Everything You Need to Set up for Raspberry Pi Emulators to Work on a Portable Display
Turning your Raspberry Pi into a retro gaming station is one of the most popular Raspberry Pi projects. If you want to make this project portable, you’ll need a screen, but the most common one, Adafruit PiTFT, takes a bit of work to get it to work in more advanced games.
When you connect the Adafruit TFT (or any other display for that matter) to the GPIO, it bypasses the Pi’s video hardware. This means that any games that rely heavily on GPU or OpenGL will not work. The good news is that Adafruit has come up with a solution. First of all, you’ll start by launching RetroPie. From there, you’ll need to install a bunch of different software, tweak a few parameters, and dig into various configuration files. Once you’ve done that, your display should finally work properly, with some performance gain. We’ve previously covered several different retro-style Raspberry Pi handheld game consoles, and with the help of Adafruit’s guide, you’ll get the performance boost you need to play more advanced games.
Running OpenGL Games and Emulators on Adafruit PiTFT | Adafrut