Tag Archives: emulation

Mar 31

Friday Post: Fix It Felix Jr. running on the Raspberry Pi!

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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 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Mar 07

AdvanceMAME 3.4 for the Raspberry Pi Zero

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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.

Get it here

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

Apr 12

AdvanceMAME 1.4 and AdvanceMESS 1.4 for Raspberry Pi3

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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:

2016-04-05 (3) 2016-04-05 (2) 2016-04-05 (1) 2016-04-05

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

Jan 22

Friday Post: AdvanceMAME 1.4 debs

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Hey All,

Updates maybe sporadic for the next few weeks.

AdvanceMAME updated to 1.4 so I have recompiled the source and made .debs out of it.  This will work on the Pi and Pi2.

AdvanceMAME 1.4 Deb Download

To install goto a terminal and type:

sudo dpkg --force-install -i advancemame_1.4-1_armhf.db
advmame

You will now have a directory in ~/.advance and will need to edit your advmame.rc file.

nano ~/.advance/advmame.rc

Add to the first line:

device_video_clock 5 - 50 / 15.62 / 50 ; 5 - 50 / 15.73 / 60

Then press ctrl-x then y and hit enter to save.

You can now place your game files into the ~/.advance/roms directory and launch a game with the command:

advmame gamename
advmame sf2

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

Mar 27

Friday Post: PiPlay 0.8 Beta 9 Released!

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Happy Friday Everyone!

 

I am proud to present the very latest version of PiPlay!  PiPlay 0.8 Beta 9!  I feel like this is the best release yet!

While this was mostly a bug fix and compatibility update, we do have one awesome new features implemented.  When you upload, drag and drop, ftp, or somehow copy a game file to the roms folder, our file watcher will pick that up, and automatically update the PiPlay Menu.  No more running the Rom Scraper, or getting popups about unscraped files.

Update now via the PiPlay Menu, or download the latest image!

 Changelog
  • Numerous bug fixes!
  • Updated to latest Raspbian
  • SQLite Backend
  • Webserver now a background process via supervisor
  • File Watcher automatically scans for game files and updates the PiPLAY menu
  • Raspberry Pi 2 comparability
  • Controller config updated
  • Moved more repos to GitHub
  • Master games list updated
  • Toggle menu item visibility (in beta mode still)

Have a good weekend everyone!

Feb 13

Friday Post: Termboy

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Hey All,

Happy Friday!

So I have had my Pi2 for a week, and I gotta say, it’s a great piece of kit.  PiPlay is coming along nicely.  Having some hiccups on the Pi2 that I need to fix before I do a full release.

TermBoy

With that being said, I saw on Hacker News today a port of a gameboy emulator to the Go language, that also only utilizes the console.  It’s called Termboy, and while it doesn’t run that fast on the Raspberry Pi, it’s still a neat little tech demo.

We first download the proper console font and install it:

wget http://kbd-project.org/download/kbd-2.0.2.tar.xz
tar xf kbd-2.0.2.tar.xz
sudo cp kbd-2.0.2/data/consolefonts/default8x16.psfu /usr/share/consolefonts/

Now we download the latest GoLang version (The apt-get version of Go is 2 years old)
[code]
wget https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.4.1.src.tar.gz
tar xf go1.4.1.src.tar.gz

Set the path for where we want our Go packages to be downloaded

mkdir godownload
export GOPATH=/home/pi/go/godownload/

Build Go

cd go/src/
./make.bash

One that has completed, it’s time to download Termboy and build it.

cd ../bin/
./go get github.com/dobyrch/termboy-go

Now goto the bin folder where our newly built termboy executable resides, and run it like so:

cd ../godownload/bin/
./termboy-go /path/to/game.rom

More PiPlay news soon.  Promise!

-Shea

Jan 31

Friday Post: PiMAME 0.8 Preview Release (only for the brave)

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Hey All!

Happy Friday!  It has been a long week.  The weather in Florida right now is crazy.  One day it’s 80 degrees, the next day its 50, then 70, then 40.  I wish it would make up its mind!  The bad part about it is everyone is getting sick.  Anyways…

PiMAME 0.8…
… preview release only for the brave edition

PiMAME 0.8 is almost done.  We have a few more bugs to fix, and some more features to test, but the basics are there.

I have an installer available for the brave to try.  It will make a new pimame folder in your home directory, so I recommend using a fresh install of Raspbian.

From the home directory in your command line, enter in the following command:

wget -O - http://pimame.org/installer.sh | bash

When that has finished running, reboot your Pi.  It should automatically boot up into the new launcher, and a web interface should be available at your Pi’s IP address.

If you decide to test this, please send me any and all feedback!  It is much appreciated!

This has been a huge labor of love, and I couldn’t have done it without some of the contributors to the codebase:

  • Zach – https://github.com/zachberry
  • Connor – https://github.com/Conno123009
  • Scotty – https://github.com/KingScooty

Thanks everyone!  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

Aug 23

Friday Post: PiMAME 0.7.8 with NES Support

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Edit: PiMAME 0.7.8 is now uploaded!

Hey All!

Happy Friday!  First week of classes is over.  Woo!

PiMAME 0.7.8 is coming this weekend.  The major enhancements are that NES emulation is supported through AdvMESS.  I have also used the updated version of PiFBA which now has 2 player support.

I hope you all enjoy it!

-Shea