Tag Archives: neo geo

Oct 19

Friday Post: New Pi and Deb Beta Users Wanted!

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Happy Friday Everyone!

It’s been a fun week over here.  I was able to order my 512MB Raspberry Pi from Element 14, and it arrived on Wednesday.  Protip: Call Element 14 when they have stock and you will get it really really fast.

Some high quality shots below:

I’ve been working on my Mini Arcade Cabinet project, and I was able to source a mini joystick from P3America.com.  I’m going to be working on the cabinet this weekend, and will be incorporating this into it.

Now for the big news….I have created some .debs for you all to test!  The latest version of Raspbian has been giving me a lot of compiling errors.  What I have gotten done I would appreciate some of you to beta test for me.

The two debs available now are PCSX_ReARMed and Gngeo.  PCSX worked for me when I made the framebuffer larger in config.txt, and gngeo seems to be crashing or hanging randomly.  I’m hoping it works better for you all.  Please provide me with any and all feedback you have regarding these!

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.

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

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