Main > Raspberry Pi & Dev Board
Raspberry Pi and MAME - Hands on
kahlid74:
I posted in the Raspberry Picade project announcement but I thought it would be good to make a main thread as well for all things Raspberry Pi gaming. I got my Pi about a week ago and I'm impressed. It's fast (depending on the distro you use) and it works exactly as expected. Here's the pics I posted before so you see it running:
Notes
* Performance in Debian using the GUI (LXDE) can be sluggish sometimes
* Make sure you've got the power hook up right. You need a micro USB at 5V and 700ma. Anything above 700ma is fine. I'm using an ac adapter that provides 5V at 1.8 A. If you want to run any USB external components you'll need the additional amperage to operate them.
* When you plug in the power, if your PWR light goes to solid red, you've got enough power and you're good to go. The OK like should flash green like an HDD light loading. The OK light does NOT stay on
* If you have power issues or you don't know if your power adapter is providing the right voltage there are two points on the Pi board where you can plug a Multimeter in. Super useful! Do a quick search on Raspberry Pi's main site and you'll find the doc on how to do it.
* Make sure you have a few different mem cards to try. I had four available and the third one finally worked. The first two the Pi would start but the OS wouldn't load (tried multiple Distro's and reloading the image on it). Once I got a good card I've had about 90% success on boot.
* Booting isn't 100%. This may be because of my mem card but of 20 boots I've had 2 failed boots where I had to disconnect power and then reconnect.
* When you restore the disk image it's only 2 GB. My card is 8 GB is size. I had to take the mem card out, boot my laptop with it in and boot to GPart and then expand the partition to make use of the other 6 GB.
So far I've very pleased with Arch Linux on the Pi. It's super responsive with SSH already enabled so plug it in, run an ifconfig to see the DHCP addy and then SSH to it from my desktop and I'm rolling.
I'm not going to post running AdvanceMAME on the Debian distro as a quick google search will find that for you. The challenge is for me to gain a better understanding of the Pi and how MAME works in Linux. You want MAME to use OpenGL to make use of the on board Video card. That way the CPU can focus on other things but OpenGL requires a GUI/X/LXDE based environment, which I don't really want to mess with.
So for me, I'm messing with ArchLinux on the Pi and trying to compile XMame/SDLMame/AdvanceMame to work on the console. It looks like a few others might have done it but we'll see.
For $35 bucks shipped I'm very pleased with the purchase. It's freaking small as heck.
ark_ader:
Its been 3 weeks and my pi still hasn't arrived, but a friend says he purchased three of them and was delivered within a week. :angry:
Zobeid:
I'm guessing it might be more efficient if you could get it to start up OpenGL ES without the whole graphical desktop environment.
See if this looks useful... http://benosteen.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/using-opengl-es-2-0-on-the-raspberry-pi-without-x-windows/
kahlid74:
That's a good find. I'll have to try that when I get home.
BurgerKingDiamond:
Man, this thing is so small that I could actually see building a little handheld machine Ben-Heck style with a nice sized Psone screen.
Unfortunately, according to this video
it can't run Donpachi properly. I would need it to at least run the first generation CAVE titles to really appeal to me.
On the other hand, I don't know about how practical it would be to run the thing off batteries..
Hopefully the specs will be improved in the future and I'll be able to build a nice little portable for playing shmups at work on my lunchbreak.
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