Minecraft Ported To the Raspberry Pi

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Minecraft Ported To the Raspberry Pi

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday November 24, 2012 @03:01PM from the port-it-to-a-computer-built-inside-minecraft dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The amusing 'but does it run Crysis?' question has a cousin: 'but does it run Minecraft?' The makers of Raspberry Pi can now officially say that yes, yes it does. Called Minecraft: Pi Edition, the latest flavor of the popular game carries 'a revised feature set' and 'support for several programming languages,' so you can code directly into Minecraft before or after you start playing. That means you can build structures in the traditional Minecraft way, but you can also break open the code and use a programming language to manipulate things in the game world."

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Hmm by The+MAZZTer · 2012-11-24 15:08 · Score: 1

Is it really ported or still running on Java? The API for hooking into the game world and controlling it sounds pretty cool though.
1. Re:Hmm by PhrostyMcByte · 2012-11-24 15:12 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Java has yet to be ported to the Pi's floating-point, so the only option is to use soft floats. I can't imagine Minecraft running at any acceptable speed. LibreOffice is also painfully unusable on the Pi at the moment, but I don't know how much that depends on float ops.
2. Re:Hmm by hobarrera · 2012-11-24 15:51 · Score: 2
  
  Even though minecraft is java, it uses several native libraries, liblwjgl is one of them.
  These *need* to be ported to the target OS+archtecture in order to run minecraft.
3. Re:Hmm by FutureDomain · 2012-11-24 16:04 · Score: 1
  
  Java has yet to be ported to the Pi's floating-point, so the only option is to use soft floats.
  Does Minecraft work with Icedtea? From what I've seen Icedtea works fine with hard floats, it's just the Oracle Java that doesn't support it yet.
  
  --
  Hydraulic pizza oven!! Guided missile! Herring sandwich! Styrofoam! Jayne Mansfield! Aluminum siding! Borax!
4. Re:Hmm by cb88 · 2012-11-24 17:32 · Score: 0
  
  No it is the pocket edition. Written in C++ it has/had a limited world size also rather small acutally...
5. Re:Hmm by Ford+Prefect · 2012-11-24 17:46 · Score: 2
  
  It's apparently a port of Minecraft Pocket Edition, which is already on Android and iOS. No idea as to the programming language, but I fully imagine it's something with less of a footprint than a full-sized JVM.
  
  --
  Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
6. Re:Hmm by Shark · 2012-11-24 18:38 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I can confirm that Minecraft runs on Icedtea (it's what I usually run it on), though there's an issue with hardcoded library paths on my system which is easily fixed.
  
  --
  Mind the frickin' laser...
7. Re:Hmm by tudza · 2012-11-24 18:51 · Score: 0
  
  Isn't there a version of the OS that allows standard Java to run on it? Tried to load it, couldn't get it to work.
8. Re:Hmm by cjthompson · 2012-11-24 19:10 · Score: 1
  
  runs just fine here on my Macbook Pro
9. Re:Hmm by sammyF70 · 2012-11-24 19:24 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  "i played the lite minecraft for 5 mins on my ipad, and I was really really dumb. i just dug a hole for 5 mins, but never got to the bottom. then i couldnt get out."
  There.. fixed for you.
  
  --
  "DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
10. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-24 23:24 · Score: 0
  
  Runs fine on any regular processor, this guy is just trollin'
11. Re:Hmm by petermgreen · 2012-11-25 00:26 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Quick summary of the java situation on raspbian:
  Oracle java doesn't currently work on armv6 hard float.
  Openjdk with zero works but is SLOW
  Openjdk with jamvm works and seems to be the most workable option right now
  Openjdk with cacao is broken on all arm hardfloat platforms at the moment*.
  I haven't tried openjdk with shark or avian.
  * see debian bugs 688703 and 688702
  
  --
  note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
12. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-25 01:13 · Score: 0
  
  It doesn't run at acceptable speeds on a core processor with a proper 3D card.
13. Re:Hmm by Narishma · 2012-11-25 01:53 · Score: 1
  
  No, they ported the Minecraft Pocket Edition, which is written in C++.
  
  --
  Mada mada dane.
14. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-25 05:03 · Score: 0
  
  It uses one library that needs natives, lwjgl.
  Which is FOSS and cross-platform, just build it for your arch.
15. Re:Hmm by drinkypoo · 2012-11-25 10:36 · Score: 1
  
  The question is then "will it run on the 256MB version?" the answer so far is "hopefully". Tired of having to hope for everything.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
16. Re:Hmm by quantumphaze · 2012-11-25 11:06 · Score: 1
  
  If it is the case, maybe it will also work on the N900 (also 256 MB RAM).
  
  --
  Unicode in Slashdot
Nostalgia Sorta by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-24 15:11 · Score: 3, Insightful

I remember the days of not 'IF it can run' but 'lets MAKE it run Doom'...
1. Re:Nostalgia Sorta by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-24 16:28 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  My watch runs doom now.
2. Re:Nostalgia Sorta by Ford+Prefect · 2012-11-24 17:42 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Some time last year I'd vaguely heard about the Raspberry Pi, and how it was a super-cheap, super-basic ARM board. I'd really not been paying much attention when I happened to click on a YouTube link apparently showing the Raspberry Pi running 'Quake'.
  That's nice, I thought - expecting a 320x200 software-rendered Quake 1 running at an abysmal framerate, in a let's-try-one-up-from-Doom kind of way.
  Shitting heck, it was Quake 3 - running at an anti-aliased 1080p at quite a speed.
  Having owned multiple, expensive generations of PCs incapable of that kind of graphical performance - nostalgia's awful. Can't they just run Doom and be happy? Stop this relentless, amazing progress, please!
  
  --
  Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
3. Re:Nostalgia Sorta by MMC+Monster · 2012-11-25 00:08 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  My watch was doomed once I bought my first cell phone.
  
  --
  Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
4. Re:Nostalgia Sorta by KiloByte · 2012-11-25 02:58 · Score: 1
  
  Duh, just run an openGL port of Doom.
  
  --
  The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
5. Re:Nostalgia Sorta by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-25 04:28 · Score: 0
  
  Quake 3 will be 13 years old in a week.
6. Re:Nostalgia Sorta by ubrgeek · 2012-11-25 07:23 · Score: 1
  
  Works out well. I'm available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.
  
  --
  Bark less. Wag more.
7. Re:Nostalgia Sorta by tlhIngan · 2012-11-26 05:18 · Score: 1
  
  Some time last year I'd vaguely heard about the Raspberry Pi, and how it was a super-cheap, super-basic ARM board. I'd really not been paying much attention when I happened to click on a YouTube link apparently showing the Raspberry Pi running 'Quake'.
  That's nice, I thought - expecting a 320x200 software-rendered Quake 1 running at an abysmal framerate, in a let's-try-one-up-from-Doom kind of way.
  Shitting heck, it was Quake 3 - running at an anti-aliased 1080p at quite a speed.
  The thing is, the chip used in the Pi was designed for media streamers (and smart TVs and such) - the things you hook onto your TV to watch stuff off the network or internal storage. As such, it actually has a remarkably powerful GPU. The only reason there's a weak ARM there is for low-cost products - they can take advantage of the ARM for their UI duties while the GPU handles the video and graphical processing (you can talk to the GPU over a high speed bus if you don't want to use the built in CPU).
  And that's what people forget - the CPU is weak because it's designed for low-cost, and saving having to add a chip (and stuff like RAM, etc) means they only need a single chip that does it all. The ARM handles UI/network/USB, the GPU handles media (and the ARM is more than powerful enough for that role). The chip's a GPU-first, CPU second meant to shave $5 off the BOM for an external ARM processor.
The gauge of a successful platform? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-24 16:31 · Score: 0

You know how well a platform is doing when Minecraft is being officially ported to it ;)
WIN.
Yes but... by loony · 2012-11-24 16:54 · Score: 2

... does it run emacs?
1. Re:Yes but... by Cito · 2012-11-24 17:33 · Score: 1, Flamebait
  
  Hell even trying to run Pico on the Pi bogs it down and VI brings it to it's knees as bad as a forkbomb.
  so far the best way is to edit code/configs/scripts on a local desktop/laptop then ftp it them over, cause even basic text editors bring the PI to a slow crawl.
  I sorta wish I didn't waste the money on it
  my wrt54GL router "seems" to be faster and more responsive in shell than the PI
  I was gonna use the PI as a network storage device, chaining 3 or 4 external usb hard drives to it via powered usb hub, and it worked and all but the PI is soooooo slow the transfer rate would dip down to 5K-10K/sec over LAN when trying to save a large file or copy a large file from it to desktop.
2. Re:Yes but... by sammyF70 · 2012-11-24 19:38 · Score: 1
  
  yes. I t runs emacs nicely, although the startup time can be a tad bit long (20-30sec in my case), depending on your .emacs . Once it's loaded it is completely useable and fast.
  One of my two rpis (both are ~old~ ones with only 256MB RAM) is running apache, mysql, dovecot, postfix and bitlbee. It also has weechat (connected to bitlbee and 4 channels on #freenode) and mutt running 24/7. Additionally roundcubemail is installed. Again, depending on the amount of mails to sort and show, RCmail can be a bit slow. This is the rpi I use emacs the most on, mostly to edit config files, write mails and code a bit on side projects when bored at work.
  The trick is to change the memory allocation depending on your useage. In the case of this mail server I set the mem to 240/16 as it is headless.(16MB for the GPU is apparently the absolute minimum you can allocate).
  
  --
  "DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
3. Re:Yes but... by Ford+Prefect · 2012-11-24 20:14 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  so far the best way is to edit code/configs/scripts on a local desktop/laptop then ftp it them over, cause even basic text editors bring the PI to a slow crawl.
  If you're running 'pico', you're getting 'nano' instead, and it's nano's syntax highlighting that's the problem. Switch it off with Meta-Y and the editor becomes positively speedy. I'm SSH'ed into a Pi right now, and for basic shell stuff it's pretty indistinguishable from any other machine. There's probably something up if it's gratuitously slow.
  (I'm on an up-to-date Raspbian, and I've overclocked things slightly. Software has improved loads the past few months!)
  
  I was gonna use the PI as a network storage device, chaining 3 or 4 external usb hard drives to it via powered usb hub, and it worked and all but the PI is soooooo slow the transfer rate would dip down to 5K-10K/sec over LAN when trying to save a large file or copy a large file from it to desktop.
  USB support is now merely 'not very good', while it used to be 'downright terrible'. I get ~3MB/s SCP-ing a large file to the Pi's (slow) SD card, so network performance shouldn't be an issue. Try again with recently updated firmware? Although it's unlikely to make a terribly good NAS anyway, with both disks and ethernet hanging off a slow USB connection...
  
  --
  Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
4. Re:Yes but... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-24 21:18 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  The day that a computer can run a modern-ish video game but not a console text editor, that text editor may need to rethink a few of its life choices.
5. Re:Yes but... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-24 23:07 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  This is on my raspberry pi: http://ompldr.org/vZ2Z5dg/out.ogv (recordmydesktop seems to make everything pink when "quick subsampling" is active).
  It's running X with fbdev, plasma and recordmydesktop and vim still doesn't feel l ike a "slow crawl". I just wait until kwin_gles runs on it then it will be really smooth.
  I tried a usb hard disk, just for you. nfs, ext4, noatime. On another computer, nfs mount on mnt/: dd if=/dev/zero of=mnt/zero bs=5M count=200
  X is getting sluggish and it has 100% cpu usage, mostly kernel load.
  Writes 7.5 Megabyte/second.
  Reads 6.8 Megabyte/second.
6. Re:Yes but... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-24 23:30 · Score: 1
  
  Liar, I run both gvim and vim just fine on the pi. Nano loads up nearly instantaneously. And you're lying about the the transfer times as well, I can get a few megs a second over wired ethernet. I'll give you that wireless usb sticks suck on the pi, but everything else works well. You're just trolling or clueless and blaming the pi on your own failures.
7. Re:Yes but... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-24 23:45 · Score: 0
  
  It can run both just fine. This guy is just clueless, I wouldn't worry about it.
8. Re:Yes but... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-25 01:08 · Score: 0
  
  whooooshh
9. Re:Yes but... by SpzToid · 2012-11-25 03:35 · Score: 1
  
  Commenting only to un-do a twitchy mod.
  
  --
  You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
10. Re:Yes but... by ThePeices · 2012-11-25 10:21 · Score: 1
  
  ... does it run emacs?
  Yes. Yes it does.
11. Re:Yes but... by Cartotype · 2012-11-25 14:57 · Score: 1
  
  More importantly, what're the commands to make emacs run it? Other than going through C-x M-c M-butterfly
12. Re:Yes but... by zeptic · 2012-11-25 21:29 · Score: 1
  
  I was gonna use the PI as a network storage device, chaining 3 or 4 external usb hard drives to it via powered usb hub, and it worked and all but the PI is soooooo slow the transfer rate would dip down to 5K-10K/sec over LAN when trying to save a large file or copy a large file from it to desktop.
  I think you are doing something wrong. I'm getting 8-9 MB/s using SMB shares on an external USB HDD (whcih also contains the root fs).
  Check out this thread to get some pointers: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=13695
13. Re:Yes but... by slim · 2012-11-25 23:51 · Score: 1
  
  VI brings it to it's knees as bad as a forkbomb.
  Since I used to run Vim (and X) perfectly happily on a 486SX25 with 4 MBs of RAM, I don't believe you.
  Just to recap, that's a CPU clock 28 times faster - along with other improvements in CPU technology - and 64 times more RAM if you have the older model.
  I wonder what you're doing wrong?
Minecraft level format has always been open by seibai · 2012-11-24 19:10 · Score: 2

It's always been possible to code against minecraft - Notch has kept the level format open since the game released (even if he did change it a bunch of times after he said he wouldn't).
I've already written a bunch of level generators for it, like these two:
Planetoids
Dungeon Adventure
1. Re:Minecraft level format has always been open by yahwotqa · 2012-11-25 02:04 · Score: 1
  
  I stand in awe in front of any decent minecraft world, but this one truly took my breath: http://www.lo-ping.org/2011/05/29/earth-mapped-to-minecraft-to-scale/
2. Re:Minecraft level format has always been open by arisvega · 2012-11-25 03:53 · Score: 1
  
  YOU wrote planetoids? That was a simple but very good idea! The worlds tend to end up a bit useless after updates: for example, when railtracks couldn't be placed on goldstone anymore, my train system was ruined.
  Also, when there are new items you cannot get them on your old maps, because those maps are are finite- infinite planetoid maps would be great, not to mention tekkit compatibility!
  Sorry to get off-topic, but I got excited- good job!
  
  --
  The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
3. Re:Minecraft level format has always been open by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-26 01:08 · Score: 0
  
  Sounds really awesome but I have not been able to find a working download or torrent link. :(
  Would be grateful if you could reply with a working link!
4. Re:Minecraft level format has always been open by Sedated2000 · 2012-11-26 07:08 · Score: 1
  
  Just an aside, have you tried Feed The Beast? I've been playing that for a while now, and I like it better than the Tekkit pack. It works with Minecraft 1.4.2 and took out some items I felt were overpowered. I love the biomes it added, some of them are simply amazing.
5. Re:Minecraft level format has always been open by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-29 15:12 · Score: 0
  
  You can get the SSP file on 4shared.com. Search for EarthSSP.7z
6. Re:Minecraft level format has always been open by arisvega · 2012-12-08 05:33 · Score: 1
  
  Just an aside, have you tried Feed The Beast?
  I did, following your reccomendation, and I was shortly after spammed with an unsolicited email from curse dot com, complete with invisible tracking links.
  Obviously, my login credencials were intercepted.
  I am NOT pleased.
  
  --
  The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
At a stunning FPS rate of by Arancaytar · 2012-11-24 22:12 · Score: 1

0.1 :P
Other ARM Linux platforms by quantumphaze · 2012-11-25 11:20 · Score: 1

I really hope that we can also use this port on other Linux ARM boards such as all the A10 platforms that are ever so popular and my old Nokia N900.
I ordered a Cubieboard (mostly for SATA and real Ethernet) and would love to have it run Minecraft when it finaly arrives.
The question is, will binaries compiled for the Broardcom chip's armv6 and FPU work on other chips?

--
Unicode in Slashdot
1. Re:Other ARM Linux platforms by petermgreen · 2012-11-25 15:22 · Score: 1
  
  I suspect it should be possible to make it work. The CPU features are there.
  The one thing that may be a problem is the 3D graphics situation. 3D libraries on embedded boards are a bit of a mess and some messing arround and/or writing of shims may be needed to make things work together. I know you used to have to use a Pi specific method to get an openGL es context on the Pi. I don't know if that is still the case (I haven't been following that side of things myself).
  
  --
  note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
nothing new by Anonymous Coward · 2012-11-25 12:18 · Score: 0

it's called augmented reality for a reason, and why would you look ar bog lego models when you can look st nicely textured nurb models. etc.