RVG Forum

Here's a SD card image made for the turning the Pi into an emulation machine.
http://chameleon.enging.com/
It's called Chameleon and has a front end to make emulating old computers and systems easy on the Pi. So far it has support for MAME, ZX 81 and Spectrum, Commodore64 and Vic20, Atari 2600 and some others listed on the site. I will be trying it out this weekend so I can report back on it.

I had hoped something like this would appear. I've given it a brief test and so far it looks promising, although there is quite a lot of work to do. Presumably this would benefit hugely from improved GPU drivers, as has been said of Raspbian itself, but if IIRC that will require more openness from Broadcom in releasing datasheets/providing kernel modules or something along those lines.

Anyway, as things are at present, I managed to get Wizball up and running on the C64 emulator. I couldn't get it into full screen, but the display was large enough. I didn't get sound up and running either - lots of options to go through there. There was a performance hit as well. Even without sound, things didn't look entirely smooth.

I tried just the one game on MAME - Raiden. It runs pretty faithfully, albeit at something like about half speed.

Anyway, it is promising - certainly the front end is very easy to use, and copying files over to the SD card is straightforward. I was using Linux though, I have no idea whether or not it's as simple under Windows.

I tried for about an hour to get some roms on the SD card from Windows. That's the worst thing about Pi, running Linux. It just sucks in this day and age to have to learn obscure commands to copy some files. I read that it's possible to connect via Samba shares but the setup means I would have to change my Windows settings to change the workgroup or once again jump through hoops via terminal to find out how to change it on Linux.
I'll keep trying...

No command line needed for this. I have an Ubuntu 12.04 installation with ImageWriter installed. Just slot your SD card in, fire up Imagewriter and you can write the image, all via the GUI. I must admit the ROMS partition didn't appear at first, so I unmounted the SD card (again, just by pressing the eject icon next to one of the mounted drives in the file manager), took it out then reinserted it. Then it mounted a ROMS partition, with all the subdirectories for the various emulators.

Unfortunately all my experiments with Linux have ended in frustration as usually when something doesn't work it goes back to command line fiddling. Hopefully it has got better since I last tried it but Linux was always like going back 20 years to Dos commands to get anything done, and I had my fill of learning commands to rewrite autoexecs and configs to get something working.
I'll try to get some networking going to it today and hopefully see what it works like. BTW which RPi are you running model A or B?

I must admit I still don't use Linux as a day-to-day operating system, even the comparatively user-friendly Ubuntu, but I do like to have it installed on an older machine as I like to experiment with it.

This is how the ROMS directory looks when the SD card is mounted on Linux - if you look top left, you can see that the ROMS partition is mounted separately (it's selected):



I am using a Model B, but it is one of the earlier ones that has less memory and you can't overclock it.

Well I managed a workaround and got roms on the base directory of the card and then found the directory in /boot. A config change for Atari VCS and a play around got some stuff working. I will add a video later although my PC and capture card did a crap job of it and I can't get sound on the capture device for some reason.

As an aside, while playing around I was using a small screen with Composite video in, and the Pi looks OK on it with Chameleon. I was just setting up to capture the video when there was a loud pop and a load of smoke in the room. The power supply for the little display had blown a capacitor, which blew the whole thing out of the socket. Scared the s**t out of me seeing the smoke it was giving off. 

I did manage to get a video, and although quiet there is some sound. The video is choppy because of my capture setup it seems to play OK at full speed on the TV.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cNvhKyZf7Y

Nice one Doug!

Great Video Doug.

I might change to this, but I will see as I like fuse and Vice and have the joysticks mapped and the sound all sorted already.

As it's on the Pi, all you have to do is setup a different SD card to try it out and at a couple of quid a throw on Ebay that's what I've done to try this and RaspBMC. Also I think sound is there but as I was using Composite video and the earphone jack into my rather useless (Ebay £3.50) USB capture stick that's probably why sound is crap.
I have to find the HDMI cable and try it on the TV.

When you do try it on hdmi, you will have to cmd promt-

sudo numid=3 2 

or somthing like that!