YOUR OFFICIAL RASPBERRY PI MAGAZINE

PI ZERO RETRO GAMING SYSTEM
Projects
PUTTING A PI ZERO
INSIDE A TELEVISION
The wires from the Pi Zero are attached directly to the SCART board inside the TV
The Pi Zero is small enough
to tuck inside the television
>STEP-01
Pi Zero RCA output
The Pi Zero comes with composite RCA output
connectors on the board. Two wires are connected
from the Pi Zero to pins 18 and 20 on a SCART socket.
and a plug to make the board easier
to remove, but there you go.”
The Pi Zero is small enough to
tuck inside the television, but that
makes it hard to access. However,
RetroPie enables you to transfer
games by via a USB drive, so
Spanner decided to use a USB hub
to provide an external connection.
“We cobbled together a powered
USB hub from a pound-shop hub,”
he tells us, “[and] soldered a
socket onto the power lines on the
PCB and replaced the cable with a
butchered micro-USB one. We also
ran a second micro-USB cable out
of the hub to power the Pi Zero,
so both the hub and the board run
from a single 5V power supply.
“Other than having to change
the composite output from the
default NTSC to PAL in the Pi Zero’s
config file, it all worked right out of
the box. We’re able to play classic
computer and console games like
the Mega Drive, SNES, Amiga, ZX
Spectrum, and loads of others.”
The Pi Zero turns out to be great
for retro gaming. “Given the extra
RAM overhead and being able to
crank the Pi Zero up to 1GHz, it’s
coped with RetroPie beautifully,”
says Spanner. “For the older
systems, you don’t even need to
overclock it, so make it easy on
yourself if you’re planning on
playing Atari 2600 games.”
Safety announcement! Working
inside old CRT televisions is
dangerous (and not in a cool way).
It is important to wear safety goggles
and to discharge the electricity
completely. Residual charge in an
old CRT television can easily kill you.
Please don’t open an old TV set if
you don’t know what you’re doing;
it’s wiser to connect the RCA from
the Pi Zero to a SCART cable and
plug this into the television, or use a
newer HDMI monitor for your retrogaming
system.
A cheap USB hub was adapted to
provide external access to the Pi Zero
inside the television
>STEP-02
USB connection
Spanner took apart a USB hub and modified it to
share power with the Pi Zero. A section of the TV is
cut away to provide external access to the USB ports.
>STEP-03
NTSC to PAL
Pi Zero’s config file needs to be changed to get
colour on a UK PAL television. Edit the config file and
uncomment the line sdtv_mode=2. The system is
now ready to play games.
raspberrypi.org/magpi January 2016 33