piconsole - The Raspberry Pi retro videogame console project

Copyright (C) 2017 Michael Andrew Nixon

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

What is this?

A collection of software (for the Raspberry Pi), firmware (for microcontrollers) and schematics to allow you to build a retro videogames console, designed to be used alongside RetroPie - https://retropie.org.uk/ - to enhance the experience by providing:

• Clean power-up and shutdown sequence for the Raspberry Pi system
• Reset button support to back-out of a running game without needing a hotkey
• The daemon automatically fixes controller configuration files generated by Emulation Station to disable unwanted emulator hotkeys - such as load/save state, reset emulator and exit emulator (each hotkey can be disabled individually depending on your preferences)
  • You will never accidentally exit the game again!
  • I know you can disable the global RetroArch hotkey in newer versions of RetroPie, but that's silly - it's a useful hotkey and without it you can no longer access RetroArch configuration in-game (select+X). This hot-patching allows you to keep the global hotkey enabled but just have the annoying hotkey combinations disabled.
  • It works on the fly, patching configuration files as they change, get created or at system startup/shutdown (configurable).
• Sony DualShock 4 lightbar color enhancement
  • If you are using native DS4 support in newer kernels rather than ds4drv, this will allow you to change the lightbar color depending on battery charge level, etc.
• Custom kernels with the following benefits over the current official Pi kernels:
  • Force feedback support for as many controller adaptors as I could enable it for
  • Support for brand new DualShock 4 controllers sold since mid 2016.
  • Please use a good power supply!

See it in action here, being constructed inside an old PlayStation: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqM2eWK6z3M0DvGwcI3AX9BVud6s98hcG

Dependencies / compiler information

• piconsole (daemon for Raspberry Pi):

  • Compilation only tested and supported under free pascal 3.
  • Requires the rpiio library - https://github.com/zipplet/rpiio
  • Requires the lcore library - https://github.com/zipplet/lcore

• firmware / ATTINY85 (firmware for the control PCB without fan PWM):

  • Compiles with Atmel Studio 7.0
  • Should also fit on the smaller ATTINY chips (the code compiles to <2KB)