RetroPie finally arrives for the Raspberry Pi 4

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We haven’t covered the Raspberry PI too much, but it is a hugely underestimated single-board PC that is so good at a variety of tasks. One where it has found its niche in recent years though was in the world of emulation, bringing back to life tens of thousands of video games from yesteryear including thousands of arcade games, most of which you have never heard of but many of which you will.

It has also been, until the recent arrival of the MiSTer FPGA device one of the best ways of playing classic console titles from the Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo.

When we had the Raspberry Pi 3 as the latest version of the emulation package end for it, RetroPie was working just fine, and many people had them in their setups. Then in the middle of last year the Raspberry Pi 4 came along, and people dashed out to buy it, keen to boost their emulation setups still further with the enhanced specs of the new board.

There was some dismay though that RetroPie wasn’t actually compatible with the new architecture, and, until today, it has remained that way, although there have been countless stories that a version for Pi 4 was on its way. It has been possible with a little Linux knowledge to get a more or less stable version manually installed, but today is a breakthrough for a more automated experience.

Now, finally, there is a beta release of RetroPie for the Raspi 4 that is running in a stable fashion, and you can get it here to try it out for yourself.

The pre-built images containing RetroPie 4.6 beta that just needs to be copied onto an SD card are using Raspian Buster as the base code, and the Retropie guys reckon most things work well, but there are improvements to come.

Within RetroPie, multi-platform emulator RetroArch has been updated to 1.85, and EmulationStation gets a boost to the current 2.9.1 version. There are a multitude of other additions in the changelog which you will find on the same page.