly and was off and running reliving some colin mcrae and gran turismo2 memories.




Everything just looks awesome on my gaming crt.




When I was at Fry's I also grabbed some extra s-video cables and dug up the $2 s-video switcher thrift store find and have been A/B'ing the consoles I have on the fly. Quite impressive how good this set up is.


It was a curiosity that really worked out well and is a gap filler for me. I've got 7800, TG16, NeoGeo aes, SNES and some old sony ps1 favorites loaded up on this thing. Emulation can be a fun thing when you don't integer scale, stretch, scanline, shader, wait for sync with overlays and you just ask a system to run the game and spit out an RGB signal and stay in the 240 realm.


good day.

[yotsuya]

A little over a year ago, I purchased the ArPiCade unit from HighScoreSaves.com and installed it into my Donkey Kong cab. I rotated the sanyo ezv20 to horizontal and incorporated a VS. panel that originally came with this cab years ago, set the arpicade with 24 nintendo VS. games and was quickly impressed with how good emulation can be in the RGB realm. Played excitebike to death and felt no lag, saw no screen tearing or jitteryness in the scrolling, things just played well. That was my first dive into a pi.

About a month ago I had a work delivery near a microcenter and made my run through and they had a bin full of pi3B's for $30, didn't know it was that cheap and snagged one and found some zebra black ice case that was open and priced at $6 (all parts were there) on the bargain bin. Played around with a couple of the popular premade hip images that the kids dig and learned the ssh thing along with some other stuff, but I just couldn't play the games via hdmi. I did enjoy some of the pretty menus and all the historical information you could read for each game and system.

I did a search for s-video on the pi and figured I'd run into some easy hackery way to accomplish it... Nope, but I did discover the RetroTink hat (pi hat was another completely new term for me) and ordered one up, yes a bit pricey, I was curious though.




Received the RetroTink hat and luckilly that bargain bin case had a cut out for hat's, yay me. Booted the pre configured version of lakka from the RetroTink site and I was instantly impressed.






Learned that the maker of the bargain bin case (C4 Labs) has an etsy.com store and they sell an expansion kit to the case I had already that could be customized for a pi hat. Worked out ok.




I used the 1/8" audio jack for about a week, but instantly saw its short comings. It didn't output a full signal and the jack was scratchy and sucked. Had a planned trip to Fry's to grab some components and found a Sabrent usb audio dongle for $4.99, did a quick google search and saw people use them with a pi. I can't recommend this little thing enough, sounds great through my system, nice strong full range signal.




I didn't like that the audio dongle was too wide and rendered the next usb port useless, dug up a 6' usb extension cable from my stash and made it 3" attaching it to the side of the case with double sided clear vhb tape.




The low res lakka/retroarch menus are perfect and look like an everdrive menu. This thing is ready to launch a game 8sec after power up and switching from game to game or launching a game from another system happens instantly, it's like a multi-system-everdrive :p . While I was trying the pre configured bloat stuff via hdmi you could tell there was just too much sh!t going on. I'd go to quit a game (select/start) and the screen would go black for 7seconds til it got back to reloading all that sh!t to get back to the menu and within that time span I'd forget what game I wanted to play next.




I didn't know a pi does ps1 emulation quite well, found myself in the garage digging through boxes hunting down my old favorite driving controller from 20 years ago. I remember buying that blue usb thingy in the early 2000's so I could use the controller to play pc driving games on the cash register pc's at a retail job I had. The pi saw the set-up instantly and was off and running reliving some colin mcrae and gran turismo2 memories.




Everything just looks awesome on my gaming crt.




When I was at Fry's I also grabbed some extra s-video cables and dug up the $2 s-video switcher thrift store find and have been A/B'ing the consoles I have on the fly. Quite impressive how good this set up is.


It was a curiosity that really worked out well and is a gap filler for me. I've got 7800, TG16, NeoGeo aes, SNES and some old sony ps1 favorites loaded up on this thing. Emulation can be a fun thing when you don't integer scale, stretch, scanline, shader, wait for sync with overlays and you just ask a system to run the game and spit out an RGB signal and stay in the 240 realm.


good day.

Wow, you have it covered! Glad to see you playing consoles the way they were meant to be played, sitting down in front of the TV instead of standing in front of a four player arcade cabinet.

[chopperthedog]

Wow, you have it covered! Glad to see you playing consoles the way they were meant to be played, sitting down in front of the TV instead of standing in front of a four player arcade cabinet.

Along with no slope to the panel and the cab ends up looking like a buffet hutch. I can officially become one of those guys that sticks their noses in peoples threads and says "just get a pi, loser". 


good day.

[barrymossel]

I can officially become one of those guys that sticks their noses in peoples threads and says "just get a pi, loser". 

LOL 

[chopperthedog]

Been enjoying the setup, but found having the pi loose and swapping usb ports and controller adapters was a bit of a pain. Mounted everything to a chunk of 12" x 8" shelf, the pi case had key holes for screws on the bottom and then used vhb mounting tape for the other stuff.  The 4 port switchable hub is perfect for swapping stuff on the fly and selecting controller order for 1 & 2 players.




Been acquiring some og controllers to compliment my gaming experience. The mega racer and snk were from ebay, there's a seller with brand new mega racers in a box for $4, not a bad little controller. The snes and sony controllers were from area thrift and resale stores.




This snk ps1 controller is by far one of the best pieces I've ever laid my hands on, I paid up for this one with no regrets. Great pad to go along with the aes stuff.




Got this asciiPad for $6 at a salvation army and it was the most disgusting controller I've ever purchased. Like all used controllers I buy, they get taken apart and descuzzed in hot soapy water.




The Y B & A buttons lived a hard life and I got new silicone's for both snes controllers.




Cleaned up well and feels great now. I kinda like this one over the oem, since it's a little wider and fits larger hands better.




Nice to have everything mounted on the board, hook up power, video, audio and pick a controller to use. That HKS controller is pretty sweet, beat all my R4 and Colin times with first testings of it.



good day.

[chopperthedog]

This set up still gets used often when I want to enjoy some neo geo, tg16 and snes (systems I don't own) in crisp 240p. Never kept up on any of the retroarch or lakka news/updates, but recently learned of the ability to sorta theme the RGUI driver along with snap and box art support. Did a full fresh lakka install  and got things configured again. There's also plenty of new menu options to hide certain settings from view that were never there before, so nice plus. Tried a couple of the stock themes and had some ideas in mind, sadly lakka locks a bunch of folders down (even if you mount drive and such), but was able to see the RGUI theme structure on github and used a config to come up with my own themes. Edited some images from the webz for wallpapers and played around with some text colors to come up some simple and nice looking themes.



A nice update from the checker pattern, green boarder and text.


good day.