Jan 04

Friday Post: First post of 2013!

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

Nov 01

Better AdvanceMAME debs with Sound!

Hey All,

I have an updated set of AdvanceMAME debs.  This time there is sound, and a lot of the stupid tricks I had to do to compile have been resolved.  It ended up being a libsdl issue and an older version of GCC.

Please uninstall the older .deb by entering this command:

You should now be set to run AdvanceMAME with sound!

If you want to compile AdvanceMAME yourself, make sure you install libsdl1.2-dev and gcc-4.7. After that make sure to do export CC=gcc-4.7 and export CXX=g++-4.7 on the command line.  Then type ./configure, then make.

 

Oct 29

AdvanceMAME .deb

UPDATE:  Debs with Sound now available here

Hey All,

It’s been a long time coming.  Between work, prototyping, other complications I present the AdvanceMAME  Debian package.

I was able to get past the issue with AdvanceMAME compiling on Raspbian. It’s the sh2 processor for the Saturn, so I had to disable that. After that, it compiles.

I have the src code up on github if anyone wants to check out the changes I had to make.

Github: https://github.com/ssilverm/AdvanceMAME_RaspberryPi
Debs: http://sheasilverman.com/rpi/raspbian/debs/advancemame_0.106.1-1_armhf.deb http://sheasilverman.com/rpi/raspbian/debs/advancemame-raspberrypi_1-1_armhf.deb (with sound)

To install:

  1. sudo dpkg -i advancemame_0.106.1-1_armhf.deb
  2. Once it’s installed, just type advmame and it will create your configuration file.
  3. Roms go in ~/.advance/rom/
  4. Edit your advmame.rc for your display:
    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
  5. to run a game: advmame gamename (ie advmame sf2)
  6. ENJOY!!!

 

Also, another goodie… My deskcade project is coming along incredibly well! I just got in these 18mm Sanwa buttons. They are awesome.

I hope everyone enjoys. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions!

-Shea

Oct 26

Friday Post: One step forward, two steps back

Hey all,

So I got MAME compiled.  The performance took a HUGE nosedive.  Whereas before SF2 was playing flawlessly, it now looks like a slideshow.  I’m going to work on it some more.  Sorry for the huge delay in these Debs.  I’m getting much closer!

I found some 18mm buttons for my DeskCade project.  I’m really excited with how that project is going.  Can’t wait for the buttons to arrive.

Time to let a compile run overnight again!

-Shea

Oct 25

AdvanceMAME compilations issues on Raspbian [SOLVED]

Hey all,

If anyone is having compilation issues of AdvanceMAME on Raspbian,  here is the relativly simple fix:

Change the line:

CONF_CFLAGS_OPT= -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -fno-merge-constants -Wall -Wno-sign-compare -Wno-unused

to

CONF_CFLAGS_OPT= -fomit-frame-pointer -fno-merge-constants -Wall -Wno-sign-compare -Wno-unused

in your Makefile.

.Debs to be released shortly now that this is sorted!

Oct 19

Friday Post: New Pi and Deb Beta Users Wanted!

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 13

Better PlayStation Emulation on the Raspberry Pi

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!

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

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!