BBB Gaming Cape

Wow!  Your phrase "labour of love" is very appropriate.  What a complete and carefully crafted project.

Max Thrun writes:

 

Again I got a patched version from portage and tried to compile it on the BeagleBone but it not only took ages but also ate up an enormous amount of RAM. At one point I was using a USB flash drive as swap space. Needless to say it failed to compile. I ended up just cross compiling it which seemed to work okay even though I didn't really setup a proper environment and was using my hosts systems header files.

This is the very reason why I have shied away from using Gentoo native on any of these ARM boards, despite it being my favourite distro on x86 equipment.  It's way beyond their memory, storage and CPU capabilities (in that order of importance).  Cross-compiling for the ARM target would be the only reasonable way of proceeding.

Binary distros are a better native fit until ARM machines becomes more fully endowed.  That's still some years away.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

This is the very reason why I have shied away from using Gentoo native on any of these ARM boards, despite it being my favourite distro on x86 equipment.  It's way beyond their memory, storage and CPU capabilities (in that order of importance).  Cross-compiling for the ARM target would be the only reasonable way of proceeding.

 

Binary distros are a better native fit until ARM machines becomes more fully endowed.  That's still some years away.

Interestingly, it's not so long ago that x86 systems were far less capable in terms of memory, storage and likely CPU than today's ARM systems, yet were perfectly capable of compiling everything required natively. How quickly we forget, and how quickly we bloat the software with unnecessary junk to the point this is no longer true.

Remember also that Raspbian was compiled on a bunch of i.MX5-QSB's where the only obvious advantage is having 1GB ram.  With the Wandboard Quad having 2GB, there's really no reason for not doing native builds today. Unless of course we persist in adding bloat to the point 2GB isn't enough

I'm still sticking to my line that trying to shoehorn a current, full x86 style desktop, distro onto an admittedly less capable Arm board is a daft thing to do.

selsinork wrote:

 

Interestingly, it's not so long ago that x86 systems were far less capable in terms of memory, storage and likely CPU than today's ARM systems, yet were perfectly capable of compiling everything required natively. How quickly we forget, and how quickly we bloat the software with unnecessary junk to the point this is no longer true.

That is so very true!!!

I've moved the rest of a long response to this thread owing to my change of topic.

is there a website to get this cape? or do we have to get the schematics and create our own cape?

Hi Ty,

There was a group buy of the the ready-made cape very recently (last month), but sadly I missed it otherwise I would have bought it too - see here: http://campaign.circuithub.com/beaglebone-gamingcape

However, from what I can see, all the design files are available on the author's site, and so it would be a quick thing to send off files for a PCB to be made - you'd still need to purchase the parts

and solder them yourself, but there is a nice video of the entire process, accelerated. Also the design files for the case are at that link too.

thanks for the info shabaz, yeah i missed the buy as well. wish i could have gotten one..oh well. im actually thinking about just putting my 4.3" cape on the BBB then get an android image and download an emulator via google store, then get the roms i have for the games i bought recently.