A new user with some questions!

[giantflyingbirds]

Hello all,

Apologies in advance if this post is in the incorrect location, as I am new to these forums.
I am very interested in constructing my own mintypi. However, in an attempt to keep the cost down a little and speed up the arrival of my parts, I was thinking of negating any sound functionality from my build. I am somewhat familiar with retropie and don't think it would make much difference to me.

Would this be detrimental to the project? I plan to follow the build guide as closely as possible.

[wermy]

Welcome, and congrats on being our 5000th member.

Sure, you can do this no problem. It'll be slightly cheaper for you, and you will get slightly better battery life as well. The only annoyance I can think of (aside from not having sound, of course) is that you may see errors pop up on the screen as you launch games, complaining that it can't initialize the sound card. It's harmless though and the games should run fine.

[giantflyingbirds]

Thanks so much! Can't believe I was the lucky 5000 member!

[giantflyingbirds]

A little follow up:

I was working on installing some roms today. I tested all of them with the default mintypi image and a keyboard. Note that the pi zero was not wired to anything, just plugged straight into my tv. Upon trying to boot any GBA game, I would receive this error message followed by the game crashing:

AudioManager Error - Unable to open SDL audio: ALSA: Couldn't open audio device: No such file or directory

After receiving this message I would be kicked directly back to the game selection screen. What seems strange though is that a Galaga rom for the NES ran fine. I assume that it is something within the GBA roms then? Or will they not function if my mintypi has no soundcard?

Thanks for any help.

[rodocop]

Should start without a soundcard, but GBA needs a BIOS file to be able to play. Google search and you can find the file you'll need. See here:

https://github.com/retropie/retropie-se ... oy-Advance

BIOS

The Game Boy Advance requires a BIOS called gba_bios.bin

Place the BIOS in

/home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS

[giantflyingbirds]

Is it possible to do this without network? I'm working with a PI Zero and am a total noob at the technical stuff.

[rodocop]

Is it possible to do this without network? I'm working with a PI Zero and am a total noob at the technical stuff.

I'm sure you can do it via usb stick or something....You can download the BIOS file on your PC, then transfer it via usb stick? I've always done it via SSH over my network, so I am not sure on how exactly you would do it.

Worst case, you'll need a usb wifi stick to have wifi on your pi zero. Or get a Pi Zero W.

[giantflyingbirds]

Dropping the gba_bios.bin in the BIOS folder in my USB stick doesn't seem to work. Unless anyone has another solution I will likely grab a usb to ethernet adapter.

[Mikethesith200]

I can't fathom why you would forgo sound. I wouldn't want to play with no sound at all. Where are you located? i can get you a usb sound card faster than China Post.

[Helder]

Put the bios file in the boot directory which can be easily accessed by inserting the SD into a PC then once inserted in the Pi use the terminal (F4) to copy it to the bios directory.