Let's Make Our Own ROMs for RetroPie

Retro Gaming in the Modern World

In today's gaming world there are dozens of ways to play our favorite classic video games. Chances are that somewhere out there is a collection or special release of your favorite nostalgic video games that can be played on modern gaming consoles or PC.

Nintendo Switch Online service provides access to a lot of the retro Super Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda, Punchout, and Metroid games from the 8 and 16-bit eras.

The Konami Anniversary Collection provides similar games available for Contra, Castlevania, and Coin-Op Arcade, not to mention the forthcoming Cowabunga Collection for the classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games.

Sega has provided several iterations of its Sega Genesis Classics Collection with access to over fifty games from the 16-bit era.

Square-Enix delivered on their Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series available on Steam, which sought to give a modern facelift to both the graphics and music of the first six Final Fantasy JRPG adventures.

Making Our Own Digital Collection

While modern-day compilations are wonderful, no retro game collection is perfect. Chances are that there will be several of your favorite retro video games left off of one of these digital collections.

However, all is not lost. We can still make our own compilation of games right from our very own retro video game cartridges by extracting the ROMs and playing them on our favorite emulators or a Raspberry Pi. 

To do this we are going to need some help.

In the next article, I'll show you how to use the RetroBlaster by Retrostage to extract the ROMs from many of your favorite old-school video games to make your very own compilation.