Building a SNES emulator with Raspberry Pi

Mario Sanchez Prada is a senior software engineer with hands on experience on some very cutting edge technologies. In his spare time, he built a nostalgia inducing Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulator using Raspberry Pi, mostly because he wanted to play around with Rpi. You can check out the video below to see him playing 90’s games on it. He is a father to young kids and his sons love the emulator.

He went for a Raspberry Pi Model B with Raspbian installed. He also needed a Bluetooth 2.0 dongle and, of course, a PS3 DualShock 3 gamepad. He also acquired a QtSixA. Those of you who are into gaming would know it is a joystick manager for PS3’s SixAxis gamepads. As for the software, PiSNES is a SNES emulator for the Raspberry Pi, based on SNES9X 1.39 and seemed right for the project.

He read the guidelines at this place. It clearly educates on using sixpair to pair the gamepad and how to get the sixad daemon running at boot time, which is a crucial personal necessity for Mario. Next, he downloaded the source code of PiSNES and patched it slightly so that it would detect the PS3 DualShock gamepad and permit Mario to define the four directions of the joystick through its configuration file.