Nov 14

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

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

Jan 10

Friday Post: Turning 30! Happy Birthday To Me!

Hey All,

So, I’m turning 30 this weekend.  Crazy.  I’ve decided to treat myself by building an awesome budget gaming PC.  I haven’t built a PC since the P4 days.

Specs:

All in all I spent about $600 on this machine.  I’m getting 200FPS in Team Fortress 2, and I’m currently waiting for some new games to download.  Happy Birthday to Me!

If anybody is on Steam, I made a PiMAME group.  Let’s get some TF2 games going 🙂

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/pimame

PiMAME

In other news, since the new menu system is taking longer than expected, I’m going to do one more 0.7 PiMAME release.  It’s going to be upgrading to the new Raspbian version, and including some much needed functions to the console menu (joystick support, and favorites).

Look for that update this week!

-Shea