Will this work with retropie?

Putting the pi zero in the gameboy advance and need a screen but not sure if this would work with retropie


Thanks for your time

It would work, but it wouldn’t be optimal. The screen defaults to 16FPS which would be nigh unplayably slow, and to get RetroPie to play nicely with a “framebuffer” type screen you’d need to use a utility called fbcp, which copies the default framebuffer contents into the USB TFT framebuffer. Since that’s another operation to run, it slows things down even more.

I believe a lot of people use tiny composite video displays, which connect to the composite video pins on the Pi Zero: https://learn.adafruit.com/using-a-mini-pal-ntsc-display-with-a-raspberry-pi/overview

There’s also a good blog about this topic here: http://sudomod.com/game-boy-zero-screen-alternatives/

Unfortunately I don’t believe we stock a composite display, but I’d rather give you the right advice! Adafruit have a fairly comprehensive range: https://www.adafruit.com/product/913?q=PAL%20TFT&

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As an addendum to this, I set up a composite display recently and while it’s somewhat blurry and low resolution on the command-line, it really does justice to retro classics up to the SNES/Megadrive era (and possibly slightly beyond) since the slight blurriness of the display mimics the softness of CRTs quite well :D

It’s also silky smoooooth. I’m not sure about the GPU in this setup though.

Here it is in action: https://twitter.com/Gadgetoid/status/789100564961517568/photo/1