Some details

As a first step I will go for a system capable of playing C64 games. If and when that works, Amiga functionality will be added.

I have done some reading and found several other people with the same basic idea. However, it seems that usually people want to put the emulator hardware into an old C64, so as to make it look as similar as possible to the original "bread box". This is not what I want. I want something that is user friendly, looks neat and is easy to bring on a trip or a vacation. For this reason I will not choose the original physical format, but rather "as small as possible".

After lots of further reading I have decided to use a Raspberry Pi, since it is cheap, well documented (at least I hope so) and other people have succeded in making C64 emulator boxes with it, see for example here, here and here, as well as many others).

So my shopping list was this:

• Raspberry Pi 2 Model B (top of the line model means it should be powerful enough)
• Box for fitting the Raspberry
• 8 GB high speed microSD (high speed is sometimes mentioned as necessary or preferable)
• USB charger, 2.1 A with a 3 meter cable
• Cheap USB keyboard and mouse

The Raspberry was the single most costly part and constituted about one third of the total cost of SEK 1300, roughly equivalent of USD 140 or EUR 130. Had I not been on vacation I could have reused an old keyboard, mouse and USB charger and cut about one third of the cost, making it quite cheap.

My preliminary plan as of now is to use Retropie, which is an SD card image for the Raspberry Pi, containing emulators for a huge number of retro gaming machines, including the C64 and the Amiga. It also has support for connection original NES controllers directly to the Raspberry, but unfortunately there is no such support for Atari type joysticks, as used by the C64 and the Amiga. Instead I have ordered a joystick-to-USB adapter from here. I ordered it a week ago, and it should arrive in another week or so. From what you can read on the internet it works like a charm. It cost another 30 Canadian dollars (roughly SEK 200, USD 25, EUR 20).

So far I have not even unpacked the Raspberry, and the joystick adapter is somewhere in the international s-mail system. More reports will follow as I continue this project.