What would it take to run batocera on the Gameshell?

Hi,

Seeing little development on the launcher and the official image (which seems stuck on debian stretch or buster, let’s hope that changes! :crossed_fingers: ) I’m looking at batocera which seems to be a solid retrogaming distribution.

Looking at the download page Batocera.linux and the wiki page for hardware supported choose_a_single_board_computer [Batocera.linux - Wiki] I can see keywords in common with the gameshell architecture (mali, allwinner, armv7l, etc.) so there might be some overlap.

As far as the low resolution is concerned (320x240 in our case), it seems that it could be supported since the Retroflag GPi Case has this resolution see the wiki choose_a_handheld [Batocera.linux - Wiki]

Does any one know how one should proceed to run / test / develop a version of batocera for the gameshell ?

I’ve posted the question on their forum to ask the same question, will post the link when the post gets approved.

Post on the batocera forum :

No feedback here, but I’m still looking into it.

Would a screenshot as progress report interest anyone ?

I’m still quite far from getting there, this photo is “only” batocera-emulationstation compiled for the orange-pc target and then copied to the debian image built with clockworkpi-debian I still have a lot to figure out with customizing kernel & u-boot integration but baby steps :baby: :footprints:

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A bit more progress WIP: [board/batocera] initial work to get clockworkpi gameshell support by arthurlutz · Pull Request #5887 · batocera-linux/batocera.linux · GitHub after building parts of batocera and copying/testing them on the hardware running clockwork-debian, I’m now trying to compile and build an image. Thanks for any feedback.

More progress today :tada: : finally got to compile and build an image from scratch with the clockworkpi target. Patches for kernel and u-boot applied correctly. I end up with an image that doesn’t boot… but… I tried swapping the working kernel with the new kernel and I get the screen turning on and being glitchy, so there’s some progress !

To understand more precisely what’s going on I need to dig out the cables to access the UART and see if I can get some debug info. If anyone knows how to debug such and image, I can upload it somewhere for people to test. (or if you know how to debug it on qemu-system-arm I’d take your tips).