Monthly Archives: July 2012

Jul 31

Raspbian on Raspberry Pi – MAME, MESS, Quake3, NeoGeo, and Cave Story Binaries

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Initial impressions with Raspbian.  Everything seems to be either playable or faster than before.

  • MESS is noticably faster.
  • MAME was a LITTLE faster (it all depends on the game).
  • Gngeo (Neo Geo) was still playing at full speed.
  • Cave Story works fine as long as music is disabled.
  • Quake 3 Arena plays but sometimes crashes (as seen in the video)

Binaries are available below:

Let me know if something doesn’t work or if you need help.  Hope everyone likes these!  Thanks to those who helped put some of these binaries together!

Tutorials Available Here

Jul 30

GameWarp 2012 Photos

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This past weekend was Game Warp! A Central Florida event dedicated to Arcade Video Games and Pinball Machines.  I had a lot of fun, saw a lot of internet friends, and watched people way better than compete in awesome tournaments.

Enjoy the pictures!

http://www.gamewarp.org

http://www.villagebbs.com/forum/

Jul 27

Friday Post: Raspbian

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I once read some very good advice about blogging, and that is to have a schedule and keep to it.  This blog has been my brain dump, I post things when I think about them.  I don’t really preplan for my posts.  Something gets completed, it’s cool, I write it down.  I’ve slowly gained a small community of some really cool people here, and I think it’s only fair to everyone that I at least post once a week regardless.

With that said, I’m going to post something every Friday.  I hope you enjoy.  Now on to the content!

I’ve been playing around a bit with the Raspbian release.  I’ve started to recompile all the binaries I released, and will be posting them online once they are to my liking.  I’ve found some hiccups along the way, but I seem to be working through them.

My goals:

  • I really want to get Cave Story working without the lag every 5 seconds.
  • Get Quake3 running again (seems a commenter has been working on that!)
  • Recompile AdvanceMESS and AdvanceMAME
  • Recompile Gngeo and get full screen working right.
  • Get a frontend running that will work with these emulators
  • Get Love2D running.

I got my second Raspberry Pi in the mail yesterday.  This one comes from RS.  The big differences I’ve seen so far in the board itself is that the silkscreening is a little different, and the company that supplies the memory is different.  In my Element14 board, the memory is Samsung.  The RS board uses Hynix memory.

I’ll post some pictures later.

-Shea

Jul 25

Star Trek: The Next Generation now in High Definition!

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Hey All,

I’m a huge Star Trek fan.  When I heard that CBS was remastering and rereleasing all of TNG in high definition I got a huge smile on my face.  I eargerly awaited the TNG Next Level sampler disc (which included the remastered Pilot – Encounter at Farpoint, Sins of the Father, and The Inner Light) to come out.

The sampler is the REASON I bought a Blu Ray player, and it was worth it.  The quality of the remasterings are amazing.  Sometimes the quality is too high.  You can see where the extra klingon make up ends and the face begins, you can see how low quality some of the extra props were.  You get to see stuff that you couldn’t ever see in standard definition.  It’s like watching a whole new show 🙂

I highly recommend the Season 1 box set if you are a trekkie, but if you are on the fence about the purchase, try the sampler pack.  I don’t think you will be disappointed.

 

 

Jul 23

Raspberry Pi “On/Off” Cable

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What started out as a funny thought is now reality.  I spent about an hour splicing, soldering, taping, and heat shrinking this fun little cable together.  It’s a microusb to microusb extension cable.  I split it in half, cut off the data wires, soldered the ground cable back together, wrapped electrical tape around it, then soldered each end of the Vcc wires to the power switch.  I taped them up, then tried to heat shrink as much as it as possible.

My frankenstein cable works 🙂

P.S.: All the items needed I got from Sparkfun.com (except the usb extension cable)

Jul 17

Cave Story (nxengine) on the Raspberry Pi

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UPDATE: New Raspbian Binaries Available

I got a request today to see if I could get Cave Story working on the Raspberry Pi.  It took me about 4 hours but I’ve gotten a decent version running.  This uses the NXengine open source cave story project, along with the english translation patch the freeware data files.

Cave Story Raspberry Pi

Steps to run:

  1. Download binaries
  2. Run unzip nxengine.zip
  3. cd into nxengine
  4. run sudo chmod 777 /dev/fb0
  5. run sudo modprobe snd_bcm2835
  6. run ./nx
  7. Play Cave Story!

Let me know if you have any issues with the binaries or running the program.  I’ve only ever played about 5 minutes of Cave Story so I’m not sure how well it’s running, but it seemed to be fine to me.  Looking forward to the feedback.

-Shea

Link to source code: https://github.com/suapapa/NXEngine

Jul 07

Development Words of Wisdom

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I found this quote from Evil Brain Jono’s blog post “Everybody Hates Firefox Updates”:

Software companies would do well to learn this lesson: anything with the phrase “users love our product” in it isn’t a strategy, it’s wishful thinking. Your users do not “love” your software. Your users are temporarily tolerating your software because it’s the least horrible option they have — for now — to meet some need. Developers have an emotional connection to the project; users don’t.

It’s 100% true.  I’m going to try to remember this from now on.  I suggest reading the whole blog post from the link above.  It’s a very good post.

-Shea

Jul 01

Raspberry Pi and MESS – Multi Emulator Super System – NES, GameGear, Genesis

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UPDATE: New Raspbian Binaries Available

Hey All!

Today I present the binaries for AdvanceMESS.  The Multi Emulator Super System.  MESS can emulate somewhere around 250 different home consoles and computers.  It’s not perfect in any sense, but it works for most consoles.

I have currently tested:

  • NES (some games are slow, but it works).
  • GameGear (works)
  • Genesis (slow but works)
  • SNES (couldn’t get it to work…yet)
Instructions:
  1. Download MESS Binaries.
  2. Unzip MESS to the ~/MESS directory.
  3. chmod 777 /dev/fb0
  4. Put your console bios’s into mess/share/advance/rom/
  5. Put your console games into mess/share/advance/image/<console>/ (ie mess/share/advance/image/nes/
  6. CD into mess/bin/
  7. Run advmess with ./advmess
    1. The first time it’s run it will generate a set of folders and files into ~/.advance
  8. edit your ~/.advance/advmess.rc to include the proper display configuration
    1. For HDMI try:
      1. device_video_clock 5 – 50 / 15.62 / 50 ; 5 – 50 / 15.73 / 60
    2. For NTSC TVs try:
      1. device_video_clock 5 – 50 / 15.73 / 60
  9. While still in the mess/bin directory, type ./advmess <console> -cart <filename>
    1. ./advmess nes -cart file.nes
  10. ENJOY!!!

This is one of the weirder setups I’ve tested, but once setup, it works.  If you have any issues, let me know and I will try to help you.

-Shea

P.S. I will NOT help you find console bios or roms.  Please don’t ask.

Official MESS Site