Tag Archives: raspberry pi

Aug 03

Friday Post: Woo! Long week…

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Hey all,

This has been an interesting long week.  I’m really happy with the feedback I’ve recieved regarding the Raspbian binaries I released.  I got linked to by Adafruit which is awesome!  I purchased one of thier little 2.0″ LCD TVs.  Still waiting for it to arrive, but I plan to do some fun things with that small screen and the Raspberry Pi.  Bensoutlet.com has on sale the Motorola Lapdock for $59.99 which is a really good price.  Theres a 14 page forum post about how people are using it to make Raspberry Pi laptops.

My next goal is to write up some tips and tricks for the emulators that my commentors have posted, and still working on getting Love2D to work.

Hope everyone has a good weekend!

-Shea

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

Jul 23

Raspberry Pi “On/Off” Cable

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What started out as a funny thought is now reality.  I spent about an hour splicing, soldering, taping, and heat shrinking this fun little cable together.  It’s a microusb to microusb extension cable.  I split it in half, cut off the data wires, soldered the ground cable back together, wrapped electrical tape around it, then soldered each end of the Vcc wires to the power switch.  I taped them up, then tried to heat shrink as much as it as possible.

My frankenstein cable works 🙂

P.S.: All the items needed I got from Sparkfun.com (except the usb extension cable)

Jul 17

Cave Story (nxengine) on the Raspberry Pi

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UPDATE: New Raspbian Binaries Available

I got a request today to see if I could get Cave Story working on the Raspberry Pi.  It took me about 4 hours but I’ve gotten a decent version running.  This uses the NXengine open source cave story project, along with the english translation patch the freeware data files.

Cave Story Raspberry Pi

Steps to run:

  1. Download binaries
  2. Run unzip nxengine.zip
  3. cd into nxengine
  4. run sudo chmod 777 /dev/fb0
  5. run sudo modprobe snd_bcm2835
  6. run ./nx
  7. Play Cave Story!

Let me know if you have any issues with the binaries or running the program.  I’ve only ever played about 5 minutes of Cave Story so I’m not sure how well it’s running, but it seemed to be fine to me.  Looking forward to the feedback.

-Shea

Link to source code: https://github.com/suapapa/NXEngine

Jul 01

Raspberry Pi and MESS – Multi Emulator Super System – NES, GameGear, Genesis

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UPDATE: New Raspbian Binaries Available

Hey All!

Today I present the binaries for AdvanceMESS.  The Multi Emulator Super System.  MESS can emulate somewhere around 250 different home consoles and computers.  It’s not perfect in any sense, but it works for most consoles.

I have currently tested:

  • NES (some games are slow, but it works).
  • GameGear (works)
  • Genesis (slow but works)
  • SNES (couldn’t get it to work…yet)
Instructions:
  1. Download MESS Binaries.
  2. Unzip MESS to the ~/MESS directory.
  3. chmod 777 /dev/fb0
  4. Put your console bios’s into mess/share/advance/rom/
  5. Put your console games into mess/share/advance/image/<console>/ (ie mess/share/advance/image/nes/
  6. CD into mess/bin/
  7. Run advmess with ./advmess
    1. The first time it’s run it will generate a set of folders and files into ~/.advance
  8. edit your ~/.advance/advmess.rc to include the proper display configuration
    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
  9. While still in the mess/bin directory, type ./advmess <console> -cart <filename>
    1. ./advmess nes -cart file.nes
  10. ENJOY!!!

This is one of the weirder setups I’ve tested, but once setup, it works.  If you have any issues, let me know and I will try to help you.

-Shea

P.S. I will NOT help you find console bios or roms.  Please don’t ask.

Official MESS Site

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

Jun 15

LowPowerPCs.com contest! Win a RaspberryPi!

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Just got an email from Jon at Low Power PCs.

They are holding a contest to win a Raspberry Pi.  From their site:

In order to win this pocket sized computer you must do your best to impress us by your geekyness and creativity. You should comment on this post with a link to a youtube clip that you’ve created to say/demonstrate why YOU should win the Rasperberry Pi.

The Rules

  • You MUST be based in the UK as we will only ship this to a UK address.
  • Post your entry as a comment to this post and include the link to your YouTube clip.
  • Entries that don’t include our website URL and Raspberry Pi in their content will be excluded from the results.
  • All entries must be received by 21:00 UK Time on the 6th July 2012.
  • We will review the entries on the 7h July 2012 and announce what we thought was the most impressive video (content wise, not necessarily technically) by the 8th July 2012.
  • Only 1 entry per person.
  • The winner of the Raspberry Pi will be announced on the 8th July 2012
  • By entering our competition you agree for us to publish your youtube clips on our website www.lowpowerpcs.co.uk

Good Luck!

-Shea

Jun 13

Raspberry Pi and MAME Part 2

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THIS IS AN OLD POST!  Please go to the latest update here!

Hello everyone from raspberrypi.org!  Thanks for visiting, more updated tutorials and binaries are available by clicking the menu item Raspberry Pi Gaming!

UPDATE: New Raspbian Binaries Available (new binaries above)

So I’ve spent even more time playing around with my MAME compile and my Raspberry Pi.  I have a new set of downloads, once is a set of binaries so you don’t even need to do a make install.

  1. Unzip MAME directory.
  2. chmod 777 /dev/fb0
  3. Put your roms into mame/share/advance/roms/
  4. run mame/bin/advmame
    1. The first time it’s run it will generate a set of folders and files into ~/.advance
  5. edit your ~/.advance/advmame.rc to include the proper display configuration
    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
  6. run mame/bin/advmame <gamename>
    1. cd into mame/bin/ then ./advmame gamename
  7. ENJOY!!!

Download AdvanceMAME Raspberry Pi Binaries

As an aside, I overclocked my Pi to 900Mhz, and Street Fighter 2 is slow, but playable 😀

edit: fixed an error in the path.  Also added a different way to run advmame (the way I run it).  Just cd into the bin directory then ./advmame gamename.

 

Jun 03

Raspberry Pi!

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So, I recently got my Raspberry Pi and have been having a lot of fun with it.

Programming in Python on it, running Quake 3 Arena, trying to compile different apps with various states of success.  Using Google Chromium on it.

The experience has been amazing.  This $35 machine has allowed me to play games, browse the modern internet, program, all using hardware I have laying around.

The Raspberry Pi outputs to both HDMI and RCA, so I’ve been using an old studio monitor at work as a display and it runs great.  At home I connect it via HDMI and it looks beautiful.

I am in the middle of uploading an iso/image file of my SD card so if anyone wants to try out these features without having to go through the setup, they can.

I plan on also updating with some tips and tricks.

I want to thank the blog http://myraspberrypiexperience.blogspot.co.uk/ – They have provided some wonderful guides so far.

One of my goals is to get the LOVE2D framework compiled.  At the moment, it won’t work because of the non existant OpenGL drivers, but nLove is available, and was made for ARM based platforms.  I am having difficulty getting it compiled, but I’m going to keep trying.

First tip to remind myself:

sudo mv /boot/boot_enable_ssh.rc /boot/boot.rc

This will enable ssh on the device at bootup.  If you just want to enable ssh once, then at the command prompt enter:

sudo /etc/init.d/ssh start

This assumes you are running the Debian Squeeze Raspberry Pi image.