Raspbian Chameleon remix

18th of January 2013 by liz

This is one for you retro gamers: a Raspbian remix from Carles Oriol that turns your Pi into a whole suitcase-full of emulated hardware, from the Spectrum to a MAME cabinet, via the Oric-1, Atari 2600, Apple II and lots of other stuff besides.

Carles Oriol popped up briefly on Twitter earlier in the week to post this video, then vanished before I was able to get him to point me at a disk image. Happily, I was able to track him down on our forums, and from there to the Chameleon web site. You’ll find a torrent of the image, instructions for adding more emulators to the menu, more video, some words on each of the emulators and a little readme. We absolutely love it: there’s an SD card on my desk with this remix on it, and it’s not getting overwritten any time soon. Thanks Carles!

News Archives

- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- 2013
- 2012
- 2011

Supported by

In the forums

jbeale, 1 minute ago: CSI camera module • Re: OV5647 vs 400 grit, or: how to…
scorp wrote:What I did, I used scalpel to detach black plastic case from flexi cable. Once they apart I had access to the filter but it was not loose inside so I had to unscrew lens to push it from…
franck, 8 minutes ago: General discussion • FastDOSBox 1.50 now available for the Raspberry Pi
NoRisc-NoFun (http://www.norisc-nofun.co.uk) has made version 1.5 of FastDosBox For Raspberry Pi / Raspbian available from the Pi Store (http://store.indiecity.com/projects/fastdosbox).FastDosBox is an enhanced fork of DOSBox, an open source x86 PC emulator. Based on the SVN source code of DOSBox, Users…
eckythump, 10 minutes ago: CSI camera module • Re: OpenCV with new camera module?
Quasim0ndo wrote:The way I'm currently handling it is:Code: call (["raspistill -t 50 -n -o temp.jpg -w 640 -h 480" ], shell=True )img = cv.LoadImage("temp.jpg")Not sure if there is a more elegant or direct way to do it (except for using…
DeeJay, 14 minutes ago: Basic setup and usage • Re: Using Raspberry Pi for Office use
'Search' is a useful tool to use.It would find this - http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=340253#p340253
DirkS, 14 minutes ago: Nederlands • Re: Rare Tekens
kan iemand mij vertellen hoe ik dat voor elkaar kan krijgen?Wat bedoel je met 'voor elkaar krijgen'. Heb je 'm niet en wil je 'm wel of omgekeerd?Het is het dollar-teken en het is niet ongebruikelijk dat die gebruikt wordt…

Follow @Raspberry_Pi

On Twitter

pimoroni, 8 hours ago
Got some lovely Raspberry Pi Swag? We'd love to see photos of you wearing it/using it etc! E-mail pics to swag@raspberrypi.org :-) Sheffield, UK
theuberchad, 15 hours ago
Thanks to @Raspberry_Pi for the awesome camera http://t.co/423s2IAmem Winnipeg, MB
VXShare, 14 hours ago
Just test deployed a @Raspberry_Pi as a malware crawler and indexer. All I had to add was an external HDD. Internet tube #1203437748.
disco_v8, 1 day ago
【拡散希望】もういってもいいでしょう(ﾟдﾟ)！ RaspberryPiの開発者、Ebenが大阪にも行くよ!!(5/27) http://t.co/XxxDLeGe7b 東京のBigJAMはいけないけど大阪なら!!という人は急いで申し込みしないと!! TOKYO

Friends of Pi

50 comments

Davespice on
January 18, 2013 at 2:49 pm said:

Fantastic!

Comment ↓
jpng81 on
January 18, 2013 at 3:06 pm said:

I’ve talked with Carles on google+ on the comunity Raspberry pi, we are now more than 14.000 people there.
I hope he releases corrections on the distro it’s getting really good.

Comment ↓
- liz on
  January 18, 2013 at 3:36 pm said:
  
  Do you know who’s running the community G+? We’re just about to take on someone to (among other things) get official G+ and Facebook pages up and running, and I remember when the G+ group was set up there was an offer to hand it over to the Foundation when we had the resources to manage it; if that’s not still the case we totally respect that, but it’d be good to chat if the option’s still open!
  
  Comment ↓
  - jpng81 on
    January 18, 2013 at 4:15 pm said:
    
    No i don’t know the moderators…
    
    Comment ↓
SimonFD on
January 18, 2013 at 3:08 pm said:

PiCade!

Comment ↓
- carlesoriol on
  January 18, 2013 at 10:04 pm said:
  
  Picade it’s great for arcade. I did chameleon also to get speccy, c64, my old oric (always try to imagine how french people pronounce it)…
  
  It’s not my idea to create a competition against any other raspbian remix, I’m pretty sure they are better than me.
  
  Comment ↓
  - SimonFD on
    January 19, 2013 at 4:17 pm said:
    
    I wasn’t implying that you were. Sorry if I gave that impression. It was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw your excellent video! Very well done.
    I’ve downloaded it and will be trying it out shortly
    
    Comment ↓
Fritz Katze on
January 18, 2013 at 3:37 pm said:

Having had that back in the 1980s would have spoiled my whole career!

Comment ↓
- carlesoriol on
  January 18, 2013 at 10:05 pm said:
  
  Of course! My dream then was to have a professional computer like QL.
  
  Comment ↓
Darren on
January 18, 2013 at 3:49 pm said:

Looking good.

Comment ↓
davedude0 on
January 18, 2013 at 3:54 pm said:

Quite ironic that I just got a ZX Spectrum bag off amazon

Comment ↓
- carlesoriol on
  January 18, 2013 at 10:01 pm said:
  
  Five centimeters under the video it’s my wonderfull spectrum. Raspberry Pi it’s great, but the feeling of the speccy keys, the slow loading times… that moment when you realize that the old speccy like the RPi didn’t have reset button… uau! It’s unique.
  
  It’s also great to have not just the tapes also all the magazines, I would like to find an pdf reader for sdl to get also it on the RPIchameleon.
  
  Comment ↓
Wobbulator on
January 18, 2013 at 7:13 pm said:

Seeing Win 3.1 running made me laugh….

Comment ↓
- liz on
  January 18, 2013 at 7:25 pm said:
  
  Lord – I remember installing Win 3.1 *from floppy discs*. About a million of the things.
  
  Comment ↓
- carlesoriol on
  January 18, 2013 at 9:56 pm said:
  
  It’s so real that it crashed when I did the video!
  
  I spend a lot of time with this old 3.1(1) and now it looks so useless…
  
  Comment ↓
Hugh on
January 18, 2013 at 8:57 pm said:

The image file is just too big to fit on my 4GB SD card

Comment ↓
- carlesoriol on
  January 18, 2013 at 9:51 pm said:
  
  Hi Hug
  
  It should fit on any 4gb SD Card. (At least all I’ve tried)
  
  I would try to do new release smaller because it takes only 1,8Gb.
  
  Carles Oriol
  
  Comment ↓
  - Hugh on
    January 19, 2013 at 12:49 pm said:
    
    It looks like its my SD card which is the problem. Using WinDiskImager the image file just seems slightly too big (my back up image file of Raspbian is 20mb smaller and that works fine). I think I have another SD card somewhere around the house that might work.
    
    Comment ↓
  - Tom on
    January 20, 2013 at 3:03 pm said:
    
    Yep, had same problem, tried with 3 different 4 gb SD cards (different brands too) and all 3 didn’t make it. A 16 GB card did the trick.
    
    Comment ↓
- Nathan Bookham on
  January 20, 2013 at 10:37 am said:
  
  I’m having precisely the same problem. The image is just a few sectors too big to fit on my 4GB Trancend SD card.
  For Raspbian I use a Class 10 16GB SanDisk card, but I want to keep this just for Raspbian.
  
  Comment ↓
- Fritz Katze on
  January 21, 2013 at 10:22 am said:
  
  I had the same problem and solved it:
  
  I used dd to copy the image.
  Then I used fdisk to edit the second partition to fit.
  And after that I used resize2fs and e2fsck to resize and repair the file system.
  
  Comment ↓
Chris on
January 18, 2013 at 9:39 pm said:

Woah, awesome! This came out of nowhere for me, I never heard of any work on something like this. Great job!

Comment ↓
Kevvy Wilch on
January 18, 2013 at 10:20 pm said:

This is fantastic and just what I was looking for! Well done and thank you.

Comment ↓
Mark on
January 18, 2013 at 10:56 pm said:

Superb! Where’s the BBC Micro emulator – I wanna play FireTrack!

Comment ↓
- carlesoriol on
  January 19, 2013 at 11:45 am said:
  
  Do you know any BBC emulator for raspbian I could include ?
  
  Comment ↓
Frank on
January 18, 2013 at 11:07 pm said:

Hey, I would love to get back some oldschool-feeling. What kind of controller would you suggest for raspberry & chameleon ??

Comment ↓
Gordon on
January 19, 2013 at 3:52 am said:

Very Kool! thanks! .. its added to my torrent server. One warning though, the unzipped image is 3.7 gb (the compressed file is 551 mb) so be sure to have media that will handle the unzipping and the final image write (i.e. a 4 gb or more SD card). It would not unzip on my pi because there was not enough room on the SD card. Doing it all in a USB drive 5 gb or more should be fine.
Now I wish I still had the pgm I did in assembler on my Commodore 64, but alas it is long gone.

Comment ↓
Mindrover on
January 19, 2013 at 9:37 am said:

I actually owned an Oric1….ah, the memories

Comment ↓
- Bob on
  January 20, 2013 at 10:46 pm said:
  
  I owned the oric 1, traded it in for an Atmos and then finally the Oric Telestrat !! great machines the great “If only”
  
  Comment ↓
Pete on
January 19, 2013 at 10:44 am said:

No Amiga? Not interested

Comment ↓
- carlesoriol on
  January 19, 2013 at 11:47 am said:
  
  Raspberry has not enough power for a good 68k emulator. I would love to have also amiga and atari st.
  
  Comment ↓
  - eben on
    January 19, 2013 at 1:21 pm said:
    
    Have you had a play with the Raspbian Hatari build here:
    
    http://chipmusic.org/forums/topic/9119/atari-st-on-raspberry-pi/
    
    I’ve been talking with the PUAE guys about getting a decent-performance Amiga emulator for the Pi, but ROMs remain an issue.
    
    Comment ↓
Jesper Skov on
January 19, 2013 at 2:15 pm said:

I get errors from Linux when I try to write the image to SD.

I’ve tried with 4GB and 8GB SD cards.

In both cases I get this in the log:

[ 125.038605] sdb: sdb1 sdb2
[ 125.038800] sdb: p2 size 7684096 extends beyond EOD, enabling native capacity
[ 125.039926] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
[ 125.039934] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 125.040891] sdb: sdb1 sdb2
[ 125.041048] sdb: p2 size 7684096 extends beyond EOD, truncated
[ 125.042163] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page present
[ 125.042169] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 125.042175] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
[ 125.444474] EXT4-fs (sdb2): bad geometry: block count 960511 exceeds size of device (952704 blocks)

Bummer

Comment ↓
- Jesper Skov on
  January 19, 2013 at 3:00 pm said:
  
  Got it working on another 8GB card. *phew*
  
  Comment ↓
carles oriol on
January 20, 2013 at 10:44 pm said:

RPI Chameleon V0.2 RELEASED

http://chameleon.enging.com/chameleon.img.bz2.torrent

Now with

amstrad, atari st, c128, vic-20, oric atmos. zx81…

Online help for computers and emulators

and a lot of more…

And some original bugs reapired.

I hope you like it.

Comment ↓
Kevvy Wilch on
January 21, 2013 at 12:06 am said:

You da man! Thanks again.

Comment ↓
Robert_M on
January 21, 2013 at 1:10 am said:

This looks really cool – well done!

I’d try to download it, but my ISP blocks torrent traffic. Still, neat to see stuff like this happening for the Pi.

Comment ↓
Andrew Oakley on
January 21, 2013 at 5:27 pm said:

Chameleon looks brilliant. I’m looking forward to installing this on one of my Raspberry Pis tonight.

I see Chameleon now includes Hatari, the Atari ST emulator. If anyone wants some LEGAL “ROMs” (actually disk images) for the Atari ST, I hereby grant permission for Chameleon and all users of Chameleon to use my old magazine cover-disk programs for whatever purpose they see fit, even including them in future releases of Chameleon. The files are available as Public Domain from my website: http://aoakley.com/atarist

Same goes for anyone else looking for legal Atari ST games, help yerself, all my old cover disk games are now public domain.

Comment ↓
carles oriol on
January 21, 2013 at 7:31 pm said:

Hi Andrew. If you want i could put this roms on the next release.

It also could be great if you put this on http://chameleon.enging.com/?q=hatari or http://chameleon.enging.com/?q=atarist where everybody can connect now directly from the launcher.

Thanks a lot

Carles Oriol

Comment ↓
perry on
January 21, 2013 at 7:53 pm said:

Hi everyone,
I have downloaded the torrent, but when I try to extract it either using tar (on the pi) or powerarchiver (in windows). I get error messages and at best a 879k image file.

I have redownloaded the torrent again (just to be sure) but get the same problem.

do you have any advice please?

Comment ↓
- mark100 on
  January 21, 2013 at 9:24 pm said:
  
  Had the same problem having 879k image file. Use bunzip2 chameleon.img.bz2 on Linux command line or 7win on windows http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/
  
  Comment ↓
  - perry on
    January 21, 2013 at 9:57 pm said:
    
    that has worked wonderfully – thank you
    
    Comment ↓
Supertrickywoocheese on
January 21, 2013 at 8:15 pm said:

I have loads of original spectrum games on tape from my old Speccy 128k+ is it possible to somehow turn these into roms to play on the emulator ? Sorry if this is a stupid Q (Newbie)

Comment ↓
- andy on
  January 22, 2013 at 7:42 am said:
  
  There’s a way to turn them into .tap files by recording the audio using your computer’s sound card, but it’d be a lot easier if you just download them. Realistically, no-one’s going to give you any hassle for it.
  
  Comment ↓
pgman on
January 22, 2013 at 3:46 am said:

Search the web for “World of Spectrum”.

The site has loads of programs (TAP etc) ready to download (with the copyright holders permission), as well as FAQs that tell you how to convert games tapes to loadable formats.

There is also tons of info on the games and on the Spectrum in all its incarnations.

Very nostalgic.

Comment ↓
Supertrickywoocheese on
January 22, 2013 at 1:50 pm said:

Having issues as a newbie getting this image created, I’m on a pc using utorrent, I have downloaded the torrent and get file chameleon_v021.img.bz2 I guess this needs to be uncompressed to open the img file, but whenever I try via winzip I keep getting a error of Extracting chameleon_v021.img
Irrecoverable Error: Invalid compressed data stream (cannot decompress)
Any ideas ?
Once I’m past this I guess I can write image using win32diskimager as usual.

Comment ↓
- perry on
  January 22, 2013 at 3:37 pm said:
  
  I had the same problem, if (in windows) you download 7win it decompresses wonderfully – I now have it flashed onto an 8MB card. Thanks to mark100 for the 7win hint.
  
  Comment ↓
  - Supertrickywoocheese on
    January 22, 2013 at 4:40 pm said:
    
    Got it, you have to extract the file after the utorrent download, but it has to be a extract that is bz2 compatible, iv’e just used winrar now that took some time to work out, then write to SD using win32diskimager, now what usb gamepad/joystick is best to get ?
    
    Comment ↓
Supertrickywoocheese on
January 22, 2013 at 6:54 pm said:

Yay got the image working, I now have some tap files on a usb pen drive to play, I see in the speccy emulator you use the “F” keys to get load menus etc… anyone got a guide on how to link the files to make them discoverable/playable ? Thanks…

Comment ↓
Daniel on
January 23, 2013 at 12:09 am said:

A uzebox emulator would be nice.

Comment ↓

Buy a Pi!

News Archives

Supported by

In the forums

On Twitter

Friends of Pi