One of the most popular uses of the Raspberry Pi is playing retro games through emulation, which is relatively easy to achieve with RetroPie, a custom software package based on Raspbian that was designed specifically for retro gaming. RetroPie, a custom software package based on Raspbian and designed specifically for retro gaming. The release of the more powerful Raspberry Pi 4 last June made this proposition even more attractive, and RetroPie finally supports the latest mini-PC hardware.

The developers of RetroPie, as ExtremeTech discovered, announced the release of version 4.6, and with it some changes.

"In RetroPie 4.6 we have moved the base of pre-built Raspberry Pi images to Raspbian Buster, Raspbian Stretch is no longer supported by Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd. We will continue to support Stretch for a while longer, but will stop updating binaries for Stretch later this year," said RetroPie. The big takeaway from this change is support for the Raspberry Pi 4.

RetroPie is being conservative by making this a beta support. But this is not a whimsical addition; RetroPie says it has been fine-tuning support for some time now and wanted to "wait until we were happy" with the results before releasing a new image. That day has arrived.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation also states that even though version 4.6 is in beta, it "works very well with our latest model, the Raspberry Pi 4."

RetroPie supports a number of emulators, most of which are said to "work well." The full list includes emulators for decades-old consoles like the Atari 2600, MUPEN64Plus for N64 games, ScummVM (if you want to revisit classic adventure games), and the Vectrex console from the early 1980s.

With respect to the Raspberry Pi 4, the most important upgrade compared to previous models is the CPU, which is a Broadcom BCM2711 SoC consisting of four 1.5GHz 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 CPU cores. It also offers a choice of 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB of RAM.

Other features include Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, full-throughput Gigabit Ethernet, four USB ports (two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0), dual 4K monitor support, microSD storage card, and more.

To download the latest build, visit the RetroPie website.