After patiently waiting for RetroPie to install and worrying about issues, I read the rest of the documentation including this sentence, “Now, you have to copy your rom files into the ROMs directory.” At first glance, I figured it meant the files had to be moved from one place on the Pi to another. Turns out these are ROM files that come with the various games and legally you are supposed to own the games in order to use the emulator.  Well, I don’t own any games–never bought a game console–so legally I can’t use RetroPie.

As I realized what had happened, I was reminded of one of the fundamental rules of cooking: read the WHOLE recipe first so you aren’t surprised when you are making something for dinner in an hour only to discover the whole casserole needs to sit overnight in the fridge. That’s a little how I felt last night.

Fortunately, there was an uninstall option but it did leave a few orphan applications behind and I’m thinking it may be time to do a clean install of Raspbian (after a backup, of course!)

Turns out all those cooking lessons can apply to programming!