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Minecraft Ported To the Raspberry Pi

Posted by Soulskill on 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."

10 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Nostalgia Sorta by Anonymous Coward · · 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 · · Score: 3, Funny

      My watch runs doom now.

    2. Re:Nostalgia Sorta by Ford+Prefect · · 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!

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    3. Re:Nostalgia Sorta by MMC+Monster · · Score: 3, Funny

      My watch was doomed once I bought my first cell phone.

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  2. Re:Hmm by PhrostyMcByte · · 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.

  3. Re:Hmm by Shark · · 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...
  4. Re:Hmm by sammyF70 · · 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
  5. Re:Yes but... by Ford+Prefect · · 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...

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  6. Re:Yes but... by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  7. Re:Hmm by petermgreen · · 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

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