Author Archives: SSilver2k2

Mar 31

Friday Post: Fix It Felix Jr. running on the Raspberry Pi!

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Hey All,

This post is made possible because ELTechs has provided me with an early version of Exagear Desktop 2.0.  This is commercial software that was provided to me free of charge.

One of my game room goals has been to have a full sized Fix It Felix Jr. arcade cabinet, and now that I can run the game on the Raspberry Pi, I’m one step closer!

The desktop version of Fix-It Felix Jr. has been notoriously hard to find.  It has been released as a flash game, an Apple iOS app, Android app, and even a homebrew Sega Genesis/MegaDrive ROM, but never as a stand alone application.

The version that ran at Disney Quest, and which was on tour at some of the themeparks, was never officially released.

Recently though, it got released to the internet, and I quickly grabbed it and ran it through a hex editor to see what makes it tick.  

It uses a 3rd party framework called FOCAL, which powers many small games on desktop and mobile, made by Code Mystics.  I was excited to finally have the software, but I wasn’t thrilled that I needed a Windows machine to run it.

Enter ExaGear Desktop.  An inexpensive (~$27) x86 emulator with OpenGL support for the Raspberry Pi.  It’s acts more as a virtual machine, running an x86 distro of Debian (or Ubuntu) inside a shell on top of Raspbian.

To get it working once you have purchased Exagear:

In a fresh install of Raspbian, you need to make sure to run sudo raspi-config and enable FULL Open GL support.  After that, install ExaGear ( sudo ./install_exagear.sh ), and then double click on the exagear icon on the desktop to bring up the shell. Run sudo apt-get install wine, then run wine FixItFelixJr.exe .

Wine should start up and asks to install some dependencies.  And then the moment of truth, the Fix It Felix Jr. window should pop up, and the game will be fully playable!

You can even change the window orientation and run it full screen!

I’ll be uploading video of the game in action ASAP!

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

P.S: Baby Silverman is expected any day now !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Mar 24

Friday Post: Politics

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Politics (or how I bought trumpsucks.gop and you can too).

To those who may not have guessed, I am not a big Trump supporter.  I am a Bernie Sanders fan.  I am an independent progressive who thinks science and technology are the way forward.

This week the Republicans tried to bring their Trumpcare bill to the House which would repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), and… they failed.  One thing I noticed in the GOPs marketing is that they kept touting this new site called readthebill.gop.  It’s a slick site, showing off their failed bill and how great it will be, but what really intrigued me was the top level domain: .gop.

I wanted to know more about this.  My google-fu led me to www.join.gop which incredibly enough allows you to search and register for domain names under the GOP brand.  WTF?!

OK, naturally I tried donaldtrump.gop and various others, but they were all unavailable.  But of course, the GOP must have disabled anything that says anything negative about themselves….right?

Well here we go.  And it’s only $20.16.  Surely they wont let it through.

Ok, so I bought it, but surely someone must confirm these orders manually right?

Yeah, someone’s looking at it and this will be bounced back.

WAT?

I actually own trumpsucks.gop now.  This can’t backfire at all.

-Shea

Mar 14

Pi Day Giveaway!

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Hey All!

Happy Pi Day!

For Pi Day, I am going to be giving away TWO things.  A Raspberry Pi 3, and a PiPlay Portable kit.

All you have to do to enter is enter your email address in the form below.  I will be closing the submission at the end of the week!  Look for the PiPlay Portable Kickstarter this month!

-Shea

Mar 07

AdvanceMAME 3.4 for the Raspberry Pi Zero

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Hey All,

AdvanceMAME 3.4 has been released with a lot of enhancements for the Raspberry Pi.

I got a message that it wasn’t working, so I recompiled a version JUST for the Raspberry Pi Zero.  This is meant to run on the latest version of Jessie with Pixel.

Get it here

To Install and play, run these commands from the command line

sudo dpkg -i advancemame_3.4-1_armhf.deb
advmame

This will install and create your AdvanceMAME folders.  Now place your ROMs in:

/home/pi/.advance/roms

Then run:

advmame romname
example: advmame sf2

AdvMAME should now start playing your game file.

Have fun!

-Shea

Feb 11

Friday Post: Simplify3D customer service is the best!

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Hey All,

Not much to report on this week.  I was having issues with really bad stringing on my prints from my SeeMeCNC ERIS 3D printer.  On fully enclosed prints, it’s been great, but on anything with overhangs or open spaces, the stringing has been incredibly bad.

I use Simplify3D as my slicer, and it’s been worth every penny.  This past week I get fed up with making the adjustments myself, so I emailed Simplify my settings file, pictures of the issues, and within a day they sent me back a new settings file, for a printer they don’t even officially support, and it’s now working 100% better.

Prints are more dimensionally accurate and I have almost zero stringing!

CURA and Slic3r are really good free open source slicers, but it’s been totally worthwhile to pay for Simplify!

I also bought ANOTHER new 3D Printer, which should arrive in a week or two, and I’m excited to see it in action.  I will be doing a review of it so be on the look out!

The model is a surprise for now.

Feb 03

Friday Post: No broken foot and open source software is awesome!

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Hey All,

Got some great news.  My wife didn’t actually break her foot.  We went to a orthopedist who specializes in feet injuries, and he says it’s only a MAJOR sprain.  She’s still in pain, but at least it is a lot less serious.  The brace only needs to be worn during the day, she can walk around again, and best of all she can drive and go to work.

Baby is also doing well.  We are in the third trimester and he is kicking up a storm!

Also, open source software is amazing, and I am so proud to be able to make software that is open.  My campaign donation software is now being used in a city council race!  This is not an endorsement, but Scott Casey is using it for his race: https://www.scottcaseycitycouncil.com/

Have a good weekend all!

Jan 20

Friday Post: Broken Foot

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Hey All,

It’s so weird to realize it was my birthday, and it passed by this year with little fanfare from me.  Knowing I’m having a baby in less than 3 months kinda takes your mind off those things.  What is on my mind is my wife broke her foot this week and I am now taking care of my pregnant immobilized love.  Luckily the baby is perfectly fine.  I feel so bad for my wife.  I have broken both arms, and both legs (at separate times), and I can tell you this is no walk in the park.

Everything is still being worked on, just going slow and steady.

Have a good weekend everyone.  Stay safe out there.

-Shea

Jan 07

Friday Post: 2017! New Year New Stuff!

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Hey All!

Happy New Year! Less than 99 days till the baby is due. I’m building stuff for the nursery, getting stuff ready. Feels more like demolition because it was our game / media room and most of the week was spent moving stuff out.

I installed my first ceiling fan today! Feels good, feels accomplished.

I am also working on a homemade DDR pad for Stepmania. It’s still not great on the Pi2/Pi3. I can get it running at 30FPS, but the audio is too choppy. I want to try to offload the audio to a USB sound card and just output it via HDMI, but I don’t know if that will help.

Found an awesome Mario mushroom power up beanie.  This kid is going to be a geek 😀

The PiPlay Advance board is coming along!  I am super happy with it and it’s almost ready to release!

Dec 31

End of 2016

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Hey All,

It’s the last day of 2016.  What. a. year.

  • Finding out I’m going to be a Dad in 2017.  We just found out it’s going to be a BOY!!!! I’m so excited, and terrified, and excited.
  • K and I just got back from New York City.  We wanted to do one last big adventure before our next big adventure is born 🙂
  • We’ve been working on the PiPlay Advance handheld.  We think he have it down now.
  • Maker Faire Orlando was amazing!
  • I ran for Florida House of Representatives, and while I didn’t win, I received 31% of the vote!!!
  • I was able to hire a very talented student in our department as a full timer after he graduated!
  • I spoke at InstructureCon in Colorado, did a CanvasLive webinar for a bunch of schools, and spoke at the Online Learning Consortium conference here in Orlando.

I haven’t updated as much, and every Friday I look at the clock and miss the post.  So I’m hoping to do better at that again.

Thanks for reading!

Have a wonderful 2017!

 

 

Maker Faire Orlando 2016

Nov 30

Migrated Hosts

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Hey All,

I’ve been in the process of migrating hosts this week.  I’m sad to say that my friends company, VNucleus, has shuttered it’s hosting business.  Oh well, on to bigger and better things.  If you see this, you are on the new host and your DNS has migrated!  Yay.

-Shea