Turn XBMC into a retro console running real game cartridges

Being quite the nostalgic tech geek and especially fond of the 8-bit and 16-bit era, I’ve managed to stack up on quite a bit of original cartridges and consoles from the glorious days of my youth.

Even though the world of emulation has been around for some time now, it’ll never beat the real thing. But for some reason I got the idea of exporting my own game cartridges into ROMs and somehow transfer them together with the save files to a media center running XBMC and back, thus making it possible to play my original games both on the media center as well as on the actual consoles.

After plenty of research I stumbled upon the amazing Retrode which was just about to be released in an updated version: Retrode 2. The Retrode is a USB adapter for both Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis game cartridges and controllers, and seeing that it would also be fully compatible with Linux, Mac OS X and Windows and supporting both reading/writing, it was just what I needed.

Running XBMC on Ubuntu 10.04, here’s what I did:

1. Make sure your Retrode works as expected by simply plugging it in and inserting a game cartridge. Your Retrode should be automatically mounted at /media/RETRODE/ and it should now contain an .sfc rom-file, representing your game cartridge.
2. Install the ZSNES emulator: apt-get install zsnes
3. Next, either start ZSNES by typing zsnes and configure it to your needs using the GUI, or simply go ahead and try out your game cartridge by typing: zsnes /media/RETRODE/*.sfc
4. Depending on your configuration the emulator will probably not be running in full screen. To solve this you can force a video mode when starting your game: zsnes -v 4 /media/RETRODE/*.sfc. Available video mode options and other parameters can be found by typing:  zsnes -?
5. Now, launching this setup from XBMC requires that you install the Executor add-on, which is available from the XBMC repository and is easily installed just like any other add-ons.
6. When the Executor add-on is installed, go into the Programs section, select Add new program and configure it to execute /usr/bin/zsnes with parameters -v 4 /media/RETRODE/*.sfc or other any video mode and/or parameters that you prefer.
7. You should now be able to launch whatever game cartridge you have in your Retrode unit, and I’d recommend that you add the execution to your Favourites section together with an execution to the ZSNES GUI in order to do simple configuration changes from XBMC

  

The Retrode 2 unit is shipped with write protection enabled, so by default it will not be possible to save any game progress to your cartridges. Instead, all your game data will be saved locally on the computer. This is probably fine for most people, but since I’d rather save all progress to the actual game cartridge, I had to make some further configuration:

1. Edit /media/RETRODE/RETRODE.cfg and set sramReadonly to 0, allowing the Retrode to write save files to the cartridge. On Linux and Mac OS X this is a reported problem, but copying the modified configuration file between the computer and the Retrode worked well for me using cat, just like the troubleshooting recommends.
2. Next, open the ZSNES GUI and go to Config/Paths and change the saves path into /media/RETRODE/. Since you’ve now configured ZSNES to store all save files on your retrode, I wouldn’t recommend you to run any other ROMs except the ones inserted into the Retrode while having this configuration. It is also important to remember that by disabling the write protection of the save files, the chances of your game data being corrupted increases, so I’d make sure to backup any saved games on your cartridges before attempting this.
3. Running your game cartridge using ZSNES should now read and write to the save file available on the cartridge, just like a regular console.

There are of course other SNES emulators to use for this, such as Snes9X and bsnes, and for those of you wanting to run your Genesis games, I’d recommend you to try out something similar using a supported emulator, such as dgen.