So you may have seen earlier posts of mine and comments around the whole “Creation Station Arcade” (sometimes called MadeArcade). Basically I’m attempting to get more modern machines under the hood of arcade machines.
The .elf file itself has had some issues and is somewhat limited:
- I’ve found it crashes quite a bit on somewhat simple games
- It’s designed to hog and take over an entire Raspberry Pi Zero and use GPIO
- The McAirpos is a great patch/wrapper to use when you want to put this on a retro game box with multiple games…
I felt like we could streamline this even more with “real”, and since the code is open source we can fearlessly dive into it and see if there’s a “more root way to get what we want”.
After a good couple weekends of “compound engineering” (this is what we call engineering where you basically talk to a bot all day, sometimes while watching tv) I’ve been able to produce REAL native executables from our PNG files!
Be aware: This is still working out some kinks and is still somewhat untested.
- Simply export your PNG file from MakeCode Arcade
- Pick which platform you want to use (x86 = intel/amd style machines, arm = raspberry pi style)
- Drop your PNG on the dropzone
- Wait for it…
- BOOM download the executable for your desktop!
Right now it only supports Linux because that’s my goal: an arcade machine that doesn’t need the sniffing and faking of keyboard inputs, gpio inputs, and sniffing to kill and respawn the PID (McAirpos style). It supports USB gamepads and the keyboard out of the box. Reset and menu just work! Oh also 4 player is just there and working as well.
I’ve tested on a weaksauce chrombook-turned-linux-machine and a Raspberry Pi 3. I have other tests I’m going to run yet including “what extensions are supported” and “what’s the weakest system this can run on”.
If you combine this output with my “single-native-arcade” branch of CreationStationArcade:
You can basically run that script in a Raspberry Pi 3, telling it which game you’d like to launch on boot and BAM you are rocking and rolling.
Future
- Testing on more machine types
- Testing extension support and what it’s limits are
- See if I can crash it
- Multi-game arcade setup in CreationStationArcade using this
- Cleaner documentation, right now it’s all just agent-built and may be tricky to read
Excited to see/hear if anyone else finds this useful. I’m really excited to see a native game spit out that I can simply just run on a linux machine!
References and other posts: