System installation
The recommended way to install the OS onto the Malinka is to install a provided OS image available here. It's as simple as burning the image onto an SD card using your favorite software, and that's all. However, if for any reason you wish to install everything on your pure RetroPie install, this guide will show you what to do.
After you burned your system image, we need to enable SSH connection and tell Raspberry to which wifi connect. After burning your SD card, you should see a "boot" partition - copy the files "ssh" (note the lack of extension) and "wpa_supplicant.conf". Open the latter file and remember to update your country, SSID and password!
If you did this before, log in to your Pi using default login pi and password raspberry. If not, open your terminal app (I use Windows Terminal) and connect with SSH. You need to know the IP address of your Pi, which you can either check on your router page, or using an IP Scanner. On Windows, you can connect with ssh pi@your-pi-address and then typing in the password. You should see a screen like this:
Which means everything is set correctly! The last thing to do is to run:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
to fetch latest software, as the source image could be quite old.
With this step you'll be able to see your Pi system just like any other folder in Windows, thanks to Samba:
RetroPie comes with built-in Samba and by default there are 4 folders: bios, roms, configs and splashscreens. We will add a 5th one, "root" folder with access to the root directory.
Go to Control Panel, select Programs and "Turn Windows features on or off". Make sure to select "SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support"
In the file explorer, type in \\RETROPIE, and we are all done!
That's everything you need if you installed the OS from prepared image. Good luck with the next step!