Tag: retro games

Raspbian Chameleon remix

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!

Retro games and a retro joystick

A lot of people of a certain age (cough – that’d be me) have been using their Raspberry Pis to play the games that we wasted spent endless 10p coins on down at the arcade when we were kids. MAME (the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a really popular download for the Raspberry Pi, and you can run an increasing number of games on your Pi as developers in the community work on recompiling for Raspbian. Below, for example, is the most excellent Metal Slug 3. (If you want a MAME download for your own Raspberry Pi, Shea Silverman has a handy little tutorial on his site along with the relevant binaries.)

I don’t know about you, but I find that what controller you use has a massive impact on the satisfaction you get from a game. Sure, you can use keyboard commands, but a joystick built for the game is a tremendously cheering thing. And sure, you can use a modern USB joystick – but where’s the fun in that?

Chris Swan thinks so too, and has hacked a lovely 1980s Competition Pro 5000 (hurrah for eBay) to work with the GPIO pins on his Raspberry Pi.

Competition Pro 5000

The Competition Pro 5000 - back in the day, the Amiga user's joystick of choice. I'm looking at my DualShock3 PS3 controller and experiencing feelings of vertigo.

If you want to adapt your own retro joystick, there are hardware instructions and Python script to get everything working on his site. Frankly, the whole thing has me feeling like a 9-year-old with a bad haircut and twitchy thumbs again. Thanks Chris!