I’m currently working on making .deb files for all the emulators. I’m also recompiling all the source code on the latest version of Raspbian. I’m hoping that will solve some issues people have been running into lately.
More updates to follow 🙂
Hey all,
It’s been a fun week. I have been playing a LOT of Black Mesa on Steam. If you have never played Half Life then I recommend you pick up this great fan remake of the original game. If you HAVE played Half Life then you need to play this game and see how great it is. It’s free. It’s awesome. It’s a lot of fun. http://release.blackmesasource.com/
Today Adafruit linked to me again. This time about my Battery Powered Pi and how I was using their 2″ screen. That made my day 🙂 The screen is working out great!
On the news about the overclocking…Holy Crap does it make a difference! Street Fighter 2 is now 100% playable, and i’ve been able to load D&D (a CPS2 game) and it play amazingly. I’ll be getting some video of that up soon. If you are using Raspbian, update and upgrade to the latest version. It’s worth it.
Have a great weekend!
Hey All,
Today the Raspberry Pi foundation announced a new Raspbian release. I’m currently putting it through its paces, but so far it seems great.
Improvements:
WiFi – I had never tried WiFi until today. I have never had good luck with Linux and wireless adapters. I have an older Belkin USB N wifi dongle and I plugged it in and it worked instantly. Used the GUI WPA_CONFIG tool and it found my dongle, my network, and once I entered my password, I was connected. Super hassle free.
Audio – Apparently there have been fixes for the audio issues. I haven’t had good experiences with Audio on the Pi. I go from Composite to HDMI a lot, and I use a lot of different emulators. There has always been clicks and hisses. I am hoping this is fixed now. I will be testing this out later.
Overclocking – raspi_config now includes an Overclocking menu item and has introduced Turbo mode. This is coming straight from the Raspberry Pi website:
“We’ve been doing a lot of work to understand the impact of voltage and temperature on lifetime, and are now able to offer a “turbo mode”, which dynamically enables overclock and overvolt under the control of a cpufreq driver, without affecting your warranty. We are happy that the combination of only applying turbo when busy, and limiting turbo when the BCM2835′s internal temperature reaches 85°C, means there will be no measurable reduction in the lifetime of your Raspberry Pi.”
This is awesome news! I’m downloading all of my binaries to this new image and will be testing out the performance for you all.
Have a great night!
Hey All,
Excited to post today. I was out shopping today at Walmart and I came across a portable battery pack charger on clearance. I had tried to use a friend’s Duracell Portable charger and while it would power the Pi, it only outputted 500mA so it wasn’t able to power my LCD. I took a chance and picked this battery pack up and what do you know…it worked!
It’s a Kodak Power Pack KP1000 – 5v 700mA.
I’m now one step closer to my portable gaming station 🙂
-Shea
Shoutout to CodenameV for bringing PCSX_ReARMed to my attention!
Tonight I have uploaded the source and binaries for PCSX_ReARMed. This is an amazing emulator that is running a lot of PSX games at full speed. I have not been able to get sound to work through HDMI yet, but since my last reformat, I haven’t been able to get sound working on anything, so I’m kinda bummed about that. I’m hoping some of you have better luck with the audio.
Guide to running PCSX_ReARMed:
Let me know if you have any issues. Enjoy!
Good News Everyone! I was able to recover my corrupted filesystem. I also completed a large chunk of a major project I’m working on at the University. This one piece of code has been bugging me for a couple of days, and I finally solved it today, so I feel a lot better. I’m exhausted but hopefully tomorrow I can do some more emulation testing.
I have been testing PCSX_ReARMed for the Pi and it’s working really well. NeoPop-SDL (Neo Geo Pocket Color) emulator is working as well, though it doesn’t fullscreen properly. Mednafen 0.8 (a multi console emulator) is already in the Raspbian Repos. Mednafen 0.9 has trouble compiling out of the box but I was able to get past the issues and it’s working. I’ll be posting binaries this week as well as some tutorials.
Have a great night!
Hey All,
So this week started off cool then took a turn for suckage. I’ve been working on getting two more emulators working. One is a Neo Geo Pocket Color emulator, and it works, but has some minor issues. The other is another mass emulator like MESS. The older version compiles, but the latest one errors out.
The reason I am not posting binaries at the moment is because my SD card’s filesystem got corrupted during a test I was doing, and won’t boot. I’ve made a bit for bit backup of the card using DD, and I’m going to try and retrieve as much data from it as possible. Luckily I have other SD cards to use.
I was hoping to have the binaries for NeoPop available tonight but I have to recompile them on the new SD card. If you want you can click the link above and download the source and compile it yourself.
The other emulator I’ve been working on compiling is called Mednafen. The old version (0.8) is available in Raspbian repos, so just do sudo apt-get install mednafen and you should be good to go. Make sure you run it once, then edit the ./mednafen/mednafen.rc file. There is a part that says video and it tries to use opengl, set it to SDL and you should be good to go.
Have a great weekend everyone!
Hey all,
It’s been a long week, and I am really glad I have a long weekend to sleep in.
When the Arduino Leonardo was announced I was really excited to see it have built in USB HID support and could act as a keyboard, mouse, or joystick. I was even more excited to find out that my year old Teensy++ (Arduino compatible board) was based on the same chipset that the Leonardo now uses, and is able to act as a keyboard as well!
This is a new feature that was introduced in the Arduino 1.0 IDE. You can now send keyboard presses with this simple line of code: Keyboard.write(‘a’); If I wanted the Up joystick to be the up arrow on the keyboard, I would just use: Keyboard.write(0x0E); .
.
My goal is to use my Neo Geo AES controllers as an input for MAME. The Neo Geo pads don’t have any control boards built into the unit. The console itself interprets each pin individually, just like an actual arcade board. The pad uses a standard midi gameport (DA-15) connector, with each pin representing one button.
My idea is to make a Neo Geo pad to usb adapter using the Teensy++ as go-between. The Neo Geo pins will be wired up to the digital pins on the Teensy, and the Teensy Arduino sketch will interpret each button press as a keyboard press.
I’m looking forward to working on this project. I hope everyone has a great weekend and a restful Labor Day.
EDIT: UPDATED BINARIES HERE – FULL SPEED ACHIEVED!
Hey All!
Happy Friday! This week brings some really cool things for the Raspberry Pi. First up, we have a Playstation Emulator that works under X in on the Pi. It’s called PCSX, it’s OpenGL ES enabled, and while it’s not runnign at full speed, it’s a really cool display of the technology that can be powered by the Pi. Binaries and Instructions below.
To use this you will need CD ISO’s of your backed up PSX games stored on the SD card.
This emulator is far from perfect on the Raspberry Pi. Some games won’t work, frame rates are wild, and it can be a bit frustrating, but who cares! It’s a freakin’ Playstation emulation on the Raspberry Pi!
Second cool thing to come out today is an announcement from the Raspberry Pi foundation. They are now selling licenses to enable MPEG-2 and VC-1 decoding, as well as H.264 encoding (free?) and CEC support!
I’m not sure how the license system works since it is somehow tied to your Pi’s serial number, but you can purchase them at the Raspberry Pi store.
Hope everyone has a great weekend!
I was very excited when I found out that on Monday, I made the frontpage of the Raspberry Pi website. A big shout out to Liz for mentioning me and linking back here. It made my day!
I really love working on this little computer. I’m learning so much and using skills that I took for granted. It’s really pushing some of the boundaries I had setup against myself. I’m glad to be getting past them.
I’m also thinking of getting one of these and building a RaspberryPi bartop machine:
