Raspberry Pi

[qoncept]

Anyone got one? My model B is shipping today. I bought it in March on a whim and don't really know what I'm going to do with it. Sounds like it's too slow to use as a HTPC and I don't really have a need for a media server or NAS. I wonder if it would make a decent Skulltag server..

[printz]

Doom.

Holy cow -- I'll be buying this one when I get back home, for a nice price. It will be an opportunity for me to learn Linux. I'll be able to combine it with other electronic gadgets I can do at home. Yay.

Maybe it makes no sense what I'm asking, but is the Raspberry Pi hardware open-source or proprietary?

[qoncept]

I don't think there's anything "open" about it. Just glorified dev board and a low price.

I have always wanted to make my own programmable thermostat. But I don't really have the time/ambition and I already have a wifi thermostat with an app for my phone. I could make something a lot more robust, but see above.

[GreyGhost]

qoncept said:

Anyone got one? My model B is shipping today.

Still in the queue - waiting, waiting, waiting.

[CODOR]

printz said:
open-source or proprietary?

I haven't received mine yet (should ship at the end of this month), but looks like a bit of both. The GPU is proprietary and required closed-source libraries to speak to it (this might be only for OpenGL ES and video decoding though). The rest of the onboard hardware seems to have open-source drivers. The GPIO pins appear to be well documented if you're thinking of hanging some hardware off of them.

I don't have any plans aside from installing ArmedSlack (I've been using Slackware since 1997 so it's the distro I'm most familiar with). Then various Doom ports, naturally. And DOSBox, simply because the idea of running DOS software on ARM hardware amuses me. :-) (I estimate in general it'll run about as well as the 486 I had in 1993. Except 32-bit code is more demanding so I don't expect doom.exe to be playable...)

[Bucket]

If Quake 3 can run on it, I'm sure it can manage Doom.

[Csonicgo]

I'd like for someone to make a highly-optimized console emulator for this thing.

[Blastfrog]

Csonicgo said:

I'd like for someone to make a highly-optimized console emulator for this thing.

Unless this thing can output in 240p RGB NTSC, it'll suck for retro emulation.

[Csonicgo]

Sodaholic said:

Unless this thing can output in 240p RGB NTSC, it'll suck for retro emulation.

That's never been a problem.

What is a problem is a growing number of Televisions that can't do 240p. They're rare, but they're out there.

[Blastfrog]

Csonicgo said:

That's never been a problem.

Why would it not be a problem? It'd look terrible trying to run an NES or Genesis game in some badly rescaled image being rescaled again to 480i.

What I wish existed was a VGA 480p to NTSC 240p scan-halver out there. It'd be perfect for emulation.

[Csonicgo]

Sodaholic said:

Why would it not be a problem?

Have you seen NES/Famicom games on the Wii Virtual Console? Has it been a problem there?

[dmdr]

Something like Mednafen, which will scale things in proper multiples and can even emulate scanlines if you're so inclined, looks just fine on an HDTV (assuming you're happy with black bars around the image, which you should be because stretching looks like shit).
True afficionados don't rely on the TVs inbuilt scalers, anyway.

[Blastfrog]

Csonicgo said:

Have you seen NES/Famicom games on the Wii Virtual Console? Has it been a problem there?

Yes. Interlacing is friggin' annoying on a CRT, particularly when the original game was progressive scan. But hey, at least it actually scales it vertically perfectly, since it's easier to do on there with the video output being controlled exactly by the software. PC video cards on the other hand just scale the desktop's resolution down to slightly less than 480, and display it at 480i. Trust me, I've tried using an NES emulator at 640x480 with emulated scanlines (the simple kind, just only rendering every other line and everything else being black), so I could attempt to make the image flash (due to interlacing) to pure black as much as possible. I got close, but no matter how much I tweaked the output settings, bits of the image would still come through when it was displaying every even instead of odd line.

Mind you, this is with consumer level stuff more so designed for presentations or whatever it's meant for, but it still sucks. I kinda doubt that the Raspberry Pi has anything for pixel perfect (rather, I should say scanline-perfect) TV output. I dunno, maybe it might, if it's so low res, but even then I bet you can't get lowres progressive out of it.

Lance MDR Rocket said:

Something like Mednafen, which will scale things in proper multiples and can even emulate scanlines if you're so inclined, looks just fine on an HDTV (assuming you're happy with black bars around the image, which you should be because stretching looks like shit).
True afficionados don't rely on the TVs inbuilt scalers, anyway.

Bah. That's for LCD TVs. If I want retro, I'll use CRT. It looks better that way with old games.

I'm currently using an Amiga monitor with my Amiga and Genesis (thanks Randy87!) with pure RGB output. It's perfect, everything looks as it's supposed to.

[Bucket]

What in the sam hell are you trying to do, exactly? Retro consoles have been successfully emulated for fifteen years, plenty already exist for ARM platforms, and the Rpi has more than enough horsepower to do it. You can have fake interlacing or not, it's only cosmetic.

[Maes]

The comments in here would make any old-time TV tech weep. The funny thing is that I'm using CRT TV everyday with a real console, and I've never actually seen a scanline (perhaps using composite output and a non-monitor grade TV plays a role).

I only recall individual scanlines being visible on a) Amiga monitors, which had much higher resolution/bandwidth than a TV and b) Arcade cabinet monitors. They were nothing but TV CRTs, but driven with more accuracy c) OSD displays on TVs.

Everything else is just a zeerust wannabe nostalgia effect that simply wasn't there to begin with.

[CODOR]

I think the thing about emulation on a RasPi is that you can tear apart a dead old console, stick a Pi in there along with a couple USB adapters wired into the original controller ports (or maybe even bitbang them through the Pi's GPIO pins) and have the appearance of an old console with an HDMI output for modern TVs/monitors.

I was pondering how one could use the cartridge slot to load games, then I realized that for the sorts of things you'd want to emulate on this board, you could fit every single game ever on even a small SD card...

[printz]

I'd like to see open-source software be developed and shared for this platform, possibly with support (and schematics) for common engineering home-made designs (also open-source lol).

[Csonicgo]

Raspberry Pi does 240p so everyone can stop bitching about that

[qoncept]

It showed up yesterday. I don't really have the time to play with it now but I did at least get it booted. What's holding me back is I don't have a supported USB mouse so I can play around with X, which will probably make discovering things a bit easier than a command prompt.

Looking at the i/o pins, I think I'm going to at least stick this thing in between my thermostat and HVAC to find out how that all works. We have 2 stage AC and furnace and a variable blower that use 8 wires instead of the 4 that make sense to me. Should have a lot of logs to dig through in a couple months.

[GreyGhost]

Just received my Id number from RS Components and will hopefully be able to place my order on Tuesday. With an estimated shipping lead time of 9 weeks it won't get here in time for my birthday, but you can't have everything.

[GreyGhost]

It's arrived! Only missed my birthday by two days. Unfortunately, without a USB keyboard I can't get past the login prompt so that's the next thing on my shopping list, along with a power supply that doesn't require a universal adapter.

@qoncept - have you tried running Doom on yours yet?

[freder]

GreyGhost said:

It's arrived! Only missed my birthday by two days. Unfortunately, without a USB keyboard I can't get past the login prompt so that's the next thing on my shopping list, along with a power supply that doesn't require a universal adapter.

@qoncept - have you tried running Doom on yours yet?

Sweet, you'll have to treat us to some pics of your set up when it's ready.

If I order one I might build a nice all-in-one wooden case for it as an homage to the single board home computers of the late 70s.

[GreyGhost]

An Apple 1 tribute case sounds good though a lack of screw mounting holes isn't going to make it easy. I'll probably settle for a Pibow case and consider disguising my Pi as an Amiga 1200 later on, if I can lay my hands on a Keyrah adapter.

[CODOR]

I got mine just before heading across the continent for a couple weeks, so it's in Ontario right now while I'm in Alberta :-P

I had a chance to put Armedslack on it (Slackware's my preferred distribution on x86 so the learning curve is minimal) and compile chocolate-doom before I left. It runs fairly well in a 640x480 window, but clunky at 1920x1200 fullscreen -- I'm thinking the X server is unaccelerated in Armedslack, but I'll need to look into it more once I get back...

[RestlessRodent]

I bought 4 and they come August 1st.

However, I shipped them elsewhere so I won't see them for quite some time (my current address is not mailable).

[qoncept]

A month later and I still haven't done anything with mine other than boot it once. I'm going to be working 7 days a week through November so I probably won't any time soon.