It’s a kit set, so right now it’s a box of boxes of parts and a raspberry pi, but once it’s all assembled…
What a brilliant prize! I love it!
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What did you do to win that
I had my name drawn out of a hat, essentially!
I was at a conference for work this week, and one of the sponsoring companies (shout out to Morpht, an Australian-based web development company doing some cool things in the Drupal CMS space) was giving this away as an enter-your-name-to-win prize at their table in the sponsor’s room. I was looking around the tables, saw the box and went to see what it was, immediately got a huge grin on my face once I understood what it was (I’d not seen these before), and the next day got tapped on the shoulder and told that I’d won :) So I was either drawn at random, or else he remembered me as the person who had displayed the most child-like glee while looking at the box :)
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If it’s a stock Raspberry Pi (and it looks like it mostly is) get ready for a second round in terms of the build. RetroPi is a rabbit hole all its own, but hopefully a fun one.
It’s pretty neat that it includes a Pico-8 license. Pico-8 is a “virtual console” based on Python coding language. If you’ve ever had any interest in trying your hand at making a game, I can highly recommend the environment. I successfully made a scratch brick-breaker game with my own graphics and sounds/music to go along with it and it’s one of the more rewarding hobby projects I can think of. If not, there’s still some neat stuff to poke around with; it got a lot of attention from some prominent code monkeys in its early days and some of the demos created for it are properly incredible.
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I’m feeling a bit defeated right now.
The build is complete (thankfully I laughed heartily at their “this will take 2-3 hours” statement, and assumed correctly that I’d spend an entire day putting it together).
Call me crazy, but I thought there would be some classic games to play once it was built, yet the entire thing seems to be an empty shell with a “provide them yourself” deal and I don’t have any arcade roms. I have furthermore found it an exercise in frustration attempting to determine how best to remedy that.
The software side of things is very confusing in general. I wouldn’t feel nearly so deflated if I could play a game of Pac Man on it and feel like I’d achieved something.
This has pretty much consumed my entire weekend and I wish I’d done something else instead (which is sad because I was genuinely excited about this before). Hopefully it comes right later, but I’ve had enough for the moment.
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There’s also something weird happening with this thread. Clearly other people can see it, but… I can’t?! I can access it via the notifications menu because other people liked it, and I can find it by searching, but it’s not listed for me in the Computer Games category (whereas my BBC Micro thread for example is visible, so other things I’ve posted are showing up).
Oh, correction – it’s not listed under “Latest”, but it is listed under “Top”. It seems strange, anyhow.
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Is it still being weird?