Setting up my Raspberry Pi 2 for Retro Gaming

Earlier in the year I purchased a Raspberry Pi 2 and have been playing around with different distro’s. One interesting distro that I came across was RetroPie. While RetroPie currently has a newer version of their distro in Beta form (Beta 4 at the time of posting), I’m posting these directions as reference instructions to myself and others.

Below you’ll find setup/config instructions specific to RetroPie v2.6 and the parts I’ve listed in my setup. Content below may also be relevant for newer version of RetroPie, however, your mileage may vary and some of the steps may not be necessary in version 3+.

Specs on My Pie

Parts List

 

Guide

Install Operating System

There are a number of Operating Systems you can install and run on your Raspberry Pi, but I won’t cover them all here. Instead I’ll be focusing on installing and configuring RetroPie, which is an Operating System based on Debian Linux with a heavy focus on video game emulation. This guide is also targeted towards Windows users. If you’ll be using Mac or Linux there are other guides that you can follow to install the Operating System on your card.

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OpenID Authentication Plugin for vBulletin 4

Recently I volunteered to help fix an existing project or develop an OpenID authentication plugin for the vBulletin platform. The group in need was UbuntuForums.org and I would have never known if it hadn’t been for Jorge Castro’s public request for help.

The Story

The existing plugin had been developed specifically for vBulletin 3.x, however, they are (as of writing this) in the process of upgrading their forums to vBulletin 4 especially wanted OpenID to be available when they make the upgrade. That’s where I came in.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, provided me with necessary software licenses for vBulletin 4 and from there it was a lot of late nights attempting to simply get a successful OpenID process to occur.

Working a full time job doesn’t make projects like this as easy as I remember them once being… Nonetheless I was able to successful port the plugin to vB4 where there were several significant differences that took me some time to address and to be honest, the previous code was a bit more complicated to follow than it should have been.

One major change from vB3 to vB4 was the way templates work. I’d never worked with vBulletin before, but I’ve had an extensive amount of experience with phpBB and bbPress in the past. After getting over the frustration of how vBulletin prefers to store ALL template information (in the database rather than pull from template files) I was ready to begin the repair process.

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Debugging PHP in Ubuntu using Eclipse

This guide walks you through the necessary steps to configure the Eclipse IDE for PHP debugging. This can be very handy, especially when you’re trying to resolve an issue in a complex PHP application or plug-in.

Things you’ll need

  • Eclipse
  • Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT)
  • Xdebug
Assumptions
This article assumes that you are configuring Eclipse and Xdebug for development on a localhost web server. If you are not, be sure to make appropriate adjustments to accommodation your needs. Likely the only changes you will need to make will be differences in connecting to your server verses localhost.

Quick Overview

For those that are unaware, Eclipse is a very popular IDE for developing in Java. However, Eclipse is much more powerful than that and can in fact easily be used for developing in many other languages including PHP.

Xdebug is a brilliant debugging extension designed for use with PHP. Once configured, Xdebug will allow you to remotely connect to your web server… or in my case connect to my development localhost web server. Rather than using crude echo and logging techniques to debug your PHP code, Xdebug allows you to literally step through and inspect values and function flows in real-time.

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Making CSS UL Menu’s Browser-Consistent

If you’ve ever made a web site and wanted it to look consistent from one browser to the next, then you’re well away of the difficulties that are involved. Fixing these sorts of styling issues can be a major annoyance, however, I like to hunt down issues on my own pages from time to time and stand up to the challenge.

One issue that I can across today was dealing with horizontal menu positioning using unordered lists (<UL>) and some positioning. The positioning wasn’t consistent between browsers or even operating systems.

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[How to] Create a bootable USB stick on OS X

A couple of days ago I decided to reinstall my operating system since it was failing. I quickly realized that the only functional system that I had at the time was my MacBook Pro. After a bit of Googling, I came up with a pretty straightforward guide, but they really could have formated it to make it easier to follow.

I’m going to run you through the same steps and you should be able to use this guide to create a bootable USB stick for Windows, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.

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Ubuntu Software Center vs. Mac App Store

As many of you may already know, Mac OS X now comes installed with a “Mac App Store”. Ubuntu also comes installed with an “Ubuntu Software Center”. Both of these applications serve the same general functionality in very similar formats, but I’m going to take a look at what needs to be improved in the Ubuntu Software Center.

First off, lets take a look at both of these applications from a first impressions point of view. Its pretty obvious at a glance that the user interface of these applications are eerily similar. It’s also pretty obvious that one app has received a little more attention to detail and aesthetics.

First Glance

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First Time to the West Coast

I went on a business trip recently to Reno, NV. While I was out that way I decided to make a quick trip to Los Angeles, CA and see the West Coast for the first time.

It was a fun trip and I took a lot of pictures. Unfortunately it rained most of the time I was in LA and the pictures I took didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped. I do however have some pretty fantastic pictures from my trip that I wanted to share.

Me at North Lake Tahoe in Nevada.
Me at North Lake Tahoe in Nevada.
Room 1191 view from the Grand Sierra Hotel & Resort.
Room 1191 view from the Grand Sierra Hotel & Resort.

This was a pretty interesting view with the clouds and the mountains surrounding everything. There was basically a 360 degree view of these mountains.

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Akismet + phpBB3 = Clean Forums

Update: deprecated by phpBB 3.1+

I’ve dealt with spam registrations and spam posts for years now in an online forum that I host. Its a burden on the users and a burden on (especially) the owner. No one wants to use a forum that can’t seem to control spam and no one wants to have a daily routine of manually purging hundreds of posts and users either! That’s where Akismet comes into play. 😉

I’ve used it in combination with WordPress from the beginning and to-date it has blocked nearly 500k spam comments! I enjoy working with web stuff, but I enjoy hacking it together even more.. so I’ve put together a “mod” package that will harness the power of Akismet and its super easy to install! While it won’t take care of spam registrations (you’ll need something else for that), it should be able to dramatically curb spam posts!

What you need

  • A web server running at least PHP 5 with phpBB 3 installed (I do not support phpBB2 or lower).
  • An Akismet API Key (* Free for personal use, the donation bar DOES drop to $0, though donate if you wish).
  • My phpBB + Akismet Installation package
  • FTP Access to your phpBB server
  • 15-20 minutes for setup time

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Create a Bootable Windows 7 x64 Install Flash Drive from 32-bit Windows

Creating a bootable Windows 7 x64 flash drive from within a 32-bit install of Windows is not as straight forward as it may seem. I recently had to go through this process myself, so I’ll document the steps below.

Things you’ll need

  1. Windows 7 x64 disc image
  2. Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool
  3. 32-bit bootsect.exe

Create the installer

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Nvidia patches a bug I’ve waited 9 months for…

I’ve been following an Nvidia bug that’s been affecting me for a while now and am happy to say that its apparently been fixed! I say apparently, because I’ve not been around my Linux box for several days (due to the holidays) and haven’t had a chance to confirm for myself.

If you have an Nvidia card, especially the 7300le model like I have, and have had difficulties using Unity 3D with the proprietary drivers, then you may have experienced this bug: [nvidia, 7300, 7400] display freeze when using unity desktop

Nvidia has just released an update which resolves this issue and it can easily be installed right away!

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What do you install in your Ubuntu?

I’ve been keeping lists for a few years of the applications that I install every time I do a fresh install of Ubuntu. I recently made a new list for Ubuntu 11.10…

  • Cheese
  • Chromium Web Browser
  • CompizConfig Settings Manager
  • Dropbox
  • EasyTAG
  • Enable Commercial DVD Playback
  • FileZilla
  • Geany
  • Opera Web Browser
  • RapidSVN
  • Spotify
  • The GIMP
  • Ubuntu Restricted Extras
  • VLC
  • Wakoopa

The applications that I install haven’t changed a whole lot over the years, but it leaves me wondering what applications make the cut for others!