Tag Archives: emulation

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 16

Made the frontpage!

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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:

Aug 03

Friday Post: Woo! Long week…

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Hey all,

This has been an interesting long week.  I’m really happy with the feedback I’ve recieved regarding the Raspbian binaries I released.  I got linked to by Adafruit which is awesome!  I purchased one of thier little 2.0″ LCD TVs.  Still waiting for it to arrive, but I plan to do some fun things with that small screen and the Raspberry Pi.  Bensoutlet.com has on sale the Motorola Lapdock for $59.99 which is a really good price.  Theres a 14 page forum post about how people are using it to make Raspberry Pi laptops.

My next goal is to write up some tips and tricks for the emulators that my commentors have posted, and still working on getting Love2D to work.

Hope everyone has a good weekend!

-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 27

Friday Post: Raspbian

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I once read some very good advice about blogging, and that is to have a schedule and keep to it.  This blog has been my brain dump, I post things when I think about them.  I don’t really preplan for my posts.  Something gets completed, it’s cool, I write it down.  I’ve slowly gained a small community of some really cool people here, and I think it’s only fair to everyone that I at least post once a week regardless.

With that said, I’m going to post something every Friday.  I hope you enjoy.  Now on to the content!

I’ve been playing around a bit with the Raspbian release.  I’ve started to recompile all the binaries I released, and will be posting them online once they are to my liking.  I’ve found some hiccups along the way, but I seem to be working through them.

My goals:

  • I really want to get Cave Story working without the lag every 5 seconds.
  • Get Quake3 running again (seems a commenter has been working on that!)
  • Recompile AdvanceMESS and AdvanceMAME
  • Recompile Gngeo and get full screen working right.
  • Get a frontend running that will work with these emulators
  • Get Love2D running.

I got my second Raspberry Pi in the mail yesterday.  This one comes from RS.  The big differences I’ve seen so far in the board itself is that the silkscreening is a little different, and the company that supplies the memory is different.  In my Element14 board, the memory is Samsung.  The RS board uses Hynix memory.

I’ll post some pictures later.

-Shea

Jul 01

Raspberry Pi and MESS – Multi Emulator Super System – NES, GameGear, Genesis

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UPDATE: New Raspbian Binaries Available

Hey All!

Today I present the binaries for AdvanceMESS.  The Multi Emulator Super System.  MESS can emulate somewhere around 250 different home consoles and computers.  It’s not perfect in any sense, but it works for most consoles.

I have currently tested:

  • NES (some games are slow, but it works).
  • GameGear (works)
  • Genesis (slow but works)
  • SNES (couldn’t get it to work…yet)
Instructions:
  1. Download MESS Binaries.
  2. Unzip MESS to the ~/MESS directory.
  3. chmod 777 /dev/fb0
  4. Put your console bios’s into mess/share/advance/rom/
  5. Put your console games into mess/share/advance/image/<console>/ (ie mess/share/advance/image/nes/
  6. CD into mess/bin/
  7. Run advmess with ./advmess
    1. The first time it’s run it will generate a set of folders and files into ~/.advance
  8. edit your ~/.advance/advmess.rc to include the proper display configuration
    1. For HDMI try:
      1. device_video_clock 5 – 50 / 15.62 / 50 ; 5 – 50 / 15.73 / 60
    2. For NTSC TVs try:
      1. device_video_clock 5 – 50 / 15.73 / 60
  9. While still in the mess/bin directory, type ./advmess <console> -cart <filename>
    1. ./advmess nes -cart file.nes
  10. ENJOY!!!

This is one of the weirder setups I’ve tested, but once setup, it works.  If you have any issues, let me know and I will try to help you.

-Shea

P.S. I will NOT help you find console bios or roms.  Please don’t ask.

Official MESS Site

Jun 24

Neo Geo Emulation on the Raspberry Pi

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UPDATE: New Raspbian Binaries Available

I’m going to start this with saying that the Neo Geo is one of my favorite systems EVER. Over the years I’ve owned multiple Neo Geo Arcade Cabinets, tons of Neo Geo boards, and a drawer full of cartridges for the system. It’s an amazing piece of hardware. The first games came out in 1989, and the system had games still coming out in 2004. There is even a homebrew scene that is still running which releases a game every couple of years.

Last week I started messing with Gngeo, an open source Neo Geo emulator. I have gotten it compiled and running. King of Fighters 98 is running at 60fps. It looks lovely. The configuration was kind of a pain, but I think I have everything working right. So without further ado, below is the guide for installing and running Gngeo on the Raspberry Pi!

  1. If you havent setup /dev/fb0 yet, just go ahead and do sudo chmod 777 /dev/fb0
  2. Download the Gngeo binaries here
  3. Download the Gngeo config file here
  4. Unzip the binaries. They should unzip to a folder called gneogeo
    1. You should have 3 folders, the ones that matter are “bin” and “roms”. Inside “roms” you need to put in a neogeo bios file as well as any legally obtained game files you have. I will not give any hints or tips on where to obtain these files.
  5. On the command line go into the bin folder (cd ~/gneogeo/bin), and type ./gngeo -i ../roms/
    1. The first time it may fail, crash, lockup your pi, or even get into a small gui looking menu. Immediately exit (this can also sometimes cause a crash).
    2. What this first run has done is create a hidden folder in your home folder called .gngeo.
  6. Go into .gngeo (cd ~/.gngeo), and copy the config file you downloaded earlier. This setups the keys and some video stuffs.
  7. Go back into the gneogeo/bin directory and run ./gngeo -i ../roms/
  8. You should now see a gui, press enter on “load game”. You should see a list of roms available to you. Press up and down to get to your desired game, then press enter to start it.
  9. Press 3 to give Player 1 a credit, 4 to give Player 2 a credit. Press 1 to start player 1, 2 to start player 2. Up down left and right control player 1, and z, x, a, and d map to the Neo Geo’s A B C and D buttons.

Press escape when done 🙂

So far I have played King of Fighters 98, Metal Slug X, and Samurai Shodown 2 at full speed with no issues 🙂

Let me know if anyone has any issues or tips.

Edit:  Here is a link to the official site of gngeo