Armbian build system with clockwork GameShell support

GameShell Firmware and Apps
1

Hi all,

I have been working on a fork of the armbian build system that will support the Gameshell. Currently, it builds an SD Card image, installs launchergo and retroarch, and some other bits, and gets the GameShell OS mostly working on stock armbian.

Tested with Armbian 24.02 and kernel 6.1 and kernel 6.6

Items not working yet:

  • bluetooth, not sure why, may have something to do with this: Home · clockworkpi/bluetooth Wiki · GitHub which I cannot get to work
  • Audio - it seems the volume control for Master isn’t controlling the actual audio out. Some other control called “AIF1 DA0” seems to be it, but I don’t know how to remap it.
  • gadget ethernet: this may be a kernel thing or just a kernel commandline thing, I haven’t tested it yet
  • windows share support: This is a matter of properly setting up samba.

Trying it out:
on a linux machine, or in wsl2 with ubuntu 22.04 run:

# git clone https://github.com/uberlinuxguy/armbian-build.git
# cd armbian-build/
# ./compile.sh  BOARD=clockworkpi-gameshell BRANCH=current RELEASE=bookworm KERNEL_CONFIGURE=no

This will take a while. It may ask you if you want to download the full linux kernel source, say yes if it does.

Once complete, you will find an image file in output/images/ That should be able to be written to an SD card and booted in a GameShell.

If you are interested in hacking around, look at armbian-build/config/boards/clockworkpi-gameshell.csc That is where most of the customizing magic happens.

Special thanks to @guu as most of the things I have pulled together came from repositories they were owner of.

Please let me know if you have any insight on how to fix the bluetooth, audio, or other issues mentionede above. I’ll try to keep the repo up to date with the latest commits from the main repo as well.

Oh and ssh is currently the best way to get in and do stuff, user and password are both cpi just like the original fw.

I will be opening a PR with Armbian to include this in the main repo once I get the issues above sorted.

For those who don’t want to or can’t do the build themselves:

Armbian 24.02 with kernel 6.1.68:

Armbian 24.02 with kernel 6.6.8:

–
Uber Linux Guy

4 Likes
2

for the audio issue, it seems if you ssh in, run alsamixer and select the actual sound card instead of the pulse audio card, you can turn the AIF1 DA0 slider up, then you CAN control the volume via the master volume in retroarch. I might have to include an asound.state file that has that volume set to max as a workaround.

3

Nice build! I don’t get status LEDs on the back of the SBC, and I miss the penguin-in-goggles bootsplash, but mgba perf is much better and it will be a treat to use a modern kernel and toolchain. I’ll try building tic80 and let you know what shakes out.

4

Thank you for your work, @uberlinuxguy!
With your image, I got moonlight running so I can now stream from steam.
Hope your improvements make it into the main repository!

Biggest issue I have at the moment however is that retroarch is really slow, especially the ps1 emulation. Not playable at all. Any tips on this?
Compiling the newest version does not help.