Tag Archives: raspberry pi

Jul 18

Friday Post: Space Madness!

Posted on by

Hey All,

For the first time in a long time I feel rested.  I did a sleep study to find out why I was so fatigued all the time even though I was getting around 8 hours of sleep. ( I’m not counting that my other waking hours have been spent on the Kickstarter, PiPlay, and Work with no breaks 😉 )

The study people hooked me up to a machine that essentially blows air at you, and holy crap, it helped me sleep through the night like a log.  I was up at 5am, didn’t need any caffeinated drinks in the morning (but force of habit…) and I’ve been going strong all day.  If I feel this good and energized after one night,  I’m excited to see what will happen after a few weeks!

PiPlay

PiPlay 0.8 Beta 4 has so far been really good.  Only a few relatively minor bugs to fix.  I am going to push the update this weekend and a new image as well.  Be on the lookout for that.

Raspberry Pi Model B+

Last Monday the Raspberry Pi Foundation released the latest Pi board, the Model B+.  While the core hardware stays the same, the board includes 4 USB Ports, more GPIO pins, improved board layout, and a switch from SD Cards to Micro SD cards.  My board came in today, so I took some pictures of it.

IMG_4088 IMG_4089 IMG_4090 IMG_4091 IMG_4092

 

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

Jul 12

Friday Post: PiPlay 0.8 Beta 4 Released!

Posted on by

Hello Everyone!!!!

The latest version of PiPlay is available to download!

Download – The image requires an 8GB SD Card

This release has been a huge amount of work, from multiple people whom I consider friends.  Artists, Testers, Family, Programmers, Designers.  I appreciate all the help that went into this.

From the Github stats: Excluding merges, 4 authors have pushed 46 commits to master and 47 commits to all branches. On master, there have been 221,966 additions and 54,318 deletions to the code.

New artwork was created just for this release.  The web frontend was overhauled. So much has been put into this.

Now the fun part.

Testing.  I’ve spent a lot of time testing this release, on as many joysticks, tvs, monitors, and devices I have available to me.  It looks good to me, but I expect there to be bugs.  I would appreciate any and all feedback about this release.  If you have any issues, comments, or suggestions, please tell me.

Updates:

  • Theme Support
  • DISPMANX
  • Cave Story reimplemented
  • Joystick Support
  • Latest version of Raspbian with Xin-Mo support
  • ZX Spectrum, Sega Master System, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Turbo Grafx 16, and Game Gear emulation have been added.
  • Tips & Tricks
    • MAME is not installed by default.  There is a tool in the menu to install MAME.
    • Press the K + S button on your keyboard at the same time for a listing of all backers.
    • To setup your controllers, keyboards, and joysticks, use the Controller Setup app.
    • Press tab (or the 2nd button on your joystick) to bring up the settings popup menu.
    • There are multiple themes available from the settings popup menu.
    • If you access the IP address of your Raspberry Pi from another computer, you will have see the Web Frontend which allows you to upload games files and manage your Pi.
  • Known Issues
    • Menu Speed – i know it can sometimes feel slow or sluggish.  We are working hard to optimize it.
    • Dual Shock Support – Limited dual shock support.  I had numerous issues with finicky controllers.  I am hoping to put official dual shock support in the next release.

Tips & Tricks

  • MAME is not installed by default.  There is a tool in the menu to install MAME.
  • Press the K + S button on your keyboard at the same time for a listing of all backers.
  • To setup your controllers, keyboards, and joysticks, use the Controller Setup app.
  • Press tab (or the 2nd button on your joystick) to bring up the settings popup menu.
  • There are multiple themes available from the settings popup menu.
  • If you access the IP address of your Raspberry Pi from another computer, you will have see the Web Frontend which allows you to upload games files and manage your Pi.

Known Issues

  • Menu Speed – i know it can sometimes feel slow or sluggish.  We are working hard to optimize it.
  • Dual Shock Support – Limited dual shock support.  I had numerous issues with finicky controllers.  I am hoping to put official dual shock support in the next release.

I am looking forward to all your feedback!

Have a great weekend!

-Shea

Jun 27

Friday Post: PiPlay Video

Posted on by

Hey All,

Thought you would like to see this:

The next release of PiPlay is so close I can taste it.

A few notes:

  • the final menu will load faster as I still have un-optimized images and debug code added.
  • the controller config does more than the just the SNES, I just kept it at that for demo purposes.
  • More emulators have been included, just weren’t added to the config.yaml in the menu yet.

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

Jun 08

Very Late Friday-ish Post: Compiling

Posted on by

Hey All,

Sorry for the very late post, I’ve had some family visiting from out of town and spent the weekend catching up.

For PiPlay, I’ve been spending some time getting into the nitty gritty of some of the emulators.  PiFBA happens to have a config file hardcoded in it’s source code.  Because I use PiFBA for a few different systems, I needed to have individual configs.

My patched version of PiFBA is available here as source code: https://github.com/ssilverm/pifba-config-patch

Looking back, it wasn’t that difficult to patch, but my C++ is rusty, and I needed some friends help to get it running.

I’ve also been playing with SDL and DISPMANX.  One of my favorite emulators is Mednafen, but it has a problem running on the console.  If you use DISPMANX and try to run Mednafen, you get an SDL error (due to not needing SDL_GetVideoInfo()).  I’m recompiling Mednafen right now which replaces the SDL_GetVideoInfo() call with generic video heights.  DISPMANX should scale correctly anyway, so I will see how it looks.

On that note,  I also had to deal with my favorite compiling issue on the Raspberry Pi: hq4x and running out of memory.

This is why I love the Raspberry Pi (and Linux).  I learn something new everyday.  To add or subtract swap space, type:

sudo /etc/dphys-swapfile
Change 100 to the desired amount of swap.  I used 300 for hq4x
/etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile stop
/etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile start

The swap space will be created, and you can now compile without crashing (usually).

Have a good week everyone!

-Shea

 

May 16

Friday Post: Themes

Posted on by

Hey all,

 I’ve spent the past week on a lot of administrative PiPlay stuff, but I do have a couple of neat things to show.

Theme Support

 Controller Config (very early)

Big thanks to Matt from the forums for coding up the theme support and Dan for helping with the controller configuration.

Desktop Arcade

On my off time (hah) I’ve been working on a desktop barcade machine.  I’ve done 2 days of 3 coats of paint, 1 day of sanding, and I’m getting ready to do another few layers of paint.

IMG_3867 IMG_3868 IMG_3871 IMG_3872 IMG_3873 IMG_3874 IMG_3875 IMG_3876 IMG_3883 IMG_3884

Have a great weekend!

-Shea

Feb 28

Friday Post: PiMAME 0.8 coming this weekend!

Posted on by

Update 3: PiMAME 0.8 Beta 1 now uploaded! Download Here!

Update 2: Apparently 4 other people have reported issues this weekend with SourceForge and uploaded files not appearing.  I’m starting a new upload to a different host now.

Update: PiMAME 0.8 has been uploaded, but I’m still waiting for SourceForge to finish mirroring it before they turn on the download link. 🙁

 

Hey All!

Very happy to announce that PiMAME 0.8 Beta is going to be released this weekend.  I’m building the SD card image now and will be uploading it.

I’m very happy with this release.  I know it still has some bugs and issues to work out, but I’m confident that this will be the best evolution of PiMAME yet.

On another note, the presentation I gave at the Information Fluency conference went well.  I have a lot of different colleges and universities interested in the applications I developed for UCF.  Hopefully I can open source them soon.

I’ve started to receive the parts for my SmartRap 3D Printer build.  This is the first time I’m building something this complex without any instructions, so hopefully it all goes well.

Have a good weekend, and I’ll update this post with the image file when it’s finished uploading.

-Shea

Jan 17

Friday Post: January

Posted on by

Hey All,

It is the middle of January and it already feels like a year full of events has occurred.  I turned 30.  It’s a weird feeling not being in my twenties anymore.  It will take some getting used too.  I spent my birthday with good friends.

My new computer has been built and is running beautifully.  Had to return the old PSU because one of the fan blades cracked, which was causing it to overheat.  Picked up a Corsair modular PSU and it’s been running 24×7 with no issues.

2014-01-12

PiMAME was featured in the January / February issue of Raspberry Pi Geek.  It was given a 2 page spread, as well as reviews of other gaming environments for the Pi.

RPG_UK_02-2013

 

PyCon 2014

I was notified that I was chosen to give a poster session at this years Python programming conference, PyCon, in Montreal.  I am very excited to be showing off the work I have done with Python and the Raspberry Pi.  It’s going to be April 9th through the 11th.  The past two conferences have been amazing, and I am excited to be able to have more of a role this year. More information is available at us.pycon.org

Adafruit

Back in 2012 I hacked together a crude but effective USB power cord with a switch.  Adafruit is now selling a professionally manufactured cable that does the same thing for only $2.95.

Mine:Photo Jul 22, 4 13 45 PM

Adafruits:1620_MED

 

I’m so glad this cable has finally been made.  It was a pain to hand make them!

Have a great weekend all!  PiMAME news next weekend 😀

 

-Shea

 

Dec 13

Friday Post: Speechless

Posted on by

Hey All,

Happy Friday!!  This week marks the end of the semester.  Finished my finals and got an A!  Pushed a lot of work code to our production servers, and waiting for them to turned on on Sunday.  Months of hard work finally coming online.  It’s been an exciting week.  Been playing around with joysticks and working on some issues.

I was also featured on the front page of the Raspberry Pi official site!

Cool things on the way! Have a great weekend.

Nov 08

Friday Post: Things to come!

Posted on by

Hey All,

Happy Friday!

I just got back from our second tech time conference that I coordinated.  It was awesome.  Exhausting, but so darn worth it.

Anyways,  a coworker and I are working on a new PiMAME menu system, and I thought you all should see a sneak peek of the design work!

Screen Shot 2013-11-06 at 5.25.35 PM

 

I’m really excited!

Stay tuned!

-Shea

Oct 20

Alpha Release of Full Speed Nintendo 64 Emulator on the Raspberry Pi

Posted on by

Hey All,

Mupen64plus has been updated and now plays some N64 games at almost full speed!

Welshy from the Raspberry Pi forums has written up a great guide on how to compile it and run it, as well as how the settings work.  You can download the compiled binaries here:

http://sheasilverman.com/rpi/raspbian/mupen64plus-rpi.zip

To install and run:

  1. unzip the files by typing unzip mupen64plus-rpi-zip
  2. cd mupen64plus-rpi
  3. cd test
  4. ./mupen64plus < /path/to/rom/files >

This is a total alpha build, and is very rough around the edges, but the progress is awesome, and I am going to put this into PiMAME as a test.

Enjoy everyone!

-Shea