Retro Gaming with Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

Retro Gaming with Raspberry Pi

learn.adafruit.com

233 pointsIgorPartola30 comments

Upvoting it simply of out pure pleasure to see an interesting post on HN in the swarm of boring politics crap it's filled in recently.

Exactly why I posted this, along with many other articles, though only this one stuck :)

Time for some articles on the innards of Lua (or Smalltalk, Scheme, Erlang, Forth, or Haskell)?

Yes please. I am not one for long meta discussions. However, once a big story breaks out, there are plenty of places to discuss it outside of HN. Reddit for example has a much larger audience. Mainstream media has been all over the NSA news too. In fact, half of the stories cover on HN have been from The Atlantic and NY Times. The other side of this argument is that a story like the one about NSA is affecting hackers.

I guess sometimes I wish HN had a separate section for articles that start with "Political: ..."

Cross-connection: Some of the early arcade video titles from Bally/Midway that were designed by Nutting Associates (including Robby Roto and Gorf) were written in Forth. There you go.

Completely agree. I've started clicking through pages and pages looking for the few interesting non-politics based articles. There's only so much outrage I can express before I want to read about computers again...

Awesome, awesome project, but for the purist please keep in mind that 8-direction joysticks can be a bit tricky on games that were built for a 4-direction joystick. For example, I popped a convertible 4/8 direction joystick into my home cabinet because Ms. Pac-Man is nearly unplayable with a purely 8-direction stick.

Just a caveat though, this project is definitely a great, inexpensive arcade-at-home solution.

Agreed on the 4-way vs 8-way. Anyone playing Pac Man, Ms Pac Man, Donkey Kong or other classic 4-way games will be very handicapped with an 8-way joystick without a restrictor plate. I've successfully used Ultimarc controllers that are 4/8 switchable using a restrictor plate and the controls are amazing.

Other than that people should be aware that there's no way this runs many arcade games using MAME. I've had desktop computers choke on a lot of arcade games for lack of CPU resources so I can't imagine this plays many games without lag especially since he mentions sluggishness right in the article.

For those of us who don't know, what's the difference between an 8 and a 4 (besides the obvious)?

Games like Pac-Man expect the joystick to read Up,Down,Left or Right only.

8-Way joysticks either output combinations of the two directions (Left+Up=Northwest), or totally unique outputs that read as nothing to the 4-way game.

In either situation, gameplay gets clumsy or non-operational when the diagonals are hit. And some people like smoothly rotating the stick from Left to Up, let's say. That would look like Left...Idle...Up to Pac-Man. And that means certain doom if a ghost is behind you.

Very nice. I posted up a similar-ish project earlier today, a raspberry pi gaming emulator stuffed into a gameboy case:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5867562

This project just made me smile. I know it's semi-impractical and there are easier ways to do this, but what a fun little project.

How about a little Mortal Kombat on here with 2 controllers? That'd be a cool extension to this guy.

Even better a dual Killer Instict cabinet: a guaranted way of destroying both your controllers :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0RJDsH1D8g

The all-in-one controller+computer housing is neat, but in terms of the software setup, is there any advantage to following the instructions in the post rather than using the RetroPie SD card image?

http://blog.petrockblock.com/download/retropie-project-image...

I have the PiMAME image ready to go at home, but after reading this I think I'll try out the Pi Store (http://store.raspberrypi.com/projects) on my existing Raspbian install first.

Glad to see you're using my image :) PiMAME is built on top of Raspbian, so you still have the Pi Store available.

-Shea

Also you can use the PiMAME installer script on top of any Raspbian install, rather than using the image.

Installer available on github: https://github.com/ssilverm/pimame_installer

Thanks!

Pretty darn cool! Was looking for a good way to pair the Pi with hardware controllers like this.

Also now that we have a good hardware tutorial, if anyone is interested I have a detailed instruction on how I get retropie/retroarch working here http://www.codingepiphany.com/2013/03/27/raspberry-pi-retro-...

Perfect use for the Pi I have collecting dust (played with it for a few days). Someone should sell a turnkey box to plug your TV into.

Doesn't the Pi have HDMI out?

Yes

If you really want to retrogame properly, you need to track down an old-school giant CRT. 32-36" is about right.

There's Picade, a kickstarter project with Integrated screen. They're a late bug give regular news on the project.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pimoroni/picade-the-arca...

However, the linked project should work if you're TV has an HDMI or DVI connection.

cool hacking project and also portable! Very low-cost aswell.

I just hook my phone up to the TV with HDMI and play emulator games with a PS3 controller to have basically the same experience so its not for me, but a smartphone is obvioulsy in a different league when it comes to price :)

Do you use the PS3 Controllers via Bluetooth? Or does the USB connection work?

Looking into installing RetroPie soon and I have those controllers laying around but I don't have a BlueTooth dongle.

Thank you for writing the code and sharing it - super useful for many projects I'm sure!

that's really great ! Can anyone comment on what type of emulation works well ? I assume neogeo should work fine but I'm worried about CPS1/CPS2 and can't imagine CPS3 working at all (I mean at 30 fps with sound).

CPS1 can work depending on the game. CPS2 has not worked for me except for D&D.

NeoGeo games work extremely well with GNGeo.

Playstation games work great with PCSX_reARMed.

SNES games work great with PiSNES.

Genesis emulation is working ok with DGEN

thanks a lot that's very useful I'll try GNGeo whenever I have some free time.

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