RetroPie is the number one recommendation on portals and forums for turning a Raspberry Pi into an emulation platform or an arcade machine replica. Its configuration is simple enough, but a user who has never done anything similar before might feel a bit intimidated. The Recalbox project aims to position itself as a direct alternative to RetroPie, much easier to install, and with the added value of Kodi, so that it also serves as a media player.
Emulation Made Easy
Emulating consoles is not complicated nowadays. You download an emulator, the game image, and with a couple of clicks you are already playing. The emulation of some systems has reached such an advanced level of development that you don't need a very powerful computer, and the Raspberry Pi is proof of that. Only from version 2 did it get a quad-core SoC, and even then we are talking about 900 MHz per core. We still debate whether that is enough to turn it into a desktop computer, although thanks to RetroPie it was demonstrated that the Raspberry Pi has plenty of material to emulate the old gems of Nintendo, Sega, and other manufacturers. Now, many of our readers will say that RetroPie is easy to configure, but there are several steps that require a bit more instinct, or alternatively, a bit of prior knowledge.
Recalbox: Simpler and Cleaner
Recalbox seeks to leave all those details aside and provide the user with a much more linear experience. We must admit that Recalbox is not exactly new. In fact, if you browse YouTube you will find videos about Recalbox that are more than a year old, but things have improved a lot since then. In the background, Recalbox shares many things with RetroPie, and if a game works in one environment it should behave the same in the other. However, its main mission is to present a cleaner interface and a simplified configuration process, especially when connecting gamepads. Recalbox can emulate more than thirty different systems, and also contains a copy of Kodi to play all kinds of videos.
Hardware Requirements and Current Version
Recalbox recommends using a Raspberry Pi 2, but it is possible to install it on the B and B+ versions of the Raspberry Pi 1, assuming the user is willing to lose performance in the most demanding emulations (systems like the NES and Game Boy should not have problems). The latest available version is 4.0.0 beta 3, which was published in April, so it is logical to expect a new update in the coming days.
