Category Archives: Uncategorized

Oct 06

Friday(ish) Post: Hanging out with Eben and Liz

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Hey all,

Sorry for the late post.  The past two days have been jam packed and I had limited internet access.

Friday and Saturday I was at Magic Ruby.  It was a Ruby conference at the Walt Disney World Hollywood Studios park. I’m still decompressing from the conference, so I’m not ready to make a full review about it.  Some talks were amazing, some were downright crappy.  I’m just exhausted.

Right after the conference Friday night, I had to run straight to the FamiLAB Hacker Space in Longwood, Florida because they were hosting Eben and Liz from the Raspberry Pi foundation!

We spent the first part of the night hanging out with Eben and Liz, showing off our projects.  Liz loved my arcade cabinet, and I need to get a kit out to her ASAP 🙂  Eben and Liz then did an interview with the Orlando Sentinel (as did I regarding my projects).  After the interview, Eben did a presentation to a standing room only gathering of people regarding the Pi, as well as a QA from the audience.  It was a great event!

Eben and Liz are both really humble and genuinely nice people.  I’m really glad I was able to spend some time with them.

Also, on a side note, my little Color Picker test app for Windows 8 passed certification, and is now in the Windows App Store!  Go me!

Have a great weekend!

-Shea

Aug 24

Friday Post: Playstation Emulation on the Raspberry Pi!

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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.

Download PCSX Binaries

To use this you will need CD ISO’s of your backed up PSX games stored on the SD card.

  1. Make sure you in a windowed environment.  If you are just on the command line, use the command startx.
  2. Double click on LXTerminal on the desktop or open it from the application menu at the bottom left.
  3. From the LXTerminal, type cd ~/ to get to your home directory.
  4. wget http://sheasilverman.com/rpi/raspbian/pcsx.zip
  5. unzip pcsx.zip
  6. cd pcsx
  7. chmod +x pcsx
  8. ./pcsx
  9. Use up and down to navigate the menus.
  10. Select Load, then navigate the directory where you saved the CD image
  11. Select your game then press enter
  12. ENJOY!!!

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!

 

Aug 12

Descent Tutorial

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Today I present a tutorial on compiling Descent for your Raspberry Pi running Raspbian.  At the end of this tutorial you should have binaries ready to go and and a playable version of the game Descent.  If you don’t want to wait for the compile, I have the binaries ready for you.  Just skip to the end.

  1. Install the required dependancies
    1. sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2debian libsdl-mixer1.2 libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2 libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-0 libsdl-ttf2.0-dev libsdl-net1.2 libsdl-net1.2-dev gcc-4.7 scons libphysfs-dev
  2. cd ~/
  3. mkdir descent
  4. cd descent
  5. Download the needed source code:
    1. wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/dxx-rebirth/files/dxx-rebirth/0.57.3/d1x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src.tar.gz
    2. wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/dxx-rebirth/files/dxx-rebirth/0.57.3/d2x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src.tar.gz
  6. Download the needed patches:
    1. wget http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heinm/tmp/d1x-rebirth-rpi.diff.gz
    2. wget http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heinm/tmp/d2x-rebirth-rpi.diff.gz
  7. Unzip the source files and the patches:
    1. tar xvfz d2x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src.tar.gz
    2. tar xvfz d1x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src.tar.gz
    3. gunzip d1x-rebirth-rpi.diff.gz
    4. gunzip d2x-rebirth-rpi.diff.gz
  8. You now have to patch the source code with the diff files.
    1. cd into the source code directories.
      1. Descent 1
        1. cd ~/descent/d1x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
        2. patch -p1 < ../d1x-rebirth-rpi.diff
      2. Descent 2
        1. cd ~/descent/d2x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
        2. patch -p1 < ../d2x-rebirth-rpi.diff
  9. We are now ready to compile!
  10. On the command line enter these two commands:
    1. export CC=gcc-4.7
    2. export CXX=g++-4.7
  11. Descent 1
    1. cd ~/descent/d1x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
    2. scons raspberrypi=1
      1. Wait around 30 – 40 minutes.
      2. If there are no errors you should now have a d1x-rebirth executable file in your directory!
  12. Descent 2
    1. cd ~/descent/d2x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
    2. scons raspberrypi=1
      1. Wait around 30 – 40 minutes.
      2. If there are no errors you should now have a d2x-rebirth executable file in your directory!
  13. You now need the data files that holds the actual game levels, sounds, artwork, etc.  These are in .hog, .pig, and .ham (descent 2 only) files.  You can get the game content from dxx-rebirth, the creators of this port.  They also have links to the shareware files:
    1. http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/game-content/
    2. http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/download/dxx/content/descent-pc-shareware.zip
    3. http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/download/dxx/content/descent2-pc-demo.zip
  14. Unzip those files by running unzip filename
  15. copy descent.hog and descent.pig to ~/descent/d1x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
  16. copy D2DEMO.HAM, D2DEMO.HOG and D2DEMO.PIG  to ~/descent/d2x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
  17. You are now ready to play!
    1. Descent 1
      1. cd ~/descent/d1x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
      2. ./d1x-rebirth -hogdir . (yes, thats a period at the end that must be there)
    2. Descent 2
      1. cd ~/descent/d2x-rebirth_v0.57.3-src/
      2. ./d2x-rebirth -hogdir .
  18. ENJOY!!


I realize these are a lot of instructions, but I wanted to make them as verbose as possible.
Below are the precompiled binaries with shareware data files already copied over.

Descent 1 Binaries | Descent 2 Binaries

Please let me know if any of this doesn’t work for you.  I wrote down every single step I did when I compiled it, but I’m afraid I may have missed something.  Let me know and I’ll correct it!

-Shea

Aug 08

Youtube-Viewer

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Hey all,

As you saw in my previous post / video, I was running Youtube videos in fullscreen on my little display.  I was using an application (really just a 2000+ line perl script) that does this for me.  The program is called youtube-viewer (github)

Gcala posted a nice guide on how to set it up and has given me permission to also repost it here.  I’m making some modifications as I had to do a couple changes, but it works.

  1. sudo apt-get install gcc-4.7
  2. export CC=gcc-4.7
  3. export CXX=g++-4.7
  4. sudo apt-get install libwww-perl
  5. sudo cpan -i XML::Fast
  6. sudo wget https://github.com/downloads/ssilverm/youtube-viewer/youtube-viewer -O /usr/bin/youtube-viewer
  7. sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/youtube-viewer

Now just type youtube-viewer on the command line and you are good to go 🙂

List of Commands
all               : play all the results in order
next              : go to the next page (same as <ENTER>)
back              : return to the previous page
login             : will prompt you for login
logout            : will delete the authentication key
[integer]         : play the corresponding video
i, info [i]       : show more informations about one video
c, comments [i]   : show video comments (e.g.: c 19)
r, related [i]    : show related videos (e.g.: r 6)
v, videos [i]     : show author's latest videos
p, playlists [i]  : show author's latest playlists
subscribe [i]     : subscribe to author's channel
like, dislike [i] : like or dislike a video
fav, favorite [i] : favorite a video (e.g.: fav 3)
[keywords]        : search for youtube videos
3-8, 3..8         : same as 3 4 5 6 7 8
8 2 12 4 6 5 1    : play the videos in your order
-argv -argv2=v    : set some arguments (e.g.: -u=google)
e, edit-config    : edit and apply the configuration
load-config       : (re)load the configuration file
/my?[regex]*$/    : play videos matched by a regex (/i)
reset, reload     : restart the application
q, quit, exit     : close the application

Let me know if you have any issues or questions!

-Shea

Jul 31

Raspbian on Raspberry Pi – MAME, MESS, Quake3, NeoGeo, and Cave Story Binaries

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Initial impressions with Raspbian.  Everything seems to be either playable or faster than before.

  • MESS is noticably faster.
  • MAME was a LITTLE faster (it all depends on the game).
  • Gngeo (Neo Geo) was still playing at full speed.
  • Cave Story works fine as long as music is disabled.
  • Quake 3 Arena plays but sometimes crashes (as seen in the video)

Binaries are available below:

Let me know if something doesn’t work or if you need help.  Hope everyone likes these!  Thanks to those who helped put some of these binaries together!

Tutorials Available Here

Jul 30

GameWarp 2012 Photos

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This past weekend was Game Warp! A Central Florida event dedicated to Arcade Video Games and Pinball Machines.  I had a lot of fun, saw a lot of internet friends, and watched people way better than compete in awesome tournaments.

Enjoy the pictures!

http://www.gamewarp.org

http://www.villagebbs.com/forum/

Jul 25

Star Trek: The Next Generation now in High Definition!

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Hey All,

I’m a huge Star Trek fan.  When I heard that CBS was remastering and rereleasing all of TNG in high definition I got a huge smile on my face.  I eargerly awaited the TNG Next Level sampler disc (which included the remastered Pilot – Encounter at Farpoint, Sins of the Father, and The Inner Light) to come out.

The sampler is the REASON I bought a Blu Ray player, and it was worth it.  The quality of the remasterings are amazing.  Sometimes the quality is too high.  You can see where the extra klingon make up ends and the face begins, you can see how low quality some of the extra props were.  You get to see stuff that you couldn’t ever see in standard definition.  It’s like watching a whole new show 🙂

I highly recommend the Season 1 box set if you are a trekkie, but if you are on the fence about the purchase, try the sampler pack.  I don’t think you will be disappointed.