Log In  

it took a while but I finally got a print of the console from my last post (with some small changes) Now I just need to adjust USB and HDMI ports to fit the raspberry pi better. After that I will probably work on figuring out how to make the physical carts work, along with the power button. After that I should be done but who knows how long all of that will take.

(Sorry for the sideways pictures)

P#59937 2018-12-12 16:22 ( Edited 2018-12-12 16:30)

Neat Idea! Physical carts? That might be more of a hassle than not, if they are big or too complex. Then again, that would be really cool.
Will this have eight USB ports on it? Also what Pi are you using? Just curious, as I have a Pi 3-B.
Are you planning to have buttons on the GPIO pins to control stuff the controllers may not handle, like shutting down the system.
Good luck! Really cool that someone is attempting this with physical carts.

P#59946 2018-12-13 00:03

I plan to have the physical carts as just an option and not something you would need to play anything, and they aren't at all too big. In terms of USB ports I only plan to use 4 ports as that's what the Pi has built into it. For the Pi model I have a 3-B as well. For things controllers can't handle I plan to be able to just plug in a keyboard and mouse so anything the controller cant handle the keyboard can. although for shutting down the system I do plan to make a functional power buttons which will use the GPIO pins.

P#59947 2018-12-13 00:37

For physical carts you could make any sort of shell you want and then inside place something like RFID/NFC cards to store url's on. Something like this here for instance.

Unfortunately after a bit of searching it seems impossible to find and by old bulk flash media, if someone knows of a good place for this let me know. 256mb sd cards are selling for like 5~20 USD a piece on ebay which blows my mind. I figured that sort of tech would be dirt cheap to find lots of old low storage capacity devices.

P#59952 2018-12-13 06:24

The whole idea of carts would be to have the program on the cartridge, as then it would not need to rely on the BBS version to work. You also don't necessarily need to connect it to the internet for it to do anything.

I have a power button on my Pi now. It is very simple Python that makes it shut down, and shorting a certain GPIO starts it up too. It works quite well for me.
Tutorial if you ever need it:
https://howchoo.com/g/mwnlytk3zmm/how-to-add-a-power-button-to-your-raspberry-pi

Also, is there any ideas for a handheld? My P.Chip burned out a while back and I am still looking for a replacement, preferably one I can code a bit on as well as play.

P#59958 2018-12-13 11:48 ( Edited 2018-12-13 11:52)

I have been thinking about handheld ideas and I might work on one when i'm done with this but that depends on how motivated I am when I finish.

P#59972 2018-12-13 20:21

Looking at Amazon, you can get 1-2GB off-brand chinese thumb drives (high quality, I'm sure!) for about US$2.50 apiece if you buy a pack of 10. You can probably get them even cheaper from another source, knowing how that sort of thing is. Maybe somewhere on alibaba--always chancy, but you can get good stuff there, sometimes better than what you can get through preferred channels.

It's not terrible overhead, at least as long as the things work for more than a week, and you could 3D print a cart shape that goes around the drive, or maybe the drive without its plastic shell, and just use a similarly-disguised standard USB port as your cartridge slot.

I think you can even take the rectangular metal shield off of the plug on the thumb drive, since I've seen mini drives that are basically just the edge connector and then just have the edge connector sticking out of a little inset hole at the bottom of the cart like SNES or N64 carts. You might even be able to find such thumb drives in cheap bulk.

Then just have your OS auto-run any .p8 or .p8.png on an inserted thumb drive cart. Or offer a menu if several. Maybe have an optional config file, or a naming scheme, so that when there are many, it runs a certain one that then spawns the rest. (think autorun.inf on PC)

P#59996 2018-12-14 09:40 ( Edited 2018-12-14 10:04)

[Please log in to post a comment]

Follow Lexaloffle:          
Generated 2024-03-29 06:47:11 | 0.008s | Q:19