Hey All,
The PiPlay Portable Kickstarter is fully funded!!! Thank you to all of you. We are super humbled and excited that we get to see this kit succeed.
In even more incredible news….
I’m super excited to introduce our son, Sam, born Monday April 24th.
Mother and Baby are doing great. We came home from the hospital yesterday. I’m so excited for this new chapter in our lives.
Have a great weekend all,
-Shea
Hey All!
I’m super happy to announce that our PiPlay Portable Kit is now live on Kickstarter!!!! First day and we hit 50% funded!! Thank you all.
Have a great weekend all!
-Shea
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 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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
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.
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
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!
Hey All,
I have extremely awesome and happy news to report! K is pregnant!!!! We are having a baby!
In other news, MAKERFAIRE ORLANDO 2016 is this weekend at the Central Florida Fairgrounds!!!!
Come see me, FamiLAB, and hundreds of other exhibits showcasing the biggest show and tell on Earth!
Jacob and I have recently finished revision 3 of PiPlay Advance, and it’s looking awesome!
We are currently testing out a variety of buttons, but it’s coming together really nicely!
And finally, the Elections are coming up soon, and my race for Florida House District 49 is heating up. I’m very excited to see what happens in the next few weeks. That being said, I have the most amazing supporters out there!
Have a great week all!
-Shea
P.S.: In sadder news, at 91, my Grandmother Bernice passed away peacefully two weeks ago. I was very hesitant about posting this, because it makes it feel so real now. She lived an amazing life, and got to hear that she was going to be a great grandmother. I miss her, and I love her, and it sucked that Hurricane Matthew hit the same week as the funeral, so everything had to be rushed.
Thank you all for being there for me.
Hey All,
Sorry for the long delay in updates. Been extremely busy with the campaign and some personal projects. I needed the break but I’m back.
Good News
The Florida primaries are over, and it is only myself and a Democrat in the race for Florida House District 49. I am currently polling in the high 30s, which is pretty damn good considering I’m an Independent with about $1000 left running against a politician who has raised over $100,000.
Does money help? Of course, but the more I talk to people and tell them my platform, and more importantly, what type of person I am, the more support I am getting. I am so thankful for the wonderful support my friends and family are showing me during this campaign. It’s been amazing so far. Can’t wait until the November election 😀
The PiPlay Advance board is coming together! We have another iteration we are getting ready to test! More news on that soon 😀
I’ve been playing a TON of Overwatch lately, and in a few of the maps, you can run around some arcade machines. They look like traditional Japanese Candy Cabs, and I love them. I really want to make my own real version sometime, BUT, I was able to do the next best thing. A modder released the model files for the arcade into Source Film Maker, and I was able to export them OBJs, convert them to STLs, and then clean them up in Tinkercad, so I could 3D print them.
Sad News
In sad news, last month my Grandfather passed away. I want to thank the other campaigns for offering their condolences and being decent about the whole thing. It took a toll on my family of course. Right after he passed, my Grandmother went into the hospital (for what looks like a heart attack), but she is doing better. It was just a heck of a month.
Today is also 9/11, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention anything about it. I remember 15 years ago, a senior in high school, watching the events unfold on TV in a class room. The administrators were going room by room turning off TVs and telling the teachers to go back to their lessons. I’m glad my teacher turned it back on when they left.
At 17, all I could think about was how my cousins lived in NYC at the time, and hoping they were OK, but not really worried, because they were also kids, what would they be doing close to the towers? I remember a lot of confusion and worry about what was next. I remember a lot of ignorant and hateful comments being spoken in the following weeks, and a lot of misinformation from my fellow classmates. I was just numb.
15 years later, the big thing I take from 9/11 is that we should never respond to these tragic events with reactionary legislation. The PATRIOT Act is probably one of the worst bills that was pushed through during that time. In hindsight we see that, but we can’t forget the lesson in case of future events.
Thank you.
-Shea
Hey All,
This has been a fun month. Between campaigning, work, and Raspberry Pi stuff, I’ve been busy 😀
Politics
So I’ve been campaigning a lot this month. I am running for the District 49 Representative in Florida’s House. I love my district. One thing that is crazy to me is the amount of money being put into this election. I have raised around $2000. I’m very proud of that number. It’s coming from friends and family who believe in me. It’s humbling. My Republican opponent has raised around ~$7000. I’m sure it’s more now. And now there is a second Republican who has entered the race. On the other side, my Democrat opponent has raised over $90,000! $90,000. That is an absurd amount of money for a State House race. I’ve heard the average is around $40,000.
That is insane to me. That’s a scholarship, a car, someone’s student loans. And instead it’s going to a campaign for ad buys and t shirts. I hate it. I truly believe campaigns should be publicly funded at all levels. On that note, I can’t help but see the irony in me asking for donations: https://donate.sheasilverman.com
PCBs
In other news, the first revision to the PiPlay Advance PCBs came in, and they are awesome!
Conferences
This week I was in San Antonio, Texas for the IMS Global Learning Impact Leadership Institute conference, where I gave two presentations on the LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) standards. I was also there because my team at UCF won 2nd place in the LTI App Challenge for ProctorHub, our free passive proctoring software!
It was a very different conference than I am used too. Most of the software conferences I have been to have been very low level. Getting into the nuts and bolts of how things work. These educational conferences are very high level. It’s an interesting paradigm change but I think we got some good stuff done. I was able to give anecdotal evidence regarding some of the gaps in the current standards, and what could be done to improve them at all levels. Stuff I introduce today will help to change the shape of educational software in the next few years.
MegaCon is also this weekend. I’ll have some pictures up from that event soon.
Have a good weekend!
-Shea
Hey All,
I compiled AdvanceMAME 1.4 and AdvanceMESS 1.4 for the Raspberry Pi3.
On the Pi3, games like Street Fighter II and The Simpsons run like butter with full audio. It’s great!
You can download them here:
http://sheasilverman.com/rpi/raspbian/pi3/advancemame_1.4-1_armhf_pi3.deb
http://sheasilverman.com/rpi/raspbian/pi3/advancemess_1.4-1_armhf_pi3.deb
To install run:
sudo dpkg --force-all -i advancemame_1.4-1_armhf_pi3.deb sudo dpkg --force-all -i advancemess_1.4-1_armhf_pi3.deb
On another note, our first “PiPlay Advance” boards came in:
There was of course an issue with our pin routing, so we had to order a new revision of the boards. So excited to see this project start coming together!
-Shea