Tag Archives: raspbian

Nov 17

StepMania on the Raspberry Pi 4!

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For anyone that knows me, Dance Dance Revolution and StepMania were a large part of my life years ago. It’s how I lost a ton of weight.

6 years ago was my first attempt to get StepMania running on a Raspberry Pi…and it was a horrible experience.

Today I’m proud to say that StepMania runs GREAT on the Raspberry Pi 4!

I’ve hosted the shell script / step by step instructions on how to compile and run StepMania on your own Pi4 as a GitHub Gist:

Just run these commands in a terminal on the Desktop GUI version of Raspberry Pi OS and you will be up and playing StepMania in about an hour.

Enjoy!

-Shea

Nov 14

Friday Post: Less than 24 hours left on the Deskcade Kickstarter!

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Hey All!

Less than 24 hours left on the Deskcade Kickstarter!  So excited!!!

On  a related note, I picked up a Steam Controller to see what the hype was about.  It’s cool, but what’s really neat is that it can be a keyboard, mouse, or gamepad at the same time, depending on the game.  Whats not cool is it requires steam to be running to set that.

ss_d2f5e7325666df6119ff1d42be73bac9594c5b1e.600x338

ynsta (Staney Marcel) is writing some code to make it run locally under Linux without the steam driver.  The github repo is here: https://github.com/ynsta/steamcontroller

I’ve forked it (https://github.com/ssilverm/steamcontroller) and I’m going to see if I can get it running as just a joypad for now.  It can currently run on the Raspberry Pi, and I can see the buttons being detected and get the feedback.  It’s just not being passed into a uinput item yet.  Soon 😀

Also, I’m trying to get the bootsplash to work again in Raspbian Jessie.  Jessie introduces Systemd, which takes over for init.d.  Currently the bootsplash runs later in the startup, so by the time omxplayer starts, the login screen is about a second away from showing up.  I’m working on that too.

Here’s my current steps:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/bootsplash.service

Insert this:

[Unit]
Description=BootSplash
DefaultDependencies=no
After=sysinit.target local-fs.target
Before=base.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/bin/omxplayer /home/pi/PiPLAY.mov

[Install]
WantedBy=base.target

Then run:

sudo systemctl enable bootsplash.service

and reboot.

You should now get a bootsplash on startup, but it may be running to late.  I’m going to try and fix that.

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

Oct 04

Friday Post: EDUCAUSE

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Hey All,

This week I was at the EDUCAUSE educational conference which took place locally in Orlando.  I was speaking on my work with the LTI standard and the applications I have created for UCF.  My first talk was amazing.  It went as perfect as a presentation could go.  My second talk though….it was my first time doing a moderated panel session.  It was awesome.  I loved it….until the fire alarm went off mid sentence and the entire convention center started to evacuate!

I also got some coverage on the IMS Global blog (they are the ones who created the LTI standard): http://www.imsglobal.org/blog/?p=372

All in all, its been a great week, but I haven’t been this exhausted since PyCon.

On the PiPlay side, we are getting some bug reports in, and working on squashing a bunch of them.  The updater has been re-factored to now take into account version numbers, so you shouldn’t have to wait as long for updates.

The latest version of Raspbian with the new Epiphany browser is amazing.  It makes using the web on a Pi a decent experience, and not a chore like before.

You should try it out.

Have a good weekend all!

-Shea

 

Jan 23

PiMAME 0.5 Beta Release

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Hey all,

This is just for testing purposes, but if you like to live on the cutting edge, I’m making available the beta/pre-release/testing release of PiMAME 0.5!

It’s based off the PiMAME 0.3 image, with the Uploader file size limit set to 200MB, and the Snapshot artwork in AdvMENU.

Let me know if you have any issues with it!

-Shea

Nov 02

Friday Post: Wreck It Ralph!

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Happy Friday everyone!

I just got back from seeing Wreck-It Ralph and here’s my verdict:  Go see it right now. Not only was it a great story, it was a great homage to the entire gaming industry.

Today I also got an iPad Mini. I have an iPhone 4S and love it. At work I use an iPad 3 and have found it to be too big and bulky. This iPad Mini is amazing. It’s light, has a great screen, and fits my hand(s) perfectly. I’m even typing this whole post on the mini right now.   So far it’s totally worth it.

I got AdvanceMESS compiled with sound but I have yet to test it. I have an issue where check install doesn’t like installing both mame and mess because they have some of the same executables (advcfg, etc.). If anyone knows much about Debian package creation I would love some help and advice.

Have a great weekend!

Nov 01

Better AdvanceMAME debs with Sound!

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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

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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

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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]

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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!

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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!