[OS] RetroArch - Debian OS image based on the minimal Debian (u-boot, kernel, and Debian from scratch) [v0.3]

[Joao_Manoel]

Thanks for your comments!

@r043v

rework on my launcher to make it debian friendly

This would be amazing I believe that you don’t need to make a deb file which is a bit complicated. Maybe a Makefile with install, and uninstall options is more than enough.

@r043v

don’t bother your time on hdmi, having it work is already great, if the original dev still work on it it will come alone soon or later

I’m inclined to it mainly because apparently our kernel patch modify the allwinner i2s driver to talk directly to the HDMI chip without a proper configuration. In the official image the HDMI is configured when u-boot loads, and after that I couldn’t see any communication to the HDMI driver.

I’m afraid that even if I manage to get the HDMI driver working with audio, the modifications made in our i2s driver will prevent it to work and I would be in the darkness without knowing if the problem is in the HDMI driver, or if the i2s driver is not complete …

@r043v

usb storage could be a valuable addon, anyway use filezilla or other for lambda users is not a pain

I agree, but I will probably add it in the future. I did some tests here and it worked nicely. The only problem I see is that we need to create a new partition/file because we cannot use the same file system the GameShell uses or it would probably corrupt the data. So the best I can think is for instance a 512 MB partition just for transfer files. For example: When you plug the GameShell to the computer it would appear a 512 MB drive on your PC, and you can just copy the files and the GameShell cannot see the files before you eject it from your computer. When the drive is ejected we mount the partition in the GameShell and we can run a small script to copy the files to a final directory inside the GameShell file system… FileZilla is very nice, but sometimes you don’t have it easily available and you just want to copy one single file. The other thing is that we transform the GameShell in a storage disk and we have another excuse to have it in our backpack

@r043v

for bt while arch dev i spend some times trying to use the mainline btattach instead of the proprietary current method, not have luck yet

I tried this as well… No luck, but maybe there is a way… We have to find what is the difference between what the Rpi3 implements and the Ampak AP6212.

@r043v

custom retroarch is pretty great and a perfect solution but could be limiting in the future, if by luck changes could be mainlined it will be awesome, else it could be difficult to update as your patch will also need be maintain along retroarch revisions

Precisely. RetroaArch has very active development and my patch needs to change frequently. Most of the cases it is a easy fix, but it require a bit of maintenance. My first suggestion is that we don’t need to have all the time the latest RetroArch. I barely see a big change for one version to the other, so maybe we can skip the last digit versions, let’s say we jump from 1.8.x to 1.9.0 and 2.0.0 instead of 1.9.1, 1.9.2, 1.93… This would give us some time to mature our version without losing much.

@r043v

other possibility, as our platform is fixed we could directly read “keyboard” input file from a tiny deamon to manage volume & backlight globally (like the wm do into arch) ?
on the same spirit, it seem sdl2 could directly use kmsdrm and evdev, it may be possible on special key to show a gui would take hand over retroarch to allow system full control ?

This is another possibility, maybe @Petrakis could help us.