using a raspberry pi to make a game emulator on mac

People have strung multiple Pis together to form a supercomputer, created working weather stations with them, and sent them up in weather balloons to take photos from the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere. Running an emulator, a program designed to let a operating system behave like another one, is actually one of the more basic things you can do with a Pi. (It’s powerful enough you could reasonably, with some work and compromises, use a Pi as your main work machine.)

But for $35 you get a computer with a 1.2 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM, about the same specs as an iPhone 5 or some Chromebooks. It costs $35, though that only gets you the computer itself - there’s no power supply, no onboard storage, no keyboard or mouse or way to connect to a monitor. To back up for a second: the Raspberry Pi is a single-board, super-simple computer that can do a surprising amount. So, I decided to build a little emulator myself, using a Raspberry Pi 3. I could have put an emulator on my laptop and plugged away, but I wanted something a little more like what I remember: an old CRT screen and a wired controller. Not coincidentally, I also had some time to kill. (It was things like this that led to me being voted “He Goes Here?” in my high-school yearbook.) Back at home over the holidays, finding myself reverting to teenagerhood, I had an itch to play Tactics again, because there’s nothing more life-affirming than someone in their 30s trying to re-create their youth.

One of the better winters I spent as a teenager was playing the classic 1998 PlayStation game Final Fantasy Tactics and listening to Built to Spill’s There’s Nothing Wrong With Love on endless repeat. I went looking for old retro games for art but have no idea what game this is, so let’s call it Super Princess Ship Quest.

Using a raspberry pi to make a game emulator on mac