hansolo77

My Nintendo NES Classic Edition has an HDMI port...

What's 'remastered' about it? Didn't this just come out a year or so ago on the Xbox 360 generation?

Standing by for validation...

This dude here is still so freaking sick. Haven't done aything with this thing in days. But I did just manage to find the reddit (never really used that site) post with the scripts I needed to run with the wired up RESET button. Anybody out there good with Pi's and electronics? I need to know if this will work "out of the box" or if I need to get a resistor or something. https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/2yw4fn/finally_set_up_retropie_complete_with_a_gpio/cpdhtpu/

Nice score guys! Keep it up! Updated OP, DB, RSS

Having never played this, I'm going to assume that's an impressive score. Updated OP, DB, RSS

Yeah could you imagine if I ever wrote a book? My English teachers would cry. Some of them said all my stories are just dialog, and then the others said I have paragraphs that are too long, and I tend to create run-on sentences. Dialog stories are great if I ever wanted to be a comic book writer. But page long paragraphs are a no-no I've always had trouble with. I think one of my teachers was trying to drive home that you need to separate paragraphs when you have different subject matter in each one. In my last post, that's how I did it. One for me being sick, one for hardware, and one for software. I just need more practice I guess. And yes, pictures will come once I do more with the hardware. I'll probably make some Youtube video too showing it all working.

Ok.. originally I wanted that R2D2, with the Millennium Falcon DVD Remote.. but this is just crazy. I like it for sure, and would die to have one. But it reminds me too much of that "other" build, where they guy built his own custom console by gutting all the original consoles and put them in a box with his own custom made console selecting slider. What would have made this more appealing would have been if he had incorporated wires to hook up all the power and reset buttons to one central location rather than have one for each console. I'd also like to have seen him actually hide all the ports behind R2's various doors, rather than mount them directly to the outside. That makes it look worse, and I wouldn't call him an R2D2 anymore. An R2 unit maybe, but all the externally visible modifications makes it more like an R2XX.

So @patrickfx just beat out @Cynicaster with his might score. Will he beat MO and take the lead? Time will tell! Updated OP, DB, RSS

This is our Bonus game for November. It was chosen as one of Cynicaster's favorites and it was his choice due to winning our GOTM Competition in October. Way to to go buddy! We like to give our winners a little something extra, and this was his reward. To be in the running to pick next month's bonus game, check out our current GOTM - Tiger Heli! At the end of the month, this game will be reverted to a standard game rather than be completely removed. So feel free to post a score any time! There are apparently NO marquee images on the internet for this game. If you come across one, feel free to let me know and I'll update the first post with it. The current one I have is a Photoshop I just made of the Title Screen. Works good enough I guess, but a legit marquee would be better! Fast Lane is a 1987 arcade game created by Konami. The game is a clone of Sega's Head On from 1979 with improved graphics and some additional features. The player controls a red sports car that attempts to avoid crashing head on with a blue truck.[1] -Quote from Wikipedia.

Fast Lane Leaderboard POSITION USER NAME TOTAL SCORE 1 ExedExes 281,340 2 Luigimaker 169,100 3 rtkiii 142,720 4 Cynicaster 137,780 5 hansolo77 112,060 6 millerbrad 102,820 7 Floyd Turbo 30,560 Last Updated by hansolo77: 09-16-2019 Please use these settings when submitting a hi-score for Fast Lane: ROMSet: FastLane Lives: 3 Unknown: Off [All] Bonus Life: 20000 100000 Flip Screen: Off Service Mode: Off Special Rules: Continues are NOT allowed! Difficulty: Medium Allow Continue: 3 Tries (These bottom 2 are defaulted on my system. We don't allow continues, so don't use any. The only other option here is Infinite, so don't bother changing it). The green coloured default values match the Twin Galaxies settings. The red coloured values need to be changed! # you can change your Mame dip switch settings by following this guide: # you can make a printscreen of your hi-score screen by following this guide: # general rules for submitting your hi-score:

Yeah, by default, the OS boots off an SD card. That's how I'm running it. All of the ROMs (and their artwork) are stored on the HD. The WD Passport Ultra I have was bought more or less as impulse based on price. I didn't really plan on buying a Hard Drive at the time, but that price was amazing and I didn't want to pass up on it. The Passport is essentially an external HD that connects via USB3.0. Even though the Rpi3 is USB2.0, it still works. It receives the power via the USB as well (so no extra external power supply needed). It is equivalent to a laptop drive (2.5 in) in appearance, but is definitely built as an external drive. There are no screws (unless they're hidden under the rubber footpads) and no apparent way to take the drive apart to use just the drive inside without the case. It also has a (in my case) White LED to show it's powered on, blinks slowly if it's in standby, and stays on/flashes quickly when there is activity or the drive hasn't "shut down" yet. The response time is great on the Pi with this drive. The only downside I have isn't due to any communication or power dropouts, but because of the way EmulationStation builds the game lists. If you have a lot of systems and a lot of ROMs for those systems, it can sometimes take about 30 seconds or so for the system to be fully booted. The reason it does this is because by default, the system is checking for any new ROMs/Systems when it boots up. Once it's booted, the thing flies. But first boot takes a while. You can disable that, and have it just parse what it knows you have, rather than scan each time. Shutting down can also take a while if you have the "Save MetaData on Exit" feature enabled. This is your list of things like "Last Played". If you don't care about "Last Played" or "Times Played" stats, you can disable that to make shutdown really quick. Day 14 - Sick I got confirmation today that my order for those C14 plugs was shipped. I looked and looked when I was at the computer store on Thursday returning my Hub, and couldn't find them. They still had a nice supply of those expensive cables that I thought I could just chop the end off of. I'm glad I decided not to though. There was an Amazon 3rd Party seller who was selling them in sets of 5 for like $3. It includes screw mounting holes too, so I don't have make a nasty looking setup with hot glue. Although, hot glue is still going to happen eventually, because I need a way to mount the HDMI cable jack. But the plugs are on their way, and according to Amazon they'll arrive sometime between December 1st and December 16th (coming from China). I wish I knew where they were coming from first, so I could have ordered from somebody closer. But they had the best price. One guy was selling just 1 set for $8. Compare that to 5 sets for $3, and it was no contest. This way I have 4 extras to use if I screw something up, or need more for other builds or any other reason. Nothing new has happened on the build side. Since I'm still waiting for other parts to arrive, there's not much TO do. I'm waiting for Mausberry to send me a replacement power switch circuit. I'm also waiting for raphnet to send me the NES/USB circuit. Then I'm also waiting for those C14 plugs. Lastly I'm waiting for the hub. So once I get all the parts, it's build time. Software side I've gone through and now have complete sets for most of the consoles and handheld systems up to the 16-bit era. I have the PSX, Sega 32X, Sega CD, and N64 all working nicely. I don't have a complete Sega CD set since they're about 500mb each and would take a lot of space. Instead, I just have copies of the games we actually bought installed on the drive. For the PSX, right now I just have all the Final Fantasy games on there. Eventually I'll have copies of all the games I had on there for old-times sake (all the JetMoto's, all the Crash Bandicoots, Parasite Eve's, DinoCrisis, Resident Evils, Lunars, Legend of Mana/Legaia/Lagoon, etc). Sega 32X is just 40 games, so no big deal there. The N64 is a complete set. I've run each system through ClrMAMEPro to rebuild a parent/clone set with the 1G1R (one game one rom) filters set so I don't have any duplicates, with priority set to USA>Canada>Europe>Japan>everything else. On my PC, I included all the Computer systems as well, but my Pi build doesn't have these (yet?). I'm not sure I want them or not. Getting the Atari 5200 console to work was a chore due to how the emulator is made. It runs both Atari 5200 and Atari 800. The first hurdle was getting the emulator to find the BIOS files, and have it save their locations. Since this emulator isn't part of RetroArch and is rather standalone, I had to manually configure it. This was an issue due to ownership permissions, etc. You have to sudo everything or the things won't save or be editable. The other crappy thing with this emulator is that there is no way to have it automatically run the ROMs you load into it. The system comes up with the ROM "loaded" in the slot, but you have to tell it what is actually running in the slot (such as Atari 800 cartridge, Atari 5200 cartridge, what romsize it is (4k, 8k, 16k etc) and so on). So it's a pain in the neck to run when you want to play something, because you're always being prompted to tell the emulator what kind of ROM you're playing. I might ditch this altogether. This brings me back to the Computer systems. The Atari 800 computer is THE computer we had when I was growing up. So hell yeah I want to have it set up and running. But if the process of selecting what system the ROM loaded into the slot is required for each game I play, I almost feel like it's not worth it. The RetroPie system is capable of running lots of different computers "out of the box" and via addons. Thing like various Sinclair systems, Amstrads, MSX, etc. I may experiment with them in the future, but right now those are very low on my priority list. I also don't want to have to have a keyboard and mouse always plugged in. There are other things you can do with RetroPie too, like Ports. They've ported a lot of game engines into "emulators" that you can install into RetroPie. Right now I have PR-BOOM installed, which is a port of the original Doom engine. It plays Doom, Doom 2, Ultimate Doom, Final Doom. Of course, you have to supply the required .wad files for each one if you don't want to run the demo/shareware versions, and then write a separate script for each title. I had that all figured out before I started over. I also have TYR-QUAKE installed, which is a Quake 1 engine. This too requires you to use the full version .wad unless you just want to play the demo/shareware version. Control in Quake is difficult with a controller though since they added the up/down look functions that Doom was lacking. The controls just aren't meant to be played with a controller, but rather a mouse. The same is true with the Quake 3 Arena port. I also have SUPER MARIO WAR, which is sort of like Super Smash Brothers, but uses sprites from the 8-bit genre. They have a lot more ports too that I've not set up yet. Things like a superior Outrun game engine, a port of SimCity type games, a game called Cave Story which is actually really good, and even some Decent/Decent 2 ports. Lastly, that I'm interested in setting up (if nothing else than for the fact that I can) some ports of the Warcraft/Starcraft engines, and an engine designed to play many of the Forgotten Realms RPG games like Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2, Icewind, Morrowind, etc. I own those games, and never finished them. These of course would require a keyboard/mouse setup, but if I get the system that far, it won't be that big a deal to do. If I decide to go that far with it, there are other things you can run too, like ScummVM for your point-and-click games like Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, etc. They even have a ZMachine interpreter that will let you run those classic text adventures like Zork, etc. from Infocom. ALL KINDS OF POSSIBILITIES!!! For a complete list, check out the RetroPie Setup Wiki and pay special attention to the Emulators and Ports categories!

Thanks for all the posts guys. Looks like the competition is heating up! Updated OP, DB, RSS

Thanks MO! Updated OP, DB, RSS

Nothing fancy to say, making this day's updates brief because I don't feel good. Updated OP, DB, RSS

Day 13 - Today I play tested some PSX and Sega CD games I copied over to the Pi's drive last night. They all work great, and are now being metadata scraped. As for everything else, I did some searching and decided I'm going to go with the PiHut 7-port USB hub and ordered it. I've read some reviews and watched a couple of review videos, and everybody seems to really like this thing. You can't beat the cost, and it's pretty much guaranteed to work with my Pi. It's powered too, so my under-voltage or under-amp issues I was having should go away. Only downside is, it comes from Europe, so it might take a little longer to get here. But as I've said from the beginning, I'm not really worried about how long it takes. I'm taking my time so it comes together right and looks good. I also ordered from Raphnet the Dual NES controller to USB circuit to replace the existing NES plugs on the console. I've seen where people have done this, and have had no issues. It converts them to USB, so I can just plug in 1 cable and get 2 controllers out of it. The nice thing is, he includes 2 NES plugs but doesn't have them connected. So I'm going to experiment and see if I can get the existing plugs connected first, rather than try and mount on his (you actually have to file down one of the corners on his plugs because of the way they go inside the console). I'm still looking for assistance on finding the script/instructions to wire up the NES's RESET button to send a keypress to the Pi for "ESCAPE" so it will return to game list...

Day 12 - I spent the day yesterday adding in some more ROMs and testing them out. Then I got sidetracked and didn't do much else. I did get a reply back from Mausberry though, and the guy (if it's only 1 guy or a full staff, I don't know) said it was probably a faulty solder joint on the USB connector, and he had no problem sending me a replacement. I asked him if he could add some jumper pins and he said that was no problem. So I got that happening.

+1 for Firefox. I originally used Netscape Navigator (wow I'm old), then moved on to Internet Explorer. Then I decided to try something newer/different and gave Mozilla's collection of software a try (where you could get Navigator for web, Communicator for Email, and ChatZilla for IRC all in one). Then there were some issues, and I knew I could always trust Microsoft's brand (at the time) and would often times switch back to IE. Then Mozilla came out with FireFox, and it's been my browser of choice ever since. On my cellphone, it came with Safari, which I didn't really like so I installed FireFox for that. My tablet came with Chrome (it's an android), and I like it to a point, but I find it lacking in some areas, so I installed FireFox along side so I could swap as needed. EDIT

Does the Musicmatch software still work so you can at least listen to the music? I'm not familiar with it, like if it's an online only sort of deal. But if you can at least listen to the music, there a bunch of audio grabbers out there (like screen grabbers) that you could use to just record the audio coming out as an unrestricted/lossless wav (cd) format. Then you can compress it if you want into FLAC or MP3 or whatever.

Added Mat Mania and Bosconian to the list! Thanks @patrickfx!! These were already added.. did somebody else request them before? It's been a long day lol.

Consider it added! I'll work on that Sunday. I'm actually feeling a bit under the weather today, so I'm going to bed early before work in the morning.

Adultery is looking into adding this functionality. I'll report back if we need any help!

I haven't gone back to look at the DIPs in more detail.. is there a SLOW speed setting? I only recall seeing FAST and NORMAL. If you're using SLOW, you're probably making it more difficult. Updated OP, DB, RSS PS - I forgot to ask you Cynicaster... what is your favorite game that would be acceptable for our competition? We'll add it as a November Bonus.

Yes, they've "gone away". GC created them manually, rather than some script built into the DB manager. It might be possible for Adultery to tweak the program to come up with something, since we already include a link to the marquee as part of the table generation. I'll let you know.

Thanks for the list Cynicaster! I've heard of Galaga '88, Xevious, Black Widow.. Those others I've never seen/heard of, so it'll be nice to see them added.