This RetroPie really happened: Watch (above) as our own Adam Patrick Murray and Alaina Yee after they weren't able to buy an SNES Classic. Go ahead, laugh at (and learn from) our mistakes. For the past 20 years, retrogaming enthusiasts have dreamed of building a “universal game console” capable of playing games from dozens of different systems.

Their ideal was inexpensive, easy to control with a gamepad, and capable of hooking into a TV set. Thanks to the Raspberry Pi 3 hobbyist platform and the software distribution, that dream is finally possible. For under $110, you can build a very nice emulation system that can play tens of thousands of retro games for systems such as the NES, Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, Super NES, Game Boy, and even the PlayStation.

All you need to do is buy a handful of components, put them together, and configure some software. You’ll also have to provide the games, but we’ll talk about that later.

The plan To make our “ultimate console,” we’re going to run software emulators and video game ROM files on a single-board computer: the Raspberry Pi 3—an inexpensive computer designed for hobbyist and educational use. To make this process easy, retrogaming enthusiasts have combined all the software programs we need into a free software package called RetroPie. RetroPie includes (among other programs) a Linux operating system, a large suite of game system emulators, and an interface that makes it easy to use.

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Mentioned in this article. For people who aren’t familiar with emulation, here’s a brief rundown: An emulator, for our purposes, is software that’s been programmed to behave in almost the exact same manner as the hardware of an older video game system. It simulates the original console circuitry in software. Since most computers lack a slot to read data from old video game cartridges, hobbyists have copied video game data into software files called ROM images. (In the case of home PC emulators, such as the Apple II, you may also encounter disk images, which are copies of an entire floppy disk’s contents combined into a single computer file.) A front-end interface is a program that displays a graphical menu that lists available games on the system, lets the user select the game of their choosing with a game controller, and then run the game on the appropriate emulator automatically. In this case, the front-end program included in RetroPie is called EmulationStation.

Evan Amos You don't need one of these classic game consoles to enjoy their best games. What consoles are supported?