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Retro Gaming With Raspberry Pi
coop0030 writes "Thanks to the affordable Raspberry Pi and some clever software, anyone can re-create the classic arcade experience at home. Adafruit brings the genuine 'clicky' arcade controls, you bring the game files and a little crafting skill to build it. Classic game emulation used to require a well-specced PC and specialized adapters for the controls, so it's exciting to see this trickle down to a $40 system. Also, a video of the game system is on YouTube."
If folks want to continue using a hacked-to-hell version of MAME from over a decade ago, or some port of a crappy old version of SNES9x that lacks all of the improvements in emulation accuracy (and the corresponding increase in CPU load) that have been discovered in that same amount of time, that's fine.
However, let's not be ignorant and claim that these old-ass emulators being ported to the Pi are in any way as accurate as modern versions of MAME, or bsnes, or Nestopia, yeah?
I need to get off my duff and buy one of these things. So many cool things you can do. I found plans to use a Pi to monitor my sump pit water level which texts/emails you if your pump fails and the water rises past a certain level. And this here would make such a cool video game enclosure for a rec room. Imagine all the games we used to pump quarters into. I could buy a boat load of Pi's with the ones I spent when i was a kid.
Additionally, the Raspberry Pi is about as powerful as the original Xbox which could, guess what, play emulated games a decade ago.
I dont see the reason for all of the hate that people seem to spew whenever a Pi article pops up here.
this seems just the right spot for these articles..
especially this one..
not everyone on slashdot is an old hand at this type of thing.. some might even be inexperienced with linux and messing about with electronics.
this project is an excellent way for people to get involved in the types of things that the more snooty among us really enjoy..
baby steps, yo.
this project doesnt require any soldering! and you can accomplish something.. whats wrong with that?
if you, and others, cant see the value in this im not sure what to say..
it seems like the editors are damned if they do, damned if they dont..
something is either determined not newsworthy enough for nerds..
or, like this, it seems like, while very much for nerds, its not quite complex enough to make them care? .....
well i am here to say i do care, and this type of thing is encouraging me, and others to get involved in electronics..
if you cannot deal with simple interesting projects that get people involved in the world of electronics being posted on on slashdot... im not sure what to say...
perhaps reddit is the place for those people!
I built a MAME cabinet from a pre-fab unit from Rec Room Masters https://www.recroommasters.com/ for my wife as a Christmas present. It was very easy to assemble (just bolts which are provided) To this shell, you add a controller (Tankstick) from X-Arcade http://www.xgaming.com/ . Lastly you add a monitor, computer, drive space for ROMS and speakers. I spent some extra for side arcade art and illuminated Marquee. As a front end for selecting games, I use Hyperspin http://hyperspin-fe.com/ . It's an amazing machine and is pretty affordable, especially if the Raspberry Pi can run the games.. My wife and I have spent countless hours on this. I also grabbed ROMS for almost every older home console ever made and play them on this as well..
I don't have the tools, space and skills required to build a cabinet from scratch. The hardest part is finding the ROMS which work with the MAME version that you use.
Skip all the Raspbian instructions. Instead, use the RPI Chameleon distribution for retro gaming on the Pi. Users are presented with a nice console-style menu screen after the system powers on with a ton of different emulators for not just consoles and arcade games but computers, too.
Check it out here: http://chameleon.enging.com/
Kriston
Maybe not that powerful, but close.
Because the weaker the console, the more performance it takes to do it accurately. The best way to do it is a cycle-accurate emulation because a lot of code written in those days took advantage of oddball features and oddball timings to work properly. For a "dumb" emulation like MAME, most of the time it works, but some games don't work requiring various patches and such in order to settle down the game.
It's not just the CPU, but also the timing of the other chips, and often things happen within a clock cycle as well that gets taken advantage of.
It's why emulators like bsnes require specs close to your PC, but run games basically perfectly with no hacks or patches required to get them to work.
The need for cycle accurate simulations ended sometime in the PS2 era - before which things like the PSX often made such cycle timing tricks necessary. Especially since the modern processor is superscalar, has caches everywhere and is heavily pipelined, making cycle counting impossible (especially caches since it made memory access timing unpredictable).
Heck, that still doesn't rule out the possibility some game took advantage of the way the system hardware glitched, requiring not just cycle accuracy, but behavior accuracy as well - perhaps some instruction caused some data line to glitch which caused RAM to gitch and it achieved the desired effect.
The GPU of the Pi is as powerful as the GPU of the original XBox. The CPU, however, is as fast as a Pentium II (I forget what MHz rating).
The GPU has all sorts of issues though, namely due to the crappy binary only drivers (ugh, yeah, even the Pi has that problem). The Pi uses a broadcom SOC while the Xbox uses a weird nVidia card that Linux never really supported quite right with any drivers.
The CPU on the Pi clocks to 700 mhz but can easily be overclocked. Running at 800 mhz rarely causes problems. Running up to 1 Ghz may cause issues occasionally if you've got a weak USB power charger but the Pi will perform surprisingly well for lightweight task at 1 GHz. By contrast, the original Xbox had a 733 mhz CPU. Remember though, the Pi uses an ARM chip while the Xbox used a custom CPU that was sort of a cross between a Celeron and a Pentium III.
The Pi has a few other features the Xbox lacked. It uses USB 2.0 while the Xbox used USB 1.1 (the controllers were basically modified 1.1 ports. You could easily splice controller cables and USB extension cables together and if you plugged flash drives in the Xbox saw them as memory cards). The Pi also sports HDMI. The Xbox only had 64 MB of RAM while the Pi has 512 MB.
The Gospel according to lolcat
People are annoyed because RPi failed to live up to its hype or promises.
The h.264 decoder is buggy and locks the hardware.
The USB controller is buggy and stuff doesn't work right. See the infamous LKML post ripping it.
The SD controller is buggy and regularly corrupts SD cards.
From what I can tell, I should've bought Beaglebone Blacks instead. For some reason RPi still gets lots of attention. If it worked right, people would just complain that it was underpowered, but, eh, it's cheap. But promising and not delivering gets peoples' hackles up.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
p>Because the weaker the console, the more performance it takes to do it accurately.
That's a misrepresentation of the truth.
What you're referring to is the culture of "hacky" code that evolved to overcome the limitations of hardware. For example, sprite multiplexing. Early graphics devices with hardware sprites had a very limited number on-screen - on a business system, there might only be one for the mouse pointer. In order to overcome these limits, programmers would use raster interrupts to track the screen refresh and switch out the sprite banks so that they could draw the full limit of sprites in the top section of the screen, and then the full limit again below; doubling, tripling or quadrupling the number of available sprites. This means that the emulator has to do cycle-exact graphics, whereas a system with unlimited sprites (whether in hardware or software) doesn't need to have any notion of a moving cathode-ray beam to follow.
The more advanced the hardware, the less likely that software interfaces with the hardware as bare metal, instead relying on APIs that abstract it out, making hardware-specific timing often unnecessary.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'