At first, I started with Retropie. It was simple enough, but all of the options presented were a bit much. The configuration options are limitless, but it did not seem all that purposeful for my needs. With that said, I felt that Recalbox was a better solution to get ROMS up and running as fast as possible. It also did not help that the wifi was not working, regardless of the settings. So why Recalbox? The hardcore nerd in me wanted to fiddle around with Retropie to its fullest. However, the gamer in me wanted everything working like yesterday. Recalbox was the better option in regards to up time. For example, Recalbox's emulation cores have been set with parameters that have the widest compatibility. Unfortunately, Retropie does not offer the same out of the box experience. Sure, one could tweak the settings so that way Retropie will run as smoothly as Recalbox, but that basically defeats the purpose of Retropie. Nevertheless, Retropie is far more robust in regards to features, but the point of entry to get those features running can be a heart wrenching chore. Also, Recalbox and Retropie both run the same exact front-ends and back-ends. Once just has a better user out of the box experience over the other. With that reasoning, I might as well wait for the Recalbox team to flush out all of the features, such as online, before worrying about the bleeding edge features.
In any case, I was luckily blessed with a set of ROMS and such, so getting things to the prototype phase was relatively simple. Using the video tutorials provided by ETA Prime and the countless documentation on the website, I was able to format the microSD card and then copy all of the Recalbox system files. From there, I had to wait for the PI to boot up with the microSD card. The first boot took an extremely long time. Recalbox was up, I began to transfer roms and their accompanying bios to the Raspberry Pi. Using Windows Explorer, I was able to navigate to the Recalbox share on my network and began to copy all the files. It is important to note, while there are multiple methods of uploading content, I found this way to be the easiest. There are ways to transfer files through FTP, SSH, and through a web browser. Using a file manager just seemed to be the route with least resistance. Once all of the ROMS and bios' have transferred, the Raspberry Pi was restarted. As an unfortunate side effect, I found that the larger amount of ROM files on the SD card, the longer the boot time would become. Now that all of the files have transferred successfully, along with reboot, it is important to ensure that the ROMS are displaying correctly. If not, within the menu, there is an option to update the game list. Furthermore, there is a scraper menu option in order to obtain the assets for each video game, specifically screenshots, box art, cart art, etc. Once the scraping process has completed I will post an update, pics and video included.