All work and no PLay ma es Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull bot. All work and NO play makes JACa dull boy.
Doesn’t it, though? There are some very nice gaming projects about at the moment so without further ado I declare that Wednesday 14th November is Raspberry Pi Gaming Day!
The first project is a Raspberry Pi-based games console built by gamaral. It uses his Marshmallow Game Engine and a custom buildroot distro:
“Marshmallow Game Engine started as a way for me to keep my cross-platform game engine chops up during my spare time (not that I have that much spare time mind you). But with the advent of both powerful and affordable hardware like the Raspberry Pi, I started looking into creating my own game console again, and I have to admit, I’m very excited.”
We are too: it’s chock full of splendid retro gaming goodness. And the boot time is phenomenal. When I watched it this morning, I lost a gobful of Grape-Nuts into the shagpile as my jaw hit the floor:
Unless you have nictitating membranes you may miss this.
The prototype MES has a custom board to deal with power cycling. This adds to the cost, but gamaral suggests that if these are produced in numbers then they could come in at a couple of dollars.
The MES power cycling hardware
You can find more details and a video of the MES in action on gamaral’s MES page, and hardware specs and source code on his github account.
