Tag Archives: gaming

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

Oct 03

Preview: Raspberry Pi Arcade Cabinet

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EDIT:  Now with Video!

Been working on this for a bit.  I now have limited access to a Laser Cutter.  This mini Raspberry Pi Arcade Machine I made is so cool.  The initial SVG came from here: http://www.ponoko.com/design-your-own/products/arcade-cabinet-enclosure-7231.  I had to modify the holes for the slab of wood I was using and the screen size for my 2″ adafruit display.

Enjoy!

Sep 22

Friday Post: Adafruit and Black Mesa

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Hey all,

It’s been a fun week.  I have been playing a LOT of Black Mesa on Steam.  If you have never played Half Life then I recommend you pick up this great fan remake of the original game.  If you HAVE played Half Life then you need to play this game and see how great it is.  It’s free.  It’s awesome.  It’s a lot of fun.  http://release.blackmesasource.com/

Today Adafruit linked to me again.  This time about my Battery Powered Pi and how I was using their 2″ screen.  That made my day 🙂  The screen is working out great!

On the news about the overclocking…Holy Crap does it make a difference!  Street Fighter 2 is now 100% playable, and i’ve been able to load D&D (a CPS2 game) and it play amazingly.  I’ll be getting some video of that up soon.  If you are using Raspbian, update and upgrade to the latest version.  It’s worth it.

Have a great weekend!

Sep 15

Friday Post: Stuff in the pipeline

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Not much to blog about tonight.  My PCSX_ReARMed binaries are getting a lot of hits.  I’m really impressed by the performance.  This weekend I’m working on my NeoGeo controller project.  Got more of the parts I need and a bunch of the Arduino code written.

Still working on the Mednafen Emulator.  Their IRC channel on freenode is really active, so that’s a great sign.

Also, VIA Technologies tweeted my APC unboxing video 🙂  That was a neat little treat.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Sep 13

Better PlayStation Emulation on the Raspberry Pi

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Shoutout to CodenameV for bringing PCSX_ReARMed to my attention!

Tonight I have uploaded the source and binaries for PCSX_ReARMed.  This is an amazing emulator that is running a lot of PSX games at full speed.  I have not been able to get sound to work through HDMI yet, but since my last reformat, I haven’t been able to get sound working on anything, so I’m kinda bummed about that.  I’m hoping some of you have better luck with the audio.

Guide to running PCSX_ReARMed:

  • Download Source and Binaries
  • unzip pcsx_rearmed.zip
  • cd into pcsx_rearmed/
  • ./pcsx
  • Have fun having fond memories replaying some favorites from a couple generations ago 🙂

Let me know if you have any issues.  Enjoy!

 

Sep 12

Good News Everyone!

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Good News Everyone!  I was able to recover my corrupted filesystem.  I also completed a large chunk of a major project I’m working on at the University.  This one piece of code has been bugging me for a couple of days, and I finally solved it today, so I feel a lot better.  I’m exhausted but hopefully tomorrow I can do some more emulation testing.

I have been testing PCSX_ReARMed for the Pi and it’s working really well.  NeoPop-SDL (Neo Geo Pocket Color) emulator is working as well, though it doesn’t fullscreen properly.  Mednafen 0.8 (a multi console emulator) is already in the Raspbian Repos.  Mednafen 0.9 has trouble compiling out of the box but I was able to get past the issues and it’s working.  I’ll be posting binaries this week as well as some tutorials.

Have a great night!

Sep 07

Raspberry Pi SD Card Corruption

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Hey All,

So this week started off cool then took a turn for suckage.  I’ve been working on getting two more emulators working.  One is a Neo Geo Pocket Color emulator, and it works, but has some minor issues.  The other is another mass emulator like MESS.  The older version compiles, but the latest one errors out.

The reason I am not posting binaries at the moment is because my SD card’s filesystem got corrupted during a test I was doing, and won’t boot.  I’ve made a bit for bit backup of the card using DD, and I’m going to try and retrieve as much data from it as possible.  Luckily I have other SD cards to use.

I was hoping to have the binaries for NeoPop available tonight but I have to recompile them on the new SD card.  If you want you can click the link above and download the source and compile it yourself.

The other emulator I’ve been working on compiling is called Mednafen.  The old version (0.8) is available in Raspbian repos, so just do sudo apt-get install mednafen and you should be good to go.   Make sure you run it once, then edit the ./mednafen/mednafen.rc file.  There is a part that says video and it tries to use opengl, set it to SDL and you should be good to go.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Sep 01

Friday Post: Arduino Keyboard Joystick

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Hey all,

It’s been a long week, and I am really glad I have a long weekend to sleep in.

When the Arduino Leonardo was announced I was really excited to see it have built in USB HID support and could act as a keyboard, mouse, or joystick.  I was even more excited to find out that my year old Teensy++ (Arduino compatible board) was based on the same chipset that the Leonardo now uses, and is able to act as a keyboard as well!

This is a new feature that was introduced in the Arduino 1.0 IDE.  You can now send keyboard presses with this simple line of code: Keyboard.write(‘a’);  If I wanted the Up joystick to be the up arrow on the keyboard, I would just use: Keyboard.write(0x0E); .

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My goal is to use my Neo Geo AES controllers as an input for MAME.  The Neo Geo pads don’t have any control boards built into the unit.  The console itself interprets each pin individually, just like an actual arcade board.  The pad uses a standard midi gameport (DA-15) connector, with each pin representing one button.

My idea is to make a Neo Geo pad to usb adapter using the Teensy++ as go-between.  The Neo Geo pins will be wired up to the digital pins on the Teensy, and the Teensy Arduino sketch will interpret each button press as a keyboard press.

I’m looking forward to working on this project.  I hope everyone has a great weekend and a restful Labor Day.

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: