Tag Archives: gaming

Jan 10

Friday Post: Turning 30! Happy Birthday To Me!

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Hey All,

So, I’m turning 30 this weekend.  Crazy.  I’ve decided to treat myself by building an awesome budget gaming PC.  I haven’t built a PC since the P4 days.

Specs:

All in all I spent about $600 on this machine.  I’m getting 200FPS in Team Fortress 2, and I’m currently waiting for some new games to download.  Happy Birthday to Me!

If anybody is on Steam, I made a PiMAME group.  Let’s get some TF2 games going 🙂

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/pimame

PiMAME

In other news, since the new menu system is taking longer than expected, I’m going to do one more 0.7 PiMAME release.  It’s going to be upgrading to the new Raspbian version, and including some much needed functions to the console menu (joystick support, and favorites).

Look for that update this week!

-Shea

Oct 18

Friday Post: Pokemon X and Y

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Hey All,

No PiMAME news this week.  Still working on new stuff 🙂

This has been a hectic week.  Two weddings and Halloween Horror Nights.  Plus a ton of pages that were written for my classes.  Woo!

Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Orlando was great this year.  K and I have been going ever since we first started dating, and it’s where I proposed to her two years ago.  It’s an awesome tradition for us.  Last year they tried some new things like having moving scare zones, which didn’t end up working well.  This year however, they went back to scare zones and based it on The Walking Dead.  It was a lot of fun.

Pokemon X and Y

I haven’t played Pokemon since Red and Blue came out.  I was addicted to the series.  I have always loved Pokemon, but the later games just didn’t have the same feel to it.  On a whim I bought X and I feel like i’m a kid again.   Not only is the game fun, but the online features are great.  Being able to battle and trade Pokemon with people all over the world is so much fun.

Add me as a friend, my friend code is: 3823 – 8512 – 0415

As an aside, I want to thank the community surrounding PiMAME.  All the members on the forums that are helping each other, showing off their builds, doing awesome stuff with the software, you all make this project awesome.  Thank you.

-Shea

Sep 27

Friday Post: Raspberry Pi Gaming Published!

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Hey All,

I have awesome news! My book, “Raspberry Pi Gaming” has been published this week. The eBook version is currently available on Amazon.com, and the hardcopy should be available next week.

3231OS_mockupcover_instant-how to (2)

 

Raspberry Pi Gaming at Packt Publishing

What you will learn from this book

  • Install a Raspberry Pi operating system
  • Set up PiMAME
  • Install RetroPie
  • Emulate PlayStation, SuperNES, MAME, and Atari 2600 games
  • Create your own Minecraft world and extend it with the API
  • Play in Open Arena matches with your friends
  • Go on an adventure with Cave Story
  • Fix common issues and troubleshoot your device
  • Keep your Raspberry Pi up-to-date

I hope you all enjoy.  I’m very excited and proud of this project!

-Shea Silverman

Sep 06

Friday Post: PiMAME 0.7.9

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Hey All,

PiMAME 0.7.9

PiMAME 0.7.9 is now uploaded to SourceForge

A new release of PiMAME is being uploaded.  This time it’s 0.7.9, and the biggest edition is DGEN, a Sega Genesis emulator.  PiSNES now supports 2 players, and the script was updated to not overwrite some of the config files.  You can use the update.sh script right now to upgrade.  I’ll update this post once the new image is on SourceForge.

Pokemon Rumble U

So, I’m a sucker for collectibles.  Make little collectible figurines, add NFC, and let them interact with a video game, and I might as well just hand over my paycheck to the developer.  I have so far kept myself away from Skylanders, and Disney Infinity, because I KNEW I would spend too much, but now Nintendo has come into the market with Pokemon Rumble U.

It’s an inexpensive Wii U game.  Download only.  It’s like a combination of Super Smash Bros., Mario Party, and bullet hell games.

There are 649 in game Pokemon to catch/befriend/see, but the real fun comes with these:

There are 18 different figurines to collect, and each one levels up as you play.  When you bring them to a friends house, you can place the little figure on their wii u gamepad and it brings over all your stats and moves.

It’s using NFC tags inside the figure’s base to read and write this data, and if you hold it up to an Android phone with NFC, it will try and read the data.  So far I have been unsuccessful getting a good data dump, but it would be neat if I could back up my figures stats and try moving them to blank tags.

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

Aug 30

Friday Post: My book, Raspberry Pi Gaming, now available for pre-order!!

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Hey All,

Raspberry Pi Gaming

So I have some amazing news!  For a while now I have been working with Packt Publishing and writing my book, “Instant Raspberry Pi Gaming.”  Today the book is available to pre-order on Packt’s website.  The preorder is currently for the e-book version, but the hard copy will be available on Amazon very soon.

3231OS_mockupcover_instant-how to

I am so excited for this book!  I hope many of you enjoy it.

NaCade

In other news, shutz from the PiMAME forums built this awesome Raspberry Pi arcade machine, The NaCade:

FXZXNI8HKPX6H1B.LARGE

http://www.instructables.com/id/NaCade-The-Naked-Raspberry-Pi-Arcade-Machine/?ALLSTEPS

-Shea

Jul 28

Awww Yiss!!! Marvel Vs. Capcom on the Raspberry Pi!

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Hey All,

Squid has released another awesome emulator port for the Raspberry Pi. This time it’s Final Burn Alpha, which is a CPS1, CPS2, System 16, and NeoGeo emulator.

Marvel Vs. Capcom runs great on it. Expect this to be in PiMAME ASAP!

https://code.google.com/p/pifba/

 

You will also see I’m running it on a Model A connected to Motorola Lapdock.  Runs great!

Have a good Sunday!

-Shea

May 17

Friday Post: Neat Things

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Hey All,

It has been a long week.  Star Trek Into Darkness was AMAZING!  Go see it now.  Stop reading.  Go to your theater, watch it, then come back here and finish reading.   It was that good.

SanderSiezen has made a really slick cocktail arcade cabinet, powered by PiMAME.  His entire build log has been published at his site.  I’m really impressed by the hinge used to hide the controls.  Great Job!

mame_arcade_table1 mame_arcade_table4

 

BarCamp Orlando

BarCamp Orlando is this weekend.  It’s basically a tech gathering un-conference.  People meet up in a central area, sign up to do talks, speak about awesome things, and network, all while enjoying the bar scene around downtown.

I am hoping to do some talking about PiMAME and the Raspberry Pi.

Have a great weekend everyone!

-Shea

 

Jan 23

PiMAME 0.5 Beta Release

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Hey all,

This is just for testing purposes, but if you like to live on the cutting edge, I’m making available the beta/pre-release/testing release of PiMAME 0.5!

It’s based off the PiMAME 0.3 image, with the Uploader file size limit set to 200MB, and the Snapshot artwork in AdvMENU.

Let me know if you have any issues with it!

-Shea

Jan 22

X-Arcade Tankstick Unboxing

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Hey all,

My new Tankstick arrived today, courtesy of XGaming.com. They have asked me to test it and get it running on the Raspberry Pi. I only had a couple minutes to play with it, but I made a little unboxing video for everyone:

Size comparison of the Pi versus a Tankstick:

tankstick
This thing has some heft to it!  With the few minutes I got to use it, I notice why some users of the Raspberry Pi are having difficulties making it work right.  It’s nothing wrong with the device, but with the way some of the software interprets the inputs.  I have a couple of hunches and ideas on how to fix it, which I hope to get to within the next week.

PiMAME 0.5 is also coming along nicely.  I’m reverting back to the 0.3 stack and just adding some minor modifications.  That should be released on Friday.

-Shea

Jan 04

Friday Post: First post of 2013!

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Hey all,

Happy New Year!  Welcome to 2013 🙂

On Monday Element14 will have more Raspberry Pi’s in stock.  Get your credit cards ready.  I will also be taking my first graduate course that same day.  I am very happy and looking forward to working on my masters degree.

I now have a USB gamepad and I’m going to work on getting that setup.  I’m currently working on PiMAME 0.4 and hope to have it released this weekend.  I am incorporating as many fixes and improvements as I can.  I really appreciate your feedback.

In other Pi news, teh_orph has posted new information about his XWindows accelerated drivers for the Pi.  I am looking forward to trying them out.  They are FAR from finished, but this is a great step forward.

Have a great weekend!

-Shea