Monthly Archives: August 2012

Aug 24

Friday Post: Playstation Emulation on the Raspberry Pi!

Posted on by

EDIT: UPDATED BINARIES HERE – FULL SPEED ACHIEVED!

Hey All!

Happy Friday!  This week brings some really cool things for the Raspberry Pi.  First up, we have a Playstation Emulator that works under X in on the Pi.  It’s called PCSX, it’s OpenGL ES enabled, and while it’s not runnign at full speed, it’s a really cool display of the technology that can be powered by the Pi.  Binaries and Instructions below.

Download PCSX Binaries

To use this you will need CD ISO’s of your backed up PSX games stored on the SD card.

  1. Make sure you in a windowed environment.  If you are just on the command line, use the command startx.
  2. Double click on LXTerminal on the desktop or open it from the application menu at the bottom left.
  3. From the LXTerminal, type cd ~/ to get to your home directory.
  4. wget http://sheasilverman.com/rpi/raspbian/pcsx.zip
  5. unzip pcsx.zip
  6. cd pcsx
  7. chmod +x pcsx
  8. ./pcsx
  9. Use up and down to navigate the menus.
  10. Select Load, then navigate the directory where you saved the CD image
  11. Select your game then press enter
  12. ENJOY!!!

This emulator is far from perfect on the Raspberry Pi.  Some games won’t work, frame rates are wild, and it can be a bit frustrating, but who cares!  It’s a freakin’ Playstation emulation on the Raspberry Pi!

Second cool thing to come out today is an announcement from the Raspberry Pi foundation.  They are now selling licenses to enable MPEG-2 and VC-1 decoding, as well as H.264 encoding (free?) and CEC support!

I’m not sure how the license system works since it is somehow tied to your Pi’s serial number, but you can purchase them at the Raspberry Pi store.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

 

Aug 23

Program in BASIC on your Nintendo DS (DSiWare)

Posted on by

Just recieved a neat link in my email from Nintendo.  One of the new DSiWare downloadable games is a BASIC interpreter called Petit Computer.

I really like the idea of saving your programs as QR codes which you can then share with others.  This is just so cool on multiple levels.  Anyone can now code on a Nintendo device!

Aug 17

Friday Post: APC.io

Posted on by

Lo all.  Happy Friday everyone.  This post is going to be kind of short, as I somehow hurt my back and I can’t find any really good position to type in.

This week the Via APC single board computer went on sale at Newegg.  This is kind of a competitor to the Raspberry Pi, except it only runs Android 2.3 right now.  It’s also more locked down than the Pi, and is almost twice the price, at $55 after shipping.  I haven’t had it long enough to do a good review, and yes, I know I sound negative about it, but what I’m really hoping is it will be able to run Unity 3D engine games.  It’s already impressed me with it’s out of the box Youtube app.

Unity is an awesome game and physics engine, and to have an ARM based development board that can output 1080P and has normal PC interfaces could be pretty awesome for Indie Arcade Development.

Heres an unboxing video I took yesterday:

Have a good weekend everyone.  I have a surprise for tomorrow 🙂

-Shea

Aug 16

Made the frontpage!

Posted on by

I was very excited when I found out that on Monday, I made the frontpage of the Raspberry Pi website.  A big shout out to Liz for mentioning me and linking back here.  It made my day!

I really love working on this little computer.  I’m learning so much and using skills that I took for granted.  It’s really pushing some of the boundaries I had setup against myself.  I’m glad to be getting past them.

I’m also thinking of getting one of these and building a RaspberryPi bartop machine:

Aug 12

Descent Tutorial

Posted on by

Today I present a tutorial on compiling Descent for your Raspberry Pi running Raspbian.  At the end of this tutorial you should have binaries ready to go and and a playable version of the game Descent.  If you don’t want to wait for the compile, I have the binaries ready for you.  Just skip to the end.

  1. Install the required dependancies
    1. sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2debian libsdl-mixer1.2 libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2 libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-0 libsdl-ttf2.0-dev libsdl-net1.2 libsdl-net1.2-dev gcc-4.7 scons libphysfs-dev
  2. cd ~/
  3. mkdir descent
  4. cd descent
  5. Download the needed source code:
    1. wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/dxx-rebirth/files/dxx-rebirth/0.57.3/d1x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src.tar.gz
    2. wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/dxx-rebirth/files/dxx-rebirth/0.57.3/d2x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src.tar.gz
  6. Download the needed patches:
    1. wget http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heinm/tmp/d1x-rebirth-rpi.diff.gz
    2. wget http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heinm/tmp/d2x-rebirth-rpi.diff.gz
  7. Unzip the source files and the patches:
    1. tar xvfz d2x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src.tar.gz
    2. tar xvfz d1x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src.tar.gz
    3. gunzip d1x-rebirth-rpi.diff.gz
    4. gunzip d2x-rebirth-rpi.diff.gz
  8. You now have to patch the source code with the diff files.
    1. cd into the source code directories.
      1. Descent 1
        1. cd ~/descent/d1x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
        2. patch -p1 < ../d1x-rebirth-rpi.diff
      2. Descent 2
        1. cd ~/descent/d2x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
        2. patch -p1 < ../d2x-rebirth-rpi.diff
  9. We are now ready to compile!
  10. On the command line enter these two commands:
    1. export CC=gcc-4.7
    2. export CXX=g++-4.7
  11. Descent 1
    1. cd ~/descent/d1x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
    2. scons raspberrypi=1
      1. Wait around 30 – 40 minutes.
      2. If there are no errors you should now have a d1x-rebirth executable file in your directory!
  12. Descent 2
    1. cd ~/descent/d2x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
    2. scons raspberrypi=1
      1. Wait around 30 – 40 minutes.
      2. If there are no errors you should now have a d2x-rebirth executable file in your directory!
  13. You now need the data files that holds the actual game levels, sounds, artwork, etc.  These are in .hog, .pig, and .ham (descent 2 only) files.  You can get the game content from dxx-rebirth, the creators of this port.  They also have links to the shareware files:
    1. http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/game-content/
    2. http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/download/dxx/content/descent-pc-shareware.zip
    3. http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/download/dxx/content/descent2-pc-demo.zip
  14. Unzip those files by running unzip filename
  15. copy descent.hog and descent.pig to ~/descent/d1x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
  16. copy D2DEMO.HAM, D2DEMO.HOG and D2DEMO.PIG  to ~/descent/d2x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
  17. You are now ready to play!
    1. Descent 1
      1. cd ~/descent/d1x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
      2. ./d1x-rebirth -hogdir . (yes, thats a period at the end that must be there)
    2. Descent 2
      1. cd ~/descent/d2x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
      2. ./d2x-rebirth -hogdir .
  18. ENJOY!!


I realize these are a lot of instructions, but I wanted to make them as verbose as possible.
Below are the precompiled binaries with shareware data files already copied over.

Descent 1 Binaries | Descent 2 Binaries

Please let me know if any of this doesn’t work for you.  I wrote down every single step I did when I compiled it, but I’m afraid I may have missed something.  Let me know and I’ll correct it!

-Shea

Aug 10

Friday Post: Descent and photography

Posted on by

Hey all,

Another Friday post here.  A couple of days ago Derhass made a post about getting Descent 1 and 2 ported to the Raspberry Pi with OpenGL ES.  Descent was an amazing game released back in the early 1990’s.  It had true 6 range freedom of movement in a spaceship with 3D modeling.   An amazing game at the time, and one that I could NEVER beat.  I’m in the middle of writing a tutorial on how to patch and compile the game, as well as hosting the binaries themselves.

Today on the Raspberry Pi frontpage is a really cool piece on time lapse photography titled “Painting with light (and a Raspberry Pi)”.  The images are really fantastic:

Time lapse photography

Hope everyone has a good weekend.  I’ll be writing the tutorial up this weekend and should have it posted soon.  Thanks for the view!

-Shea

 

Aug 08

Raspberry Pi – Quake 2

Posted on by

Hey All,

Reefab has spent an amazing amount of time getting Quake 2 to run on the Raspberry Pi.  The port is based off of YQuake2 and has been changed to use OpenGL ES.  It runs quite well on the Raspberry Pi, there is some slowdown but it’s still very playable.

You can download and compile it yourself from his Github repository (which also has really well done compiling instructions), or you can download the precompiled binaries from my site.

  1. Download Binaries (quake2Bin.zip)
  2. unzip quake2Bin.zip
  3. cd quake2Bin
  4. ./quake2
  5. Frag away!

Let me know if you run into any issues with these binaries!

Aug 08

Youtube-Viewer

Posted on by

Hey all,

As you saw in my previous post / video, I was running Youtube videos in fullscreen on my little display.  I was using an application (really just a 2000+ line perl script) that does this for me.  The program is called youtube-viewer (github)

Gcala posted a nice guide on how to set it up and has given me permission to also repost it here.  I’m making some modifications as I had to do a couple changes, but it works.

  1. sudo apt-get install gcc-4.7
  2. export CC=gcc-4.7
  3. export CXX=g++-4.7
  4. sudo apt-get install libwww-perl
  5. sudo cpan -i XML::Fast
  6. sudo wget https://github.com/downloads/ssilverm/youtube-viewer/youtube-viewer -O /usr/bin/youtube-viewer
  7. sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/youtube-viewer

Now just type youtube-viewer on the command line and you are good to go 🙂

List of Commands
all               : play all the results in order
next              : go to the next page (same as <ENTER>)
back              : return to the previous page
login             : will prompt you for login
logout            : will delete the authentication key
[integer]         : play the corresponding video
i, info [i]       : show more informations about one video
c, comments [i]   : show video comments (e.g.: c 19)
r, related [i]    : show related videos (e.g.: r 6)
v, videos [i]     : show author's latest videos
p, playlists [i]  : show author's latest playlists
subscribe [i]     : subscribe to author's channel
like, dislike [i] : like or dislike a video
fav, favorite [i] : favorite a video (e.g.: fav 3)
[keywords]        : search for youtube videos
3-8, 3..8         : same as 3 4 5 6 7 8
8 2 12 4 6 5 1    : play the videos in your order
-argv -argv2=v    : set some arguments (e.g.: -u=google)
e, edit-config    : edit and apply the configuration
load-config       : (re)load the configuration file
/my?[regex]*$/    : play videos matched by a regex (/i)
reset, reload     : restart the application
q, quit, exit     : close the application

Let me know if you have any issues or questions!

-Shea

Aug 06

Youtube in my Raspberry Pi? or Is that an LCD in your pocket or are you just happy to see me…

Posted on by

LCD Screen

This weekend has been fun.  I got my 2.0″ LCD Display from Adafruit in!  It’s an amazing little screen.  Bright, Sharp, Colorful.  MAME, Quake, NeoGeo games all look great on it.  A concern I had was how to power the little screen.  It can take 5v – 12v, and the connector is just two bare wires for power.

After testing the screen with a regular power supply, I decided I wanted to see if I could power it via the GPIO power pins on the Raspberry Pi itself.  I was concerned about the amperage it would require, but after connecting it to pins 2 and 6 (5v and GND), and powering on the Pi, they both turned on and I was watching Raspbian bootup.

Youtube

On the Raspberry Pi Forums, gcala contributed a post with a how to on getting Youtube to play from the command line to omxplayer.

Here is a video I took after getting youtube-viewer running on my Pi:

Hope you all enjoy this!

-Shea