Tag Archives: fixitfelixjr

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

 

Oct 10

Friday Post: Custom Carts

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Hey All,

Happy Friday!  This week I got in two cartridges that I am very to share with you all.  The first one is a custom SNES cart called StarFox Legacy!

StarFox Legacy contains three games:

  • The original StarFox
  • The StarFox competition game (a modified version that has a timer set and you have to rack up the most points before it runs out)
  • The unreleased StarFox 2.

To change games, you hold the reset switch down for 3 seconds.  It’s a really cart, and I’m glad I was able to acquire it.

The second cart is made for the Sega Genesis, and is a homebrew game some of you may know called FIX IT FELIX JR!!!  Yes, someone programmed a recreation of the game from the movie Wreck It Ralph!  It’s really well done, the label looks awesome, and I love it.

PiPlay 0.8 Beta 7 is coming!

Nothing too groundbreaking in this one.  Bug fixes for the controller setup, a popup window on first startup to give you some hints as well as a change log popup.  Some bug fixes, a little bit of speed improvements, background sounds.  I’m also switching out the python flask built in webserver for gunicorn.  It causes great speed improvements, uses less RAM and CPU.  When I switched to it, I noticed a lot of SNES games stopped stuttering.

I’ll be uploading the image this weekend and the updater should be available shortly.

-Shea