Your retro game console 🎮¶

You've got a little black box (a Raspberry Pi) loaded with about 3,600 classic games — NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, Game Boy (all flavors), Sega Genesis, and PlayStation 1 — with box art, descriptions, and video previews for nearly all of them. This guide gets you from box to playing in about five minutes.

1. Plug it in¶

HDMI cable → any TV.
USB-C power → use the power supply that came with it (phone chargers make it flaky — if you ever see a lightning-bolt icon, that's why).
It boots straight into the game menu in ~30 seconds. No remote needed — everything is controller-driven.

2. Connect a controller¶

USB controller: plug it in. Done.
Bluetooth controller: from the main menu press Start → Controller & Bluetooth Settings → Pair a Bluetooth device, then hold the pairing button on the controller.
First time a new controller connects, the box may not respond to it yet: hold any button for ~3 seconds and a mapping wizard appears — press each button as it asks, and you're set forever.

3. Connect it to your Wi-Fi¶

Press Start → Network Settings → enable Wi-Fi, pick your network, type the password. (You only need Wi-Fi for the built-in help pages and game streaming — regular games play fine without any network.)

4. The manual lives on the box¶

Once it's on your Wi-Fi, open http://retrobox.local:8080 in a browser on your phone or laptop — the full guide is served by the console itself: controls cheat-sheet, save states, adding your own games, and a fix-anything troubleshooting table.

Playing games — the 20-second version¶

Pick a system, pick a game, play.
Hotkey + Start (Hotkey = the controller's center/logo button) quits any game back to the menu.
Hotkey + South button (A/B) opens the in-game menu for save states — save anywhere, load anytime, just like a modern game.
The box also keeps normal cartridge-style saves automatically.
Nintendo 64 games are the most demanding: most run great, a few are picky. If one stutters, it's the game, not you.

Something's weird?¶

Symptom	Fix
Controller stopped responding	re-pair it, or reboot the box
Controller "forgot" its pairing after a battery swap	just pair it again — some pads change identity when reset
Game frozen	Hotkey + Start quits to the menu
Anything else	pull the power, wait 5 seconds, plug back in — it's unbrickable this way, saves included

Optional extras (coordinate with the operator)¶

Stream a PC game library: the box has a "Moonlight" entry that can stream big modern games from the main homelab's gaming PC over the internet. It needs a one-time link-up between your networks — ask the operator, it's a ten-minute thing done remotely.
Movies & TV: Kodi is installed with the Jellyfin add-on ready — if you (or the operator) have a Jellyfin media server, it plugs right in.

For the technically curious¶

SSH is enabled: user root, password linux (standard for this OS — it's a game console on your home network, not a bank). Games and settings all live under /userdata. The OS is Batocera — huge friendly wiki at wiki.batocera.org.

Have fun! 🕹️