Raspberry Pi Forums

Hey all, brand new to the pi. Picked up a pi zero over the holidays. I have downloaded NOOBS and installed it on my sd card, I have also downloaded retropie. Do I just copy that image to the card as well and it will give me the option of what I want to boot when I start this thing up, or do I have to install retro in one of the operating systems that is in the NOOBS folder?? Any help or a sticky would be great. thanks.

NOOBS is an OS installer that allows you to install multiple OSes onto one SD card.
Perhaps you used it to install Raspbian which comes supplied with a full NOOBS card, or maybe Raspbian was already pre-installed by your supplier.
If you want to install multiple OSes, they must be installed at once by NOOBS. If you have already installed some OSes with NOOBS and you want to add another, NOOBS will wipe the card and reinstall all your selected OSes, wiping any previous programs and data.

If your PI is connected to the internet when you run NOOBS, you will have the option to install other OSes. Unfortunately, Retropie is not one of them.
However, if you use PINN instead of NOOBS, then this will be able to install (a slightly old version 3.8 of) Retropie.
(As you have a PiZero you will need an external network connection - ethernet or wifi. PINN will support a lot of wifi dongles. NOOBS only supports the Broadcom chipsets)

NOOBS/PINN were designed to make it easier for Windows users to install OSes from a windows PC simply by copying files onto the FAT formatted SD card.
The alternative method is to burn an image onto the SD card directly. if you have downloaded Retropie directly, then you have to install it this way.
For this you need to use a tool like Win32DiskImager to write the Retropiexxxx.img file directly to the SD card, which will wipe out any NOOBS and other OSes already on your SD card.

I believe It is also possible to install retropie (i.e. EmulationStation) inside another OS like Raspbian, but you'll have to look at the retropie website for details on how to do that.
So it all depends on how you want to organise your SD cards. if you are just beginning, why not try all three methods, discover their pros and cons and find out which you prefer.

Thanks for the reply. gonna have to do more reading I guess. I downloaded NOOBS and copied the image to the SD card but have not installed anything yet. I will check out the retro pie page a little more too.

I believe It is also possible to install retropie (i.e. EmulationStation) inside another OS like Raspbian, but you'll have to look at the retropie website for details on how to do that.
So it all depends on how you want to organise your SD cards. if you are just beginning, why not try all three methods, discover their pros and cons and find out which you prefer.

Retro pie has a guide to downloading it directly through the Raspbian command line however there is another boot loader that I use calledhttp://www.berryterminal.com/doku.php/berryboot it comes with raspbian, retropie, ubuntu, kali linux etc. I enjoy using it but if you prefer Noobs then go to retropie they should have a how to but i dont know if it will overwrite raspbian

SirScottsAlot wrote:

I believe It is also possible to install retropie (i.e. EmulationStation) inside another OS like Raspbian, but you'll have to look at the retropie website for details on how to do that.
So it all depends on how you want to organise your SD cards. if you are just beginning, why not try all three methods, discover their pros and cons and find out which you prefer.

yes you can install retropie in raspbian, but apparently you have to log out of raspbian, and into retro pie with a reboot to get it to work.. I would just get a second sd card, and burn the retro pie image from their site onto one of the cards , and raspbian onto the other.. then you can just hot swap the cards when you want to use either.. its what I started doing.. its easier then logging in and out of everything every time you want to use retropie