ROMS

ROMs stand for Read Only Memory. ROMs are essentially digital versions of old game cartridges which allow you to play games on emulators (software that mimics your old gaming consoles.) There are many issues involving Copyrights laws regarding the usage of ROMs, as a result in order to preserve the integrity and longevity of the RetroPie project, the locations of ROMs will not and cannot be added to the Wiki. That being said, in the search of your childhood - Google is your friend. You should only have ROMs of games that you own.

Transferring Roms

There are three main methods of transferring roms: via USB stick, via SFTP, and via Windows (Samba) shares

USB stick

• (ensure that your USB is formatted to FAT32)
• first create a folder called retropie on your USB stick
• plug it into the pi and wait for it to finish blinking
• pull the USB out and plug it into a computer
• add the roms to their respective folders (in the retropie/roms folder)
• plug it back into the raspberry pi
• wait for it to finish blinking
• refresh emulationstation by pressing F4, or choosing quit from the start menu

see this video for reference:

SFTP (needs to be able to establish a connection to your Raspberry Pi, either via internet or internal network)

• Wired (needs ethernet cable)
• Wireless (needs Pi >= 3 or wifi dongle for Pi <= 2 )

There are many SFTP programs out there, for windows many people use WinSCP for mac you can use something like Cyberduck

Connection settings:

• Protocol: SFTP
• IP address: To find the IP address of your RetroPie, go into RetroPie options from the main menu, and select the last option Show IP address.
• Username: pi (default)
• Password: raspberry (default)

Where to drop the files

Simply drop the files in the ~/RetroPie/roms/$CONSOLE folder, where $CONSOLE is the name of the target console, e.g. snes or arcade.

You can also log in as root if you wish to change more files than just the roms, but you first need to enable the root password by typing sudo passwd root into the terminal and choosing a new root password.

Samba-Shares (needs an active internet connection)

• if on windows type \\RETROPIE into the computer folder. You can also replace RETROPIE with your Raspberry Pi's IP address

• if on MAC OS X open finder, select "Go" menu and "Connect to Server". Type smb://retropie and hit "Connect".

Manually copy files from USB-stick

From RetroPie version 3.0 a file manager is available, it allows you to manually transfer files between USB-stick and Raspberry Pi SD card. File manager can be run from 'RetroPie' Emulationstation menu. Quick file manager (MC) guide can be found here. Your USB-stick should be mounted in /media/usb. The directories for the ROM files are located in ~/RetroPie/roms/SYSTEMNAME, where SYSTEMNAME is the short name of the corresponding system.