Monday 6 August 2012

We've only just begun

I finally got a chance to play with the Raspberry Pi and it's been a doddle to set up so far.

After reading some of the horror stories, I half expected some problems getting the RPi to start up at all but thankfully had none. I guess my paranoia helped as I'd read all about the power issues, purchased a half-decent power supply and a really good powered USB hub.

My only video option at the moment is composite to my telly. Yes, I know most self-respecting gadget-philes bought HD flatscreens with HDMI years ago - myself and my partner both bought 21" Sony Trinitrons over a decade ago, we don't want to get a new telly until at least one of them expires, and the damn things are just too well-built, refusing to die. I'm using a composite + phono to SCART adaptor, combined with composite and 3.5mm to phono cables running from the RPi, and the picture isn't too bad. There's a bit chopped off the left-hand side, the interlacing looks awful sometimes and text in a terminal window is a bit blurry, but it's generally good enough for most stuff and it'll do until my HDMI-DVI adaptor turns up.

Bear in mind that though I've had close to 20 years of experience as a UNIX/Linux user, I've not really done much in the way of installs or admin beyond switching window manager. I've installed Ubuntu on my netbook about a million times, but that practically installs itself. I've been learning as I've gone along, trawling the intaweb for guides, supplementing them with a great deal of educated guesswork and trial-and-error.

For the Raspberry Pi I'm using Raspbian, as it's now the recommended Linux distribution and the optimisations are coming thick and fast. At initial startup there's a config utility to help sort out the important stuff. I'm not going to be doing anything clever with graphics yet, so memory's shared 7:1 between CPU and GPU. I thought I'd give the LXDE window manager a go to start off with, but at PAL resolution it looked a bit cluttered and with the interlacing it was a little too reminiscent of Amiga Workbench for my liking, so I turned it off again and turned on SSH.

SSH just worked, with no fuss whatsoever. I got the IP address from my router (though "ifconfig" on the RPi also does the job), put it into PuTTY and that was it - remote access to the RPi. Xming was also fairly easy to set up without really knowing what I was doing - initially the RPi's IP address was being blocked so I added it to Xming's X?.hosts file, set the $DISPLAY variable, et voilĂ . Then I undid all that and set up X11forwarding in PuTTY to sort out the display for me. Wireless was a lot more tricky to set up, but once I'd read a few guides (the debian one was the most useful), convinced myself that the dongle wasn't broken, figured out that you need to be root to scan for interfaces, learnt the syntax of the interfaces file, realised that WPA needs a completely different set commands to WEP, and worked out how to generate a PSK, I was up and running.

Setting those things up meant I could remove the mouse and keyboard, disconnect the telly, and unplug the Ethernet cable tying it to my router. I've now got the RPi on my desk instead of a footstool by the telly, with just the hub/wireless plugged in. It's a useful setup for playing around, getting better stuff set up, taking screenshots, perhaps natively building C++, but what to try first? For low-effort instant gratification, how about some old games?

Tiny amount of activity in game, sshd CPU usage spikes
I mentioned Beneath a Steel Sky in my previous post, and that's free on ScummVM so I gave it a go... perhaps unsurprisingly it was very, very slow over a remote display and there was no audio. When I switched back to using the telly it was nigh perfect and really fast, huzzah! There was the odd crackle and pop over the speakers, though I've no idea whether that was the SCART connector, phono cable, socket, board, drivers, feedback from the USB hub or just the incessant ALSA underruns you get with a busy CPU. Back to the SSH connection again I could see the CPU usage of the sshd (SSH daemon) process spike when anything moved. Turning off X11forwarding and going back to insecure X?.hosts/$DISPLAY didn't make much difference, but VNC was a bit better.

It took over an hour just to get to kick-off for this
screenshot
Next up, Sensible World of Soccer running on DOSBox. First job: finding the CD, which took a while as it was in storage, in one of the many boxes of stuff we rarely use in the spare room. You may be shocked to learn that the Raspberry Pi doesn't have a native CD drive, and I don't have one with a USB connection, so I tried to find an ISO maker which was a) free and b) actually worked. Eventually I settled on ISODisk, which was a bit flakey but did the job nicely. Once SWOS was running it was ridiculously slow with Xforwarding, and didn't work at all with VNC. On the telly there was a keyboard issue, but once I'd sorted that out it was still rather slow. It could probably be tweaked a bit, but SWOS runs in protected mode which is notoriously slow on DOSBox so I think the RPi's 700MHz processor doesn't quite cut it. That's a shame, I was quite looking forward to having SWOS on a little box under my telly - though I've discovered that there's a Wii version of DOSBox available...

I've also had a look at MAME, but there's some weird video driver issue I'll have to get to the bottom of. If I do get it working, I'll really want to get my gamepad working too but that looks a bit tricky under Linux. It's a Microsoft gamepad, so what are the chances of an official Linux driver?

Perhaps trying to use the Raspberry Pi as an emulation machine is a bit optimistic as its processor isn't great. All the graphics is going through the CPU, most emulators don't take advantage of the GPU. ScummVM works well but as I understand it that's not really an emulator, it's a new implementation of the interpreter. But it's been a useful exercise in just getting stuff working and probing the limitations of the box. For my next trick I think I'll try something a little more suitable. Maybe I'll learn how to use OpenGL ES? Well lookie here, the Quake II source code...

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