RetroPie image and RetroArch on the uConsole

Rex's RetroPie 6.12.y image is built with Pi-Gen from Raspbian, EmulationStation and RetroArch, with the uConsole drivers, charging defaults and external-antenna setting baked in; CM3 (legacy panel), CM4 and CM5 are supported, the filesystem expands on first boot, and after making an account you run sudo retropie-device uconsole. Later builds added volume keys through triggerhappy, persistent themes and precompiled Dreamcast and PSP cores; mikeschnier's verdict is that 8- and 16-bit systems are perfect on a CM4 and N64 and Dreamcast playable. Known snags: do not use Raspberry Pi Imager's custom settings, use the FBNeo core rather than lr-mame2003 on 64-bit, and QMK-keyboard users must delete es_input.cfg and the RetroArch autoconfig files.

Before the image, jutleys ran RetroPie on top of Debian with an 8BitDo pad and an SDL_GAMECONTROLLERCONFIG line in .profile, and cuu's answer to the stock-image RetroArch problem was that arm64 cores are not pre-compiled — load one by hand with retroarch -L core.so rom.zip. The built-in YXBA keys arrive as keyboard keys; the community QMK firmware's gamepad mode (Fn+G), or selecting the 'Clockwork uConsole Keyboard' device and remapping in RetroArch, sorts that out.