Christmas Wish List: Raspberry Pi Arcade Cabinet

Every day in December (work schedule permitting) I plan on posting one thing from my official DevilDinosaur Christmas Wish List (patent pending). Why? Because I can.

Every few weeks on Reddit I see people post pictures of these amazing custom Raspberry Pi cabinets and I want in on that. Last year I put together my own RetroPi, so I'm confident enough in getting the software to work, it's putting together the cabinet and getting the control stick and buttons all working and programmed that I'm pretty iffy on. If I put one of these things together I want it to WORK not "work". Like if I have to break out a keyboard and open up the cabinet every time I fire it up then what's the point of putting it in a slick cabinet?

I think I'm really going to try this. I'm going to have 5 weeks of vacation next year, it doesn't seem that irresponsible to take a 3 or 4 days off to put one of these together. My dad is pretty much a master woodworker at this point in his retirement. I'll bet if I sent him the specs on the cabinet pieces he could whip them up for me in no time and all I'd have to do is assemble the thing.

Now I just have to decide where the put it and how to keep my son off it all day...

All Hail the New Raspberry Pi

This morning, or yesterday (I'm not really sure I've been drunk off Oscar Fever) Raspberry announced the brand spanking new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. Click through the link if you want all the real specs, I'm just here to give the TL/DR version.

The new Pi 3 is faster, has more ram, is finally 64-bit and has built in wi-fi and bluetooth. I'm pretty excited for the built in wi-fi and bluetooth. In theory that frees up a lot of USB ports. My biggest annoyance with my Pi is that while the box is cool and sleek looking it has like 6 cables running into it, all at very different angles making it look more like a small powerstrip or USB hub, than the super rad video game emulator that it is.

The retail price is still $35 which puts this squarely in the realm of impulse buy, especially since I already have all the accessories, like gamepads and power cables, I need. Now all I need is some time to actually sit at home and put another one together. You know, there's a cold that's been going through my office. Now that I think about it my throat does feel a bit sore..

The Further Adventures of my Raspberry Pi

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the new Raspberry Pi I bought on a whim and a prayer. Well last Friday I took the day off from work so I could sit down put it together and play with the thing for a while. I mean I didn't take the day off just to play with the Pi, I took the day off because I'd been at work for 11 straight days and I needed a break. It just so happens that I had nothing to do that day other than pick up cookies at the store and play with tiny computers.

Here's what happened, more or less.

Sorry about the poor quality of all these pictures. My camera phone has a scratch on the lens and my basement has horrible lighting. This is the Pi nestled into the case I bought for it. There weren't any screws or anything, it took all of 2 minutes to get it lined up and stick the heatsink on the processor. You're looking at the side with the Power Jack, HDMI out and 1/8th inch jack for RCA outs. The side you can't see on the top left has 4 USB outs and a standard 10/100 network connector.

Three hours of dinking around later here's what it looks like with RetroPie installed. Two big issues tripped me up getting it started. The pre-installed OS the pie came with doesn't include RetroPie the emulation software I wanted to run. The Pi runs it's OS from a microsd card, and my desktop doesn't have anyway to read/write to one even with the micro to standard sd card adapter I have. That meant a bit of swapping files around on a USB stick with my laptop, not a huge deal just time consuming. Then I realized I didn't have a USB keyboard lying around the house, every keyboard I have is a mechanical keyboard with an old PS2 adapter. But wait! My parents gave me their old computer, it's in the garage somewhere... So after an hour of going through the garage and my crawlspace I finally found a wireless USB keyboard my parents gave me. Worked like a champ. So after all that the Pi booted to RetroPie, time to get cookies.

Back home and full of chocolate creme stuffed Tuxedos, I get to work installing my snes knock off controllers and downloading some ROMs (games). Both were a giant pain in the ass. The Raspberry Pi by default boots to a command prompt and guess who doesn't know anything about linux commands? This guy. The RetroPie software I installed changes that and boots the Pi directly to the Emulation Station but to configure the controllers you have to get back to the command prompt and do a bunch of typing. Could I do it now in like 5 minutes? Sure, but when first confronted with it I was super confused. Also loading ROMs on the Pi wasn't the easiest thing in the world. Finding and downloading them was easy but for whatever reason even when I plugged the Pie into my router Windows7 wouldn't recognize it on the network. I tried the things people suggested and gave up after about 20 minutes of tinkering around. I figured I would just copy everything via USB drive again. Oh man was that a nightmare. As it turns out Rasbian (the GUI OS you can load from the command prompt) wouldn't recognize my thumb drive unless it started with the drive already plugged in. Man windows plug and play has spoiled me. Once I figured that out it was easy enough to transfer all my newly downloaded ROMs onto the Pi.

The first game I booted up was Toe Jam and Earl.

I eventually got Windows7 to recognize the Pi on the network. It involved ssh settings and IP addresses. Again, something I could do in 5 minutes now but it took at least an hour to figure out the hard way. Moving files over to the Pi is now a snap. The picture you see above is my son playing Final Fight. So far we've tried about a dozen retro games and his favorites are the side scrolling brawlers like Final Fight, TMNT, Captain America and the Avengers, etc. We've tried some Mario games but he's 5 and gets frustrated with the timing aspects of those games pretty quickly. Sonic was a big hit.

All in all the RetroPie project was a big success. The one thing I was never able to figure out is a way to map some higher-function controls to the USB controllers I have. This means that to exit a game or turn of the Pi you have to use a keyboard. The wireless one my parents gave me is a pretty good option but it's a desktop keyboard, it's huge. I'm thinking at picking up a smaller one, maybe with a built in touchpad, on amazon.

Finding ROMs hasn't been that difficult. I found practically every NES, SNES and Genesis game I could ever want. I haven't had much luck finding Commodore64 or TurboGrafx-16 games yet and the few AppleII games I found didn't load right. Still, when you consider how expensive Retro Gaming has gotten over the last couple years even if I just stick with those 3 systems the RetroPie easily pays for itself.

Raspberry Links

People In London Tried To Label The 50 US States On A Map. These Are The Hilarious Results. People give Americans a hard time for not being able to find oh lets say Mexico on a map but look at these crazy Brits. They don't even know the difference between East and West Dakota.

One (Likely) Reason Big Video Games Are Releasing Broken. This is an overly simple chart of why very large Video Game publishers are releasing crap games but its not without merit. Video games are a HUGE business and with huge businesses come huge expectations. The sad truth is that for most companies the sales lost releasing a broken game cost the company less than delaying a game until it's ready to go.

The Lego Movie Oscars Snub Is Garbage. Yeah this is old news but it's still hot garbage. The idea that How to Train Your Dragon 2 is going to win the best Animated Picture Oscar while The Lego Movie isn't even nominated is just unbelievable nonsense. It's like when Forest Gump beat Pulp Fiction AND Shawshank Redemption for best picture in 1995.

29 Women Who’d Probably Like To Forget They Covered Maxim. This is like a parade of women that appeared in Maxim back when I had a subscription. 2001 to 2003 those were some sexy times. Some lonely sexy times...

Raspberry Pi 2 arrives with quad-core CPU, 1GB RAM, same $35 price. Of course there's a new Raspberry Pi out and of course it blows the one I just bought out of the water for the same price. The only solace I have here is that the new Raspberry Pi is so different from the old one most software designed for the B+ doesn't work on the Pi2 so my retro console plans wouldn't have really worked on the new one anyway.

Raspberry Pi B+, the Unboxing!

A month or so ago I posted a link to a guy that built a really cool retro console emulator using a Raspberry Pi. It was so cool I made a couple impulse buys on Amazon and before you know it I had my very own Raspberry Pi B+. I also bought a couple retro controllers because what's the point of emulating ExciteBike if you're going to play with it on your keyboard?

Anyhoo, here's what the box looks like. This is my first Raspberry Pi so I probably went overboard, I bought the CanaKit ultimate starter kit. I was afraid of getting halfway into my build and finding out I was missing some stupid switch or something. $59.99 on Amazon right now.

The first thing I noticed was how small the case it came with is (Lego Spider-Man for scale). I knew these things were small but I had no idea it was THIS small. My biggest concern at this point is once all the cables are plugged in this box is going to look kinda silly.

The power adapter is just like a cell phone charger. It even uses a micro USB connector.

Oh crap, I have no idea what these are.

Ditto on all these wires

And here's where I feel like I might be in over my head. I haven't soldered anything since I was in high school.

Still feeling in over my head.

At least I recognize these cables.

So here's where the magic happens... kind of. The Raspberry doesn't have a hard drive so everything loads off a MicroSD card. I have a couple 2gig ones but the Ultimate kit included an 8gig one with the operating system pre-installed. Look at how tiny this thing is. It holds more info than what, 7,000 floppies?

This is a very small wireless adapter yet I'm kind of disappointed in it. I wish it was either built onto the motherboard or was oriented differently, maybe vertically? I don't know, before I saw all the wires and diodes this thing came with connecting this baby to my wireless network was my biggest fear. I'm hoping this thing is plug and play but I have a bad feeling about this.

Here's the actual guts. Again, it's hard to explain just how small this thing is. It's no bigger than my cell phone.

Here's a better look at the power plug, the HDMI connector and a 1/8th inch jack that handles both video and audio in case you need to plug in a pair of headphones or hook this up to something that doesn't take HDMI. An HDMI cable was included but no adapter for this.

Pretty standard 10/100 network connector and 4 USB hubs.

The cutest little heatsink I've ever seen. It's like half an inch by half an inch. I've read that unless you plan on overclocking the pi this is pretty unnecessary but the case has plenty of vertical room so I'll probably use it.

That's pretty much it, sorry it's a bit anticlimactic at the end. I didn't even try putting it together after I opened everything up. I spent most of my free time on Sunday watching instructional videos on youtube. It looks like putting it together is a snap and all the diodes and switches are totally unnecessary for what I want to do with it. I'd like this whole enterprise to go as smooth as possible so I'm going to take my time reading more on RetroPie (the emulation software I want to run) and the controllers I bought before putting it all together. If everything goes right I should be looking at this boot up screen in the next few days:

I'll try and keep everyone up to date on how it goes.