Category Archives: Nintendo

Sep 19

Friday Post: Maker Faire and Kano Unboxing!

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Hey All,

What a week.  Maker Faire was amazing but exhausting!  So many kids playing Street Fighter 2, and so many adults loving the nostalgia.  It was a great time.  Tons of 3D printers, awesome products, and great people all around.  I hope you enjoy the gallery!

I also received my Kano computing kit today.  I haven’t had the chance to boot it up, but I have made a short unboxing video.  The packaging is spectacular, and the custom keyboard is great to hold and use (tested it on my desktop).

 

The next release of PiPlay is coming together, I hope to release it this weekend.

Small list of changes:

  • modified romlist layout to include area for game descriptions
  • added 2 player controller config support
  • added “button combo” support for PiPlay Menu actions
  • optimization, screen updates only happen on controlled events
  • removed horizontal romlist option in theme support
  • Loading time speed up
  • Wifi Configuration Tool

Have a great weekend all!

-Shea

Mar 28

Friday Post: Framebuffer Copy and new PiMAME 8 beta release

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Hey All,

Another week another PiMAME release 🙂

This is beta 2 of the new PiMAME 0.8.  I’m loving the feedback.  I know there are bugs and issues, but I’m able to iterate so much faster now.  This latest release includes:

  • Added NES support again.
  • Added C64 support again.
  • Put back in restart, shutdown, and updater tools.
  • Menu will now notify you if there are updates available.
  • PiMAME bootsplash video
  • Tankstick support

High priority features I’m working on:

  • Adding back in screenshot support
  • More joystick configuration options

Framebuffer copy

I’ve started playing with Notro’s FBTFT module again.  This allows you to use little inexpensive LCD screens for things like the console and X Windows.  The problem is that most programs expect output on framebuffer 0.  These screens operate on framebuffer 1, or /dev/fb1.  Tasanakorn has created a program called fbcp.  This mirrors the screen from the hdmi / rca port and onto the SPI based screens you see above.

It doesn’t work 100% yet for me.  I don’t know if its my screen or the program.  I’m going to purchase some more and test them out.

Little Arcade Machine

Steve Smith has created this awesome little MAME cabinet.  Plans and more images are below at the imgur link.

http://imgur.com/a/Pr4rG

Have a great weekend everyone!

-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.

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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

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 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

Sep 06

Friday Post: PiMAME 0.7.9

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Hey All,

PiMAME 0.7.9

PiMAME 0.7.9 is now uploaded to SourceForge

A new release of PiMAME is being uploaded.  This time it’s 0.7.9, and the biggest edition is DGEN, a Sega Genesis emulator.  PiSNES now supports 2 players, and the script was updated to not overwrite some of the config files.  You can use the update.sh script right now to upgrade.  I’ll update this post once the new image is on SourceForge.

Pokemon Rumble U

So, I’m a sucker for collectibles.  Make little collectible figurines, add NFC, and let them interact with a video game, and I might as well just hand over my paycheck to the developer.  I have so far kept myself away from Skylanders, and Disney Infinity, because I KNEW I would spend too much, but now Nintendo has come into the market with Pokemon Rumble U.

It’s an inexpensive Wii U game.  Download only.  It’s like a combination of Super Smash Bros., Mario Party, and bullet hell games.

There are 649 in game Pokemon to catch/befriend/see, but the real fun comes with these:

There are 18 different figurines to collect, and each one levels up as you play.  When you bring them to a friends house, you can place the little figure on their wii u gamepad and it brings over all your stats and moves.

It’s using NFC tags inside the figure’s base to read and write this data, and if you hold it up to an Android phone with NFC, it will try and read the data.  So far I have been unsuccessful getting a good data dump, but it would be neat if I could back up my figures stats and try moving them to blank tags.

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

Aug 30

Friday Post: My book, Raspberry Pi Gaming, now available for pre-order!!

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Hey All,

Raspberry Pi Gaming

So I have some amazing news!  For a while now I have been working with Packt Publishing and writing my book, “Instant Raspberry Pi Gaming.”  Today the book is available to pre-order on Packt’s website.  The preorder is currently for the e-book version, but the hard copy will be available on Amazon very soon.

3231OS_mockupcover_instant-how to

I am so excited for this book!  I hope many of you enjoy it.

NaCade

In other news, shutz from the PiMAME forums built this awesome Raspberry Pi arcade machine, The NaCade:

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http://www.instructables.com/id/NaCade-The-Naked-Raspberry-Pi-Arcade-Machine/?ALLSTEPS

-Shea

Dec 31

Raspberry Pi Powered SNES

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Hey All,

HAPPY NEW YEAR!  This is what I assume to be the last post of 2012.  Might as well end it with a bang 🙂

A fellow member of FamiLAB (Orlando’s Hackerspace) has made a great write-up of his Raspberry Pi powered SNES.

I have been watching Ted (Waterbury) work on this project for the past few months, and the work is nothing short of incredible.

I hope everyone has a great new year.  May 2013 bring you joy, happiness, and success.

-Shea