Hey All,
The next release of PiMAME will have a bootsplash intro video. The way I am having it work it will be easy for anyone to modify and replace the video with a custom one of their own.
I am hoping that we can get a collection of neat startup vids going!
Tutorial coming up soon.
-Shea
Hey all,
For the past 2 months I’ve been heading up a small technical conference with my department. We have done small 1 hour sessions before, but this was a lofty experiment. 14 talks, 5 hours, 2 tracks, with no budget.
It was a resounding success! The Techrangers at UCF put on the Extended Tech Time Conference last Monday, July 1st, from 5pm to 10pm, in the Student Union.
We had over 60 attendees watch our talks while students, staff, and local companies talked about a wide variety of subjects.
We also had a Google Glass demo, which was really really cool. Everyone seems to get “glass-face” the second they put it on. It can only be described as getting a dumb grin, looking halfway up, and trying to focus both on whats on the screen and in front of you at the same time. It only lasts a second but it makes for some really funny imagery. It was tough to use it with my prescription glasses on, but this seriously makes me consider getting contacts.
I plan to have the videos up soon, but for now, here’s my talk about Gaming on the Raspberry Pi:
PiMAME
So I’ve been working for a week, trying to get this next release of PiMAME really stable. The problem I keep running into is with DISPMANX and PiSNES/Dgen. With DISPMANX, Dgen works, but PiSNES does not, without DISPMANX, PiSNES works but Dgen crashes. I’m going to hold off on including DISPMANX and Dgen for this release. The new things included in PiMAME 0.7.5 will be STELLA, the Atari 2600 emulator, and CaveStory.
This should be uploaded tonight.
Book
So the first drafts for the book I’ve been writing came back, and they have very / minor revisions. I’m really excited to see this project coming alone, and hopefully published very very soon.
Hey All,
This week has been kinda awesome and frustrating at the same time. We had an issue crop up at work that dealt with some legacy app, and it was a part of the system no one had ventured in for a long time. Needless to say around 3pm today, after a whole week of digging around, we finally had a fix. Feels good!
I sent the first draft of the first half of my book to the publisher for editing and reviews. Feels real good!
My buddy Jacob received his Crazyflie nano quadcopter a few weeks ago and has been having a lot of fun with it. His latest project has been to control it via a Raspberry Pi. He has been flying it around the office and it’s a lot of fun to play with. The thing is whisper quiet until you start turning and then it sounds like a humming bird looking for a kill is coming at you. Again, its a lot of fun, especially with coworkers and nerf guns.
Another frustrating thing happened this week. I needed to take screenshots of the Raspberry Pi in action playing some games, so I did some research, and it looks liked the best device is an EasyCap DC60. This device takes input from an RCA jack and goes into your computer via USB, and appears like a webcam with the video. It also has Mac drivers, which is a big plus. Now I know there are a lot of fakes out there, and newer models which don’t support OS X, so I went on Amazon, looked for the proper model, and didn’t care that it was fulfilled by a third party. It was sent via prime and said DC60. What I got was a piece of counterfeit hardware.
Now, I buy a LOT of hardware from China. Over the years I have been very lucky about counterfeits. I tend to not order anything of enough importance to be counterfeited, or its generic enough that EVERYONE makes the same product. This time I wasn’t so lucky. I got an Easee Cap DC-60++ that used a utv007 chipset. This chipset BARELY supports Windows much less OS X or Linux. The software it came with was also pirated. I decided I was going to try to get it to work first though, and see if it had any saving grace.
It took two hours but it finally displayed my video in a window. I was so frustrated. If you can get your hands on a genuine EasyCap DC60, its supposedly an awesome video capture device. I’m still on the hunt for one.
Anyways, have a good weekend!
-Shea
Hey All,
It has been a long week. Star Trek Into Darkness was AMAZING! Go see it now. Stop reading. Go to your theater, watch it, then come back here and finish reading. It was that good.
SanderSiezen has made a really slick cocktail arcade cabinet, powered by PiMAME. His entire build log has been published at his site. I’m really impressed by the hinge used to hide the controls. Great Job!
BarCamp Orlando
BarCamp Orlando is this weekend. It’s basically a tech gathering un-conference. People meet up in a central area, sign up to do talks, speak about awesome things, and network, all while enjoying the bar scene around downtown.
I am hoping to do some talking about PiMAME and the Raspberry Pi.
Have a great weekend everyone!
-Shea
Ok, this is seriously cool! (no pun intended)
The folks at linkxs.org decided to try running a Raspberry Pi under liquid nitrogen, and seeing how it performed. Like a beast apparently! It runs pretty stable at -100C. The ethernet port is only rated to 0C, so the fact that it still worked and they could stay SSHed into the machine is awesome.
Great job guys!
http://linkxs.org/freezing-a-raspberry-pi-in-liquid-nitrogen/
-Shea
Hey All,
The Raspberry Pi Camera Module is now available for sale from element14!
It’s $25 and it was about $6 for shipping to Florida.
Have fun!
-Shea
Hey All,
The Raspberry Pi Model A board is in stock at Element 14 for US orders.
I ordered one and hope to have some hi res pictures available once it arrives.
-Shea
I think I have figured out the booting issues. PiMAME 0.6 Beta 3 will be uploaded today.
Thanks for the feedback!
-Shea
Hey All,
Thanks for the heads up on some of the issues. PiMAME 0.6 Beta 2 is now available. Please let me know how it works out for you!!!
-Shea
