#nespi

My drawing of Charles Leclerc I made for my sister as birthday present

Drawing of Charles Leclerc

J’ai gagné un Nespi case plus grâce à Recalbox !!

Il fallait bien que ça arrive un jour, j’ai gagné à un concours !! C’est Recalbox qui m’a fait gagné (more…)

I really wanted to like this case, but it looks now like I’m going to have to abandon it in favor of another one for the RetroPie I’m building.  First, there were power supply issues with it that required me to rewire the power switch and supply lines.  Not a big deal I thought, but a pain.  Now there is another issue apparently, involving the internal USB hub and the latest version of Raspian (4.14/Stretch) that comes bundled with the RetroPie install download.

It seems that there is a bug in Raspian (or maybe its a HW issue with the hub) that casues endless error messages to be logged to the files in /var/log.  It may or may not also be related to using the XBox wireless dongle on these outside USB ports, this is what others have run into who use this setup. Things kind of work, but your disk fills up, and it also appears to be the cause of the hangs I experienced.  

Options here are:

Downgrade to Raspian Jessie (you will have to manually install Retropie on it).  People report this is OK but have not tried it

You can disable logging, but this is only a partial fix - performance is still impacted because the OS is taking exceptions constanty

Hack your case to allow you to access the internal USB ports of the Pi instead of the hub (for me, file this under, what’s the point?)

Wait for a fix from Raspian - they are aware of it, I see activity in GitHub about this bug. Not sure when it will be fixed - the 4.14-70 kernel still has it.

So I had to abandon my RetroPie project using the 220-in-1 game case.  A short circuit developed somewhere in the LCD/Pi assembly, which was quite soldered together.  

I suspect maybe contamination from trimming leads, or perhaps a solder joint went wrong.  It may have caused subsequent damage to the Pi, and then the only way to save the LCD would be to unsolder the 40 pin header I direct soldered to the Pi to save space.  Attempts to do this, at least with my equipment, were futile.

Live and learn.  I will try again, with a more well-tried path, probably a Pi-GRRL kit.

In the meantime though, I have had a lot of luck with my other retropie setup, using this nice NESPi case (its not fully together here but you can see the size)

This peanut-sized thing has its own switch, reset, fan, and usb ports below the flap, and takes a Raspberry Pi 3B+ just fine.

I did have a bit of trouble with it causing undervoltage alerts and having flaky behavior.  Googling around I found that the wires used for the connections between the power socket and switch, and switch and Pi were skimpy, so I took it all apart and replaced with some thicker 22AWG wire.

The retropie project is coming along nicely, I am not sure if it will all work the way I like but one way or another it should wrap up in a bit.  Meanwhile, I already have a follow-on project.  I have been really impressed with the Retropie/EmulationStation/RetroArch setup and I would like to build a small console system for the living room that has a fully-fledged version of the emulator software.  The handheld I’m building will only really handle 2-button games, and my main target is to use it for pico-8 game testing.  

This project is more about having a loaded up game box that can play the classics, using real controllers on a larger screen.  I found this great NES-styled case to use for the Pi, which will be a model 3 B+.