Level 1: Software Setup

Your Zero Arcade comes with a 8gb Micro SD card with a USB adapter for plugging into your computer to install the Retropie pre-configured image. We’ve created a disk image with it fully configured (minus games) to work with our circuit boards. A link to download that image if you desire will be provided upon purchase. This image does the heavy lifting of setting up the video/audio/controls for your arcade so you don’t have to worry about it! We do not provide support for the prebuilt image and it is provided as-is as a way to make setup easier for people who don’t want to go through the process of configuring the Micro SD card manually. The prebuilt image comes ready to play other than installing the game roms which you must install and provide yourself. To learn more on how to add rom files to your Retropie install, check out the Retropie page.

To load the prebuilt image or the Retropie fresh install image onto your card we recommend Balena Etcher as it’s very easy to use on both Windows and Mac computers. Below is a quick video on how to flash a Retropie image onto your Micro SD card. This same process can be used both for a freshly downloaded Retropie installation or the preconfigured Zero Arcade image.

Roll Your Own SD Card Image

If you want to fully customize your build (advanced users only - do this at your own risk we make no guarantee these instructions will work exactly for you), these are the steps that were taken to create the original SD card image:

First, download the Retropie Image for the Raspberry Pi Zero W from their website and go through the basic install process. You will need an HDMI monitor and a keyboard to attached to the Raspberry Pi during this setup or you can follow the instructions linked above on how to set up the wifi and then use ssh to log in to your Pi. The instructions in these setup articles are for using Terminal on the Mac. If you’re doing this from a PC the setup should be similar but may have slight differences in how to run the commands.

Let’s get started with the wifi setup.