Having a television connected through operating systems such as Tizen, webOS, Roku or Android TV offers the user a whole world of possibilities. Use the device for more than just watching TV, which we will put into practice with this tutorial to turn the TV into a retro console.
We are only going to need the installation of an app how are RetroArch and a file explorer on our TV, if you don’t have one. And step taken, we can revel in the wonderful world of retro games.
Our television is a retro game console
And the first step to success is to get RetroArch, an app that has disappeared from the Google Play Store but can be found conveniently updated in APK Mirror. At this point we will download the one that is compatible with our television or Android TV based device.
We bring the RetroArch app to a device that we will connect to our television, either via USB or directly in the internal memory. It is our choice. And then, if we don’t have a file explorer, we install one from the Google Play Store. I still use File Commander although there are different ones I can use.
File Commander
At this point, we open File Commander or the chosen application and find and install the RetroArch application that we have in .apk format. It is find the folder in which we placed it, so using the root folder is the best option to make the job easier.
We are only going to have to install the application following the usual method and if everything is working normally we will eventually find the message app installed on the screen.
With the application already installed, we exit the browser and see how it already appears among the applications that we can use on the TV. From that moment, it only remains to configure it.
We will have to grant the application, the ability to access, write and read external storage and also the ability to access photos and other media files on our device.
With these permissions granted, the first step will be install or load the corresponding kernel. After starting RetroArch, we will see a first basic automatic configuration message and we can go to the “Main menu”
Download the kernel
To install the emulator on the machine we want to use, just enter “Load kernel”. In this section we click on “Download the kernel” and we choose the one that interests us the most. The process does not take more than a few seconds and the variety of options is enormous.
Once we have the emulator ready, it remains to start the game itself. We can have all the title images that we like stored on a USB stick connected to the TV and we will use the “Load Content” section to access them.
Once the folder is located, all the files we have appear and with the .zip extensionbecause they are compressed files.
There we have to choose the title we want to load and we will see how a new menu appears on the screen with two options from which we will choose “Load file” to start the game.
This is one of the methods to load a title, since the other is to load them into “Import content” and go to the last section of the “Main Menu” in which the downloaded emulator image appears.
The the titles we previously imported will appear and by clicking on it, we will only have to click on it to then select “Start” and start the game.
To use RetroArch on a TV or device with Android TV we can use the remote control, but in some TV models this can be a problem and it is advisable to use a compatible control pad or some keyboards with inexpensive directional keys that can be found in different stores on the net.
