TourRobot

TourRobot
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Primary Contact	Matt Little‎
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Giving tours around the hackspace takes time and effort. So the obvious solution is to build a robot to do it. Here are the details and build log.

Start 27/11/13 Basic base is the blue robot from Real Robots Magazine

Update 08/10/2012

Performance woes with SDLMAME in fullscreen.

• tried a fresh PC with oodles of CPU/RAM - same result!
• registered on SDLMAME forum but registration needs approval - still waiting
• posted findings on MAME subreddit - general advice is "you need a much faster PC/GFX card to run SDLMAME these days"
• need to obtain and drop back to ancient xmame version
• find or make a slimmer case for new PC

Update 12/10/2012

• xmame (0.106-3.2 from http://packages.debian.org/source/squeeze/xmame I think) installed from the Debian package
• scaling problems again and now ALSA sound issues which might be down to the slow video rate
• a lot of messing around found a good video setup:
  • xmame -video-mode 1 -fullscreen -fm 640x480x16 defender
• still need to work on the video modes and the general settings for performance
• wahcade setup required
• keyboard setup for all games

• http://www.anti-particle.com/forum_phpbb3/viewforum.php?f=2
• http://wahki.mameau.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

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The development pages from some years back: http://www.tecspy.com/arcade

• • recover games (and most importantly, the high scores) from the dead laptop
    • HDD totally dead :( Need to obtain ROM sets again
  • mamed front end http://phulshof.home.xs4all.nl/mame.html - compile and tweak
  • better linux distro base - have kubuntu 7.10 - want Knoppix 6
  • rewire controls matrix - should take a couple of hours
  • Noisy fan on PC - heatpipe? ideas please
  • Priority! Gauntlet rev 14 http://www.rom-world.com/file.php?id=23575

Update: 22/07/2011

I have now replaced the replacement PC! Seems to work mostly but some full system freezes have happened :(

MAMED has now been built and it works! After all these years the SDL libs are still compatible.

The keyboard controller seems to work!

• more button wiring to do
• more tweaking of mamed config
• more USB PlayStation2 contollers on the way

TODO: Michael Erskine 09:06, 7 December 2011 (EST)

• replace LAN cable run from members room
• minimal Xorg server installation with BlackBox window manager or equivalent
  • replace GDM with straight startx as low-permissions user
  • replace XFCE with plain X init straight into mamed front end
• screen bezel fitting
  • mark screen geometry when bezel fitted and screen in position
  • router work on sizing and chamfer
  • blackout tape and foam padding

Update: 05/04/2012

The machine is now in the studio (again!) and we have a working PC with a recent Xubuntu, functional mame install and all three DVDs of ROMs installed. The next stage is to get the mamed front-end starting automatically as an unprivileged user.

• Where I would previously have just used inittab, Ubuntu now uses upstart: -
  • https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBootupHowto
  • http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/
• so we could have xdm (or equivalent) auto-login as the mame user and have their xinit launch mamed as the only X client
  • create user and give access to all the files required