Category Archives: Gaming

Jan 10

Friday Post: Turning 30! Happy Birthday To Me!

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Hey All,

So, I’m turning 30 this weekend.  Crazy.  I’ve decided to treat myself by building an awesome budget gaming PC.  I haven’t built a PC since the P4 days.

Specs:

All in all I spent about $600 on this machine.  I’m getting 200FPS in Team Fortress 2, and I’m currently waiting for some new games to download.  Happy Birthday to Me!

If anybody is on Steam, I made a PiMAME group.  Let’s get some TF2 games going 🙂

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/pimame

PiMAME

In other news, since the new menu system is taking longer than expected, I’m going to do one more 0.7 PiMAME release.  It’s going to be upgrading to the new Raspbian version, and including some much needed functions to the console menu (joystick support, and favorites).

Look for that update this week!

-Shea

Nov 29

Friday Post: Joystick debugging

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Hey All,

This has been a fun week.  K and I have finished painting the house, we’ve been slowly bringing things in.  All the fun joys of moving to a new place 🙂

This week I’ve been making progress with Joystick support in PiMAME.  I’m hoping for 0.8 to have full joystick support implemented and an easy to use system to configure it.

Remember Cyber Monday deals this coming monday!  SparkFun and Adafruit are having some great sales.

-Shea

Nov 22

Friday Post: IAAPA 2013, Homeownership, and Happenings

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Hey All!

Happy Friday!  K and I are officially homeowners!!!  WOOOO!!!  This long stressful process took way too much time, and too much energy.  I don’t believe how wiped I am just from signing paperwork for a couple hours.  This is a huge weight off my shoulders, and a big time sink now gone.

1458661_10151742643346314_335252549_n

 

IAAPA 2013

For the past few years I have been attending IAAPA, which is the big amusement part and arcade entertainment expo in Orlando.  It’s really a remarkable event, and this years was no different.  Some of the highlights was a Korean pavilion showing off a ton of new Korean companies and the games / motion simulators coming out of there.  Stern Pinball was showing off the new Star Trek pinball game.  It was a lot of fun.  The best part of the day was the Namco Bandai booth.  They had a bunch of new games, but the exciting ones were a new Mario Kart arcade racing game, and MachStorm, an AceCombat / Afterburner inspired game with an immersive cockpit.  I will be posting pictures in another post.  One of the more apparent things this year was much less piracy, stolen cabinet designs, and game clones.  Previous shows there were blatant ripoffs and large displays that almost seemed to encourage it.  This year, not so much.

Holidays

The holidays are approaching, and I hope everyone who reads this has a good one.  I am going to have time off work, which will be spent working on PiMAME.  I’m hoping to have a January release of the new 0.8 version, and I welcome everyone to contribute to the github repos.

Kano.me

Kano computing is raising a kickstarter for a very innovative Raspberry Pi kit, and they have already reached the 500k mark.  These guys are really nice and I have high hopes for them.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alexklein/kano-a-computer-anyone-can-make

HWHardSoft Pi Cabinet

HWHardSoft has been working on a cool Pi case, and his preorder is now available.  http://www.hwhardsoft.de/english/projects/raspberry-pi-mini-cab/

Have a great weekend!

-Shea

Nov 15

Friday Post: More PiMAME Menu stuff.

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Hey all,

Happy Friday!

I am beyond stressed.  I think I’m buying a house next friday.  If all goes according to plan.  Knock on wood, everything will go right.

Anyways,  I have put up some new github repos for PiMAME.  It’s regarding PiMAME 0.8, and it’s for the new web frontend and the pimame menu / launcher.  They are no where near ready for use, but if you would like to help with the programming, feel free to fork the repo and send a pull request.

https://github.com/ssilverm/pimame-menu
https://github.com/ssilverm/pimame-web-frontend

Have a good weekend everyone!

-Shea

Nov 08

Friday Post: Things to come!

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Hey All,

Happy Friday!

I just got back from our second tech time conference that I coordinated.  It was awesome.  Exhausting, but so darn worth it.

Anyways,  a coworker and I are working on a new PiMAME menu system, and I thought you all should see a sneak peek of the design work!

Screen Shot 2013-11-06 at 5.25.35 PM

 

I’m really excited!

Stay tuned!

-Shea

Oct 25

Friday Post: Rough week but PiMAME 0.7.10 is coming!

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Hey all,

It’s been a rough week.  K and I have been looking at houses and we’ve had nothing but bad luck.  We just lost the second house we had under contract because of appraisal issues.  Housing is such an industry that could benefit from technology.  I don’t understand how in 2013 I still need to FAX documents, “secure email” is a “works best in IE” website, and personal information is expected to be blurted out anywhere and everywhere.

I work for a university, I’m used to red tape and bureaucracy!  I didn’t think buying a house would rival that!

Anyways!  PiMAME 0.7.10 is being uploaded this weekend.

The updater version will include Alpha N64 emulation.
The SD card image will include that, a boot up screen, and the new kernel for xin-mo joysticks.

I will update the post when it’s finished uploading.

Have a great weekend all!

-Shea

Oct 20

Alpha Release of Full Speed Nintendo 64 Emulator on the Raspberry Pi

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Hey All,

Mupen64plus has been updated and now plays some N64 games at almost full speed!

Welshy from the Raspberry Pi forums has written up a great guide on how to compile it and run it, as well as how the settings work.  You can download the compiled binaries here:

http://sheasilverman.com/rpi/raspbian/mupen64plus-rpi.zip

To install and run:

  1. unzip the files by typing unzip mupen64plus-rpi-zip
  2. cd mupen64plus-rpi
  3. cd test
  4. ./mupen64plus < /path/to/rom/files >

This is a total alpha build, and is very rough around the edges, but the progress is awesome, and I am going to put this into PiMAME as a test.

Enjoy everyone!

-Shea

Oct 18

Friday Post: Pokemon X and Y

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Hey All,

No PiMAME news this week.  Still working on new stuff 🙂

This has been a hectic week.  Two weddings and Halloween Horror Nights.  Plus a ton of pages that were written for my classes.  Woo!

Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Orlando was great this year.  K and I have been going ever since we first started dating, and it’s where I proposed to her two years ago.  It’s an awesome tradition for us.  Last year they tried some new things like having moving scare zones, which didn’t end up working well.  This year however, they went back to scare zones and based it on The Walking Dead.  It was a lot of fun.

Pokemon X and Y

I haven’t played Pokemon since Red and Blue came out.  I was addicted to the series.  I have always loved Pokemon, but the later games just didn’t have the same feel to it.  On a whim I bought X and I feel like i’m a kid again.   Not only is the game fun, but the online features are great.  Being able to battle and trade Pokemon with people all over the world is so much fun.

Add me as a friend, my friend code is: 3823 – 8512 – 0415

As an aside, I want to thank the community surrounding PiMAME.  All the members on the forums that are helping each other, showing off their builds, doing awesome stuff with the software, you all make this project awesome.  Thank you.

-Shea

Oct 11

Friday Post: What’s free time?

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Hey All,

Happy Friday!

This week just flew by.  It feels like it’s still Wednesday.  Maker Faire Orlando has come and gone, and I have to say, it was incredible.  I was manning my booth the entire time which always had a crowd but I was able to catch a 10 minute break to eat something and look around.  There were so many cool displays, and so many interested people who were interested.  By the end of the day my throat was sore and I had lost my voice.  It was totally worth it.

I will say this, the X-Arcade Tank Stick is built like a tank.  It got hit by hundreds of kids during the Maker Faire and it stood up to the challenge.  I’m going to take it apart because I think the right joystick got a little banged up but it was still working.

Python in 24 Hours

Someone who I am very honored to call a friend has just released her new book!  Katie Cunningham has just had her book, “Sam’s Teach Yourself Python in 24 Hours“, published.  I got mine in the mail today so I haven’t gotten a chance to go through it yet, but I have a feeling it will be great.  Congratulations Katie!

Pokemon X and Y

Pokemon X and Y come out tomorrow.  I love Pokemon, but I haven’t played one of the core series since Red and Blue (I know!).  Most of my office is picking the new one up, so I figured it’s time to once again catch ’em all!  Between work, grad school, and PiMAME, where I am going to find the time to play…

PiMAME

I upgrade PiMAME to use the newest version of Raspbian, and recompiled the kernel to have the Xin-Mo module fixes in place.  I wanted to hold off on the release until I had more to add, but I think i’m going to do an image only release for this, since you can’t really just do a kernel upgrade with an install script.  It will also include the PiMAME intro video.

Once that is released I am going to be working on totally revamping the main menu system and web interface.  I have some cool things coming down the pipeline!

Have a great weekend!

-Shea