Raspberry Pi-ness

ThePrettyDamned

Duke nukem 3d and doom - this needs to happen.

Phil_aka_Pip

Sporky said:

Raspberry Pis ...

seem to be good educational tools, and lots of nice home uses, but I am not convinced they're appropriate for "important" applications.

My boss thinks like this, but still expects the alternatives to be as cheap. The company bought me a Raspberry Pi to play with and I rather liked it. Shame the only human user output is an HDMI - all our monitors are VGA and when I got an HDMI-VGA converter it eventually fried the Pi by drawing too much current.

Gizmo

Thinking of getting an OrangePi Zero (about £16 case+psu from aliexpress) and sticking Pi-Hole on it as a DNS ad blocker,i use a few ad blockers in combo atm but i like the idea of Pi-hole stopping the content ever coming down the pipe so to speak.

Anyone here running pi-hole ? if so how does it stick up to browser extensions as a full ad blocker suite.

juansolo

I've done a few things with pi's. As has been mentioned for a emulator setup, a Raspberry Pi 3 and Retropie 4 is the easiest and probably the slickest way of doing it. I'm on my 3rd iteration of that http://juansolo.co.uk/geekery/picade.html

If you want to build an Amiga, Amibian is what you're after http://juansolo.co.uk/geekery/amibian.html

The great thing is you really can get nearly there with all of these for very sensible money. However, if you're an obsessive like me, you also have all the consoles and computers running into period CRT monitors (even the pi is now)... It's a bit of a problem, I'll admit.

joneve

Can't remember if I said before, but I paired my PS3 controllers with my Pi at the weekend, it functions BEAUTIFULLY. Can't wait to get the NESPI case which will complete the look. Glad I finally managed to setup the SFTP connection for updating roms too - soooo much less faff than updating via USB.
 

Axe_meister

Just get a pi 3. Our Pi1 is a little sluggish on N64 games

strumjoughlamps

Axe_meister said:

Just get a pi 3. Our Pi1 is a little sluggish on N64 games

Pi3 not running N64 too well either, very hard to emulate.

FX_Munkee

strumjoughlamps said:

Axe_meister said:

Just get a pi 3. Our Pi1 is a little sluggish on N64 games

Pi3 not running N64 too well either, very hard to emulate.

Agree with that. I can get a passable Mario64 working but something like Waverace and it's on its knees.

joneve

Yea, I've not attempted any N64 games yet. I have Zelda the Ocarina of Time to work through, but not used it yet. Apparently its one of the better ports, but because the console was so ahead of it's time, it's a right shit to emulate apparently. The only games I'd want is Zelda, and Mario 64 probably anyway. Some of the WWF Wrestling Games were good too, so I might see if they run OK. I'm apprehensive about controlling them with a PS3 controller though - I used to love the N64 controller  

Not the end of the world if they don't work well. There's enough legit AF PS1 games to keep me occupied!  

Jalapeno

Should I start a new thread on Pico X86 vs Raspberry Pi ? Interested ....

joneve

Jalapeno said:

Should I start a new thread on Pico X86 vs Raspberry Pi ? Interested ....

I'd be interested in this, as it could be the next step, depending on cost, so I can run more modern emulators like the PS2. 

MrBump

I just bought one for my youngest for Christmas - he's reasonable tech savvy.  Although I suspect that if he can't get immediate gratification from it, it may sit and gather dust!

joneve

MrBump said:

I just bought one for my youngest for Christmas - he's reasonable tech savvy.  Although I suspect that if he can't get immediate gratification from it, it may sit and gather dust!

I'm an absolute dullard when it comes to stuff like this, and I managed to get my Pi set up relatively easily - took one evening. It's the downloading of the roms that takes the longest. 

You can buy them pre-setup too, which is good if you can't be bothered with loads of faff (although I appreciate this might be a bit late for you!) 

d8m

This thread(coupled with the limited availability of the SNES mini) has made me want to build a retropie.

Off to Amazon I go

joneve

d8m said:

This thread(coupled with the limited availability of the SNES mini) has made me want to build a retropie.

Off to Amazon I go

Give us a shout if you want any guidance  

FWIW I bought all my components from The Pi Hut

joneve

Absolutely loving life now I have my Pi all setup. The NESPI case will finish it off nicely once I get it for Christmas (hopefully). 

Customised the menus and got the majority of the games I want on there. 

I love the fact it plays PS1 games so seamlessly, and the N64 games I wanted run pretty well, with a little audio lag and occasional slowdown during playing, but easy to get used to it and play through. 

joneve

Spoke to soon  

Installed Kodi last night, which I think caused the space to run out on the SD card (note to self: get a bigger one)...and with this all the game data files seemed to disappear so all of my meta data scraping has disappeared (even from the RetroPie menu). So will be spending the weekend trying to recover and reset all that! 

vasselmeyer

If you have a large thumb drive, you can move all of the RetroPie stuff over to  it and just keep the system files on the SD card. I suck a 64Gb thumb drive  in mine and I'm fairly sure I'll never run out of space for  ROMs overlays etc. It saves wear and tear on the SD card too.

joneve

vasselmeyer said:

If you have a large thumb drive, you can move all of the RetroPie stuff over to  it and just keep the system files on the SD card. I suck a 64Gb thumb drive  in mine and I'm fairly sure I'll never run out of space for  ROMs overlays etc. It saves wear and tear on the SD card too.

How do you tell it to use the thumb drive for storage? I think the one I have is at least 32gb.

I was going to just get a 32gb microSD card but open to either option! 

I'm not sure whether to just start from scratch (as I still have the rom files on my MacBook) with a fresh install now I understand a bit more what I'm doing. 

vasselmeyer

There is a very comprehensive guide here:
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive