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The Raspberry Pi Zero might be coming to old age in terms of electronic components from the Foundation, but it’s still a very viable heart of many projects. Its small stature and full 40-pin GPIO set make it more than enough to run as a headless (no screen) device that you can connect to via SSH to make any needed changes once it is embedded in a project.
However, most of the time, it seems to be used for gaming and building little handhelds, but what can it really do? Can it actually play much outside of 1990s? Well, sort of. A little. It can play Gameboy Advance games and that’s about your lot.
Without overclocking the onboard ARM chip, it’s a fairly limited device, but limitations usually breed the best innovations and I find that having a lack of games to choose from can help me figure out what to play next. So it’s like an innovation if I just didn’t have my pick of grey-area acquired games.
Either way, you can use the following emulators on the Raspberry Pi Zero running RetroPie:
| Company | Console |
|---|---|
| Nintendo | NES |
| SNES | |
| GameBoy | |
| GameBoy Color | |
| GameBoy Advance | |
| VirtualBoy | |
| Game & Watch | |
| Pokemon Mini | |
| SEGA | Master System |
| Mega Drive | |
| Sega CD | |
| 32X | |
| Game Gear | |
| Arcade | MAME (Pretty much anything not overly reliant on 3D) |
| Commodore | Commodore 64 |
| Amiga | A500 |
| A500+ | |
| A600 | |
| A1000 | |
| A1200 | |
| A3000 | |
| A4000 | |
| CD32 | |
| Atari | 520ST |
| 260ST | |
| 520STM | |
| STf | |
| 520STE | |
| 1040STE | |
| MEGA ST | |
| MEGA STE | |
| TT030 | |
| Falcon | |
| 2600 | |
| 5200 | |
| 7800 | |
| Lynx | |
| NEC | TurboGrafx-16 |
| SuperGrafx | |
| PC-FX | |
| Neo Geo | |
| Pocket Color | |
| Neo Geo | |
| PC (DOS) | 286/386 |
| MSX | MSX 1 |
| MSX 2 | |
| MSX 2+ | |
| TurboR | |
| Sinclair | ZX Spectrum |
| ZX81 | |
| Misc. | Amstrad CPC |
| ColecoVision | |
| Vectrex | |
| Intellivision | |
| Sharp X68000 | |
| Thomson TO8/TO8D | |
| Magnavox Odyssey | |
| LaserDisc (MAME) |
As you can see, the Pi Zero makes for a great emulator for handheld devices but stumbles at anything more than 3D for the most part. As long as you stay within the 2D range and the older consoles (or at most, 32-bits like a GBA), you should be fine and dandy without having to do any other tinkering.
This is why you’ll see Pi Zeroes in a lot of portable projects and such, as you’ll rarely need the power of the Pi 4 or something similar to recreate handheld memories.
The Raspberry Pi is incredibly fun to tinker with, which is why we’re currently pushing with multiple projects across the board. Be sure to keep tabs on our dedicated hub for more projects like this in the future!
