One of RetroPie’s wrinkles (for our purposes) is that it assumes you’ll be using a console‐style gamepad. You can enable it via raspi-config - but first, by God, change the default password. On newer releases of Raspbian, SSH access is disabled by default for security reasons. This one from Logitech has worked great for me. If you have as many headless Pis around the house as I do, you might want to invest in a wireless keyboard and trackpad. But at first you’ll need to use a physical keyboard hooked up to the Pi. Soon you’ll be able to work primarily over SSH. Here’s what you’ll be doing with your first few boots: Hooking up a keyboard
RETROPIE REMAP KEYBOARD INSTALL
Technically you’re able to install RetroPie on top of an existing Raspbian system, but in an age where SD cards are like candy and it takes only a couple minutes to write a disk image to a card, why bother? The simplest way to start with RetroPie is to download one of the pre‐built images and burn it onto an SD card. I’d suggest that you follow the installation guide to the letter. The RetroPie docs should be your first destination lots of supplemental information can be found in the RetroPie‐Setup wiki on GitHub.
So rather than hold your hand through the process, I’ll use this post to talk about some of the things I wish I’d known when I was installing RetroPie for the first time. Any tutorial I write would be a pale imitation of what already exists. In particular, the stage we’ve come to - installing and configuring RetroPie - has extensive documentation already. After all, I’m largely following other people’s plans here, and if I wanted to do a tutorial I should’ve taken twice as many photos. Here’s my dilemma: I want to give enough detail to make this series worth reading, but not so much detail that it gets mistaken for a step‐by‐step tutorial.