Here’s How You Can Turn Your Fire TV Into a Vintage Console
If you like to play video games, either occasionally or as a true gamer, you will be interested to know that you can give much more life to the Fire TV that you have at home as a console. This is thanks to RetroArch, an emulator available in the Amazon App Store with which you can play nostalgic console games such as Nintendo 64, PlayStation, SNES or GameBoy. However, to take full advantage of this, we will have to do a few things. We will explain them to you below.
You can download the emulator right now RetroArk look for it in the Amazon app store. But in order to be able to present the games you want and have an experience as close as possible to that of a real console, it would be desirable to have a few elements that we may have at home or that we can buy for little money.
- A team Xbox, PlayStation or other devices that can be connected to the TV and used to play games.
- adapter OTG micro USB to be able to connect a flash drive or other external storage device to Fire TV, on which we will save games.
- If we don’t have or don’t want to buy an adapter, we’ll have to download an app like Wireless file manager in the Fire TV app store, which lets you transfer games from your computer to your Fire TV.
We’ll just have to search the Internet for ROMs of the games we want and transfer them to Fire TV using an adapter or wirelessly (using an adapter is much more convenient and will also allow us to save more games than if we only used Fire TV memory). We can’t help you choose sites to download games from, but finding resources on the Internet is easy.
The list of compatible consoles that RetroArch is able to emulate is huge, and you can check it out here. Of course, most of the games we will be able to use will be somewhat retro, because they are more or less old consoles (although we can also find Wii or Nintendo 3DS in their latest version).
Once we have the games, we can go to the app store on our Smart TV and download RetroArch to fire tv. Once installed, we will need to log in and as you can see from the main menu, you will have many configuration options. First, you will need to click on “Load Core”, since if you have not previously had RetroArch, you will need to install what are similar to the supports for the different consoles. The emulator gives you quite a few options and perhaps not all of them will work, but trying should be enough. Once we have loaded the cores of the consoles we want to use, we will need to click on “Load Content”, find the folder where our ROMs are located and install our games.
In RetroArch’s settings, you can also connect a controller, update its software, or try playing online.
Use an adapter
As we mentioned earlier, you can use an app like Wireless File Manager to download games to the system, but it is quite a complex app and using external storage for our games will usually be much more convenient and safer. For this, you can look in stores like Amazon, as there will not be a high price. The Micro USB OTG adapter should be able to connect external storage via USB-A on one side and on the other side connect to the Fire TV using the Micro USB that is on the Amazon device.
An example would be the one you see above. Remember to download games from trusted sources to avoid introducing malware to your computer.