My latest Gadget.. An emulator for old school gaming consoles built inside of an original NES Game Cartridge, Part 2

In the first part of this blog post, I described the hardware that I used to make my own old school gaming cartridge.  Now, I am going to delve into the software aspect of it.  For the cartridge to work, you need basically 2 things.  First you need an emulator, and second you need a game ROM.  The emulator I am using for my cartridge is actually a collection of emulators that can play multiple games, depending on which ROMs are loaded on to the memory card.  The collection I am using is called RetroPie.

RetroPie splash screen

RetroPie contains emulators for over 50 gaming systems.  Here is a list from the RetroPie website that shows what emulators are included.  With the hardware that I am using, it can probably only emulate systems up to the mid 90's.  But for the Super NES, NES, and Atari games that I have loaded on it it works great.

The second thing that you will need to have to make the cartridge work are the actual games themselves.  They are referred to as ROM's.   The ROM's are not included with RetroPie as there could possibly be some copyright issues.  If you do a google search, you can find all the ROM's for the games you want to play.

ROM's are placed onto the emulator by loading them onto a flash drive, and then inserting the flash drive into the USB on the front of the cartridge.  

The only thing left to do after installing the software, and copying ROM's to the emulator is to configure the controls.   The first time a controler is inserted into the cartridge, RetroPie starts a script that allows you to configure the control pad for use with the emulators.  I hope this has been informative and helpful.  If you have any questions or comments please leave them below.

Thank you,

Curtis Dean(The Gadget Geek)