[TriEmbed] RetroPie and MAME

[Mike Lisanke]

Did you mean something like...
http://lifehacker.com/how-to-turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-a-retro-game-console-498561192

On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 1:19 PM, Alex Davis via TriEmbed <
triembed at triembed.org> wrote:

> This may be a little off topic for embedded systems, but I bet there’s
> enough ‘old people’ like myself who remember arcade games, soo…
>
> What I’ve been working on is a Pi2 with the RetroPie distro installed,
> along with an HDMI-component converter and an ‘old’ Sony Wega 480i TV
> (which has component inputs). The idea here is to get as close to the
> arcade CRT experience as possible without spending tons of money on an
> actual arcade CRT.
>
> RetroPie is very handy as it is set up to boot straight to a simplified
> GUI meant to be controlled by an arcade stick/buttons or a game console
> controller. The somewhat tricky part was going through a windows-only
> process of processing a huge 50 GB ROM dump to weed out duplicates and
> broken sets to get down to about 2 GB of zipped ROMS. I have no idea what I
> ‘lost’ in the process, but it’s still over 2000 games.
>
> The Sony TV was next to nothing off craigslist and is nearly the pinnacle
> of CRT consumer-grade TV technology. 640x480 text is clearly readable,
> convergence and focus is good, and geometry can be adjusted via a service
> menu.
>
> The HDMI adapter worked fine under X using modeline "640x480i-2" 12.324
> 640 648 706 784 480 483 489 524 interlace -hsync -vsync but, using
> ‘hdmi_mode=6’ on the Pi, suffers from flagging at the top of the display. (
> photos: http://imgur.com/a/0Bk5X ) I’m guessing some part of the video
> signal is a bit off from what the TV wants. There is the ability to use
> custom HDMI modes on the Pi, but the parameters are different from a
> standard X modeline, so I have no yet gotten it to work.
>
> Alternatively, if the TV+adapter doesn’t work out, I have an HDMI-VGA
> converter plus a 17” multisync CRT display which will look arcade-ish when
> run at 640x480.
>
> Finally, I have Trammell Hudson’s vector MAME project working. It is a
> patched version of MAME, a Teensy 3.1, some SPI DACs and level-shifting
> op-amps to get a full +/-5v signal range. This is fed into an analog scope
> in XY mode. Games work, but speed is very slow - I think because it still
> tries to write to the primary display while sending vectors to the Teensy.
> The Teensy handles drawing vectors from a table in RAM, so at least vector
> writing speed and therefore screen update is not affected by slowdowns on
> the computer side. I am hoping Mr. Hudson has some feedback once the
> holidays are over. This project could be demoed at the next meeting if
> there is interest. I’d also welcome any input or collaboration of taking it
> ‘to the next level’ once the bugs are worked out, which would be re-winding
> yokes on CRT monitors and supplying external deflection drive circuits, so
> games like Tempest and Star Wars could be played in full color.
>
> Alex
>
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-- 
Best regards,  Mike
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