Happy Friday! This week I took video of myself building a small Arcade Joystick for the Raspberry Pi. I hope you all enjoy. Let me know if you have any questions!
MagPi
The latest issue of the MagPi is out, and in this issue, not only have they announced that they are officially part of the Foundation, but they have also reviewed PiPlay, RetroPie, and Raspicade!
PiPlay received the “Best Features” comment, while RetroPie and Raspicade received “Best of the Bunch” and “Best for Newbies” respectively.
I am VERY excited to post about this. I have been working on this book for the better part of a year, it has truly been a blood sweat and tears kinda project. I felt burnt out at times, frustrated, ecstatic, relieved, rewarded, and angry all during the writing of this book. But it’s done and I couldn’t be happier.
Whereas the last book was mostly a cookbook style in writing, this book teaches how to:
Program games utilizing the Scratch language
Install multiple operating systems
Set up your Raspberry Pi computer
Install and configure game system emulators
Control your Minecraft world with the Python programming language
Explore different kinds of joysticks, controllers, game pads, and other input devices
Install applications in Linux
Thanks again to everyone who has helped me, supported me, and given me the opportunity to make this a reality. You all rock. Thank you readers and PiPlay community members 🙂
PiPlay 8 Beta 8 is here! Mark has put a huge amount of time into the new frontend code. We have moved form YAML files to a SQLite database. Many items have been sped up. The web frontend now has a database administration section.
This is a huge update. Probably the best I think we put out… but because of the Pi2, we have had to do a lot of extra testing, and may have missed some stuff. Please please please let us know if something isn’t working, or if something slipped through the cracks. I want this to be the best release ever!
This new image will work on the Pi2 and B, B+, A, and A+. I have spent the past week pulling out hair trying to get everything to work. I have had to remove Stella, the Atari 2600 emulator for the moment. When I can get it working properly on the new kernel, I will add it back in.
The image is currently being uploaded to SourceForge, so in a few hours it should be available.
Thanks for your patience, and thanks to all the testers. If you find any bugs (I’m sure there are some) let us know in the PiPlay forums.
So I have had my Pi2 for a week, and I gotta say, it’s a great piece of kit. PiPlay is coming along nicely. Having some hiccups on the Pi2 that I need to fix before I do a full release.
TermBoy
With that being said, I saw on Hacker News today a port of a gameboy emulator to the Go language, that also only utilizes the console. It’s called Termboy, and while it doesn’t run that fast on the Raspberry Pi, it’s still a neat little tech demo.
We first download the proper console font and install it:
wget http://kbd-project.org/download/kbd-2.0.2.tar.xz
tar xf kbd-2.0.2.tar.xz
sudo cp kbd-2.0.2/data/consolefonts/default8x16.psfu /usr/share/consolefonts/
Now we download the latest GoLang version (The apt-get version of Go is 2 years old)
[code]
wget https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.4.1.src.tar.gz
tar xf go1.4.1.src.tar.gz
Set the path for where we want our Go packages to be downloaded
mkdir godownload
export GOPATH=/home/pi/go/godownload/
Build Go
cd go/src/
./make.bash
One that has completed, it’s time to download Termboy and build it.
cd ../bin/
./go get github.com/dobyrch/termboy-go
Now goto the bin folder where our newly built termboy executable resides, and run it like so:
cd ../godownload/bin/
./termboy-go /path/to/game.rom
So my Pi2 is scheduled to arrive tomorrow! I am currently prepping a new PiPlay image, as well as a new update so that it should just be plug and play.
I’m excited!!!
Humble Bundle Books Edition
So I love Humble Bundle. I have bought a ton of things from them in the past…but this week, they have an awesome bundle!
They are offering a boatload of No Starch Press books at a name your own price!
A big announcement came from the Raspberry Pi Foundation today! They introduced the Raspberry Pi 2!
The biggest change is the CPU has been upgraded from a single core ARMv6 @ 700Mhz to a QUAD CORE ARMv7 @ 900Mhz. The RAM has also been upgraded from 512MB to 1GB. The price is going to remain the same as well! Only $35!
The upgrade from ARMv6 to v7 is pretty big. v7 can run things like Ubuntu and Android OS. Most main line software repos are precompiled for v7 first as well. Microsoft has even mentioned that Windows 10 will be free for the Raspberry Pi (though in an Internet-Of-Things way which may be more like the Intel Galileo than a full desktop environment).
All software should be backwards compatible so PiPlay should work right out of the box, along with a much appreciated speed boost. I can’t wait to start recompiling the source code to eek out as much power as possible from this new core!
Most of the retail sites are swamped, but here is a list of places to order:
