Jools

Coder n Geek.

RetroPie 3.0 beta 4 is released

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RetroPie is a system to build / configure and launch emulators on the Raspberry Pi.

RetroPie 3.0 beta 4 has been released. Changes include:

  • Work around issue with RetroArch GUI not accepting input/freezing.
  • Fixed up RetroArch control configuration via our new integrated input configuration.
  • Moved RetroArch joypad configurations to /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch-joypads

Pre-built images and further information are available from the RetroPie project website. For those who want to install on top of Raspbian – the system can be installed directly from the GitHub project, where you can also find a detailed list of changes.

Good video introductory here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbCvNsyLmQw

RetroPie 3.0 beta 3 is released

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RetroPie is a system to build / configure and launch emulators on the Raspberry Pi.

RetroPie 3.0 beta 3 has been released. Changes include:

  • Integrated controls for emulationstation / retroarch – on first start  emulationstation will ask for controls to be configured, and will then also configure retroarch based on your choices. Note there will be a delay after selecting OK whilst this is done – this will be improved later to give feedback so it doesn’t look as though ES has frozen.
  • New experimental modules/emulators: limelight (Networked game streamer for Steam), lr-tgbdual (gameboy color emu with link support), DXX-Rebirth port (Decent 1/2), lr-mednafen-wswan (Wonderswan emu), lr-mednagen-gbp (NeoGeo Pocket emu), uae4arm (Amiga emu), lr-fuse (ZX Spectrum emu), lr-caprice32 (Amstrad CPC emu), lr-gw (Game and Watch simulator). All modules prefixed with lr- are libretro cores for use
    with Retroarch.
  • New startup picture with new RetroPie logo.
  • Added additional ES theme “Color Pi”
  • Dosbox bug fixes / Ability to launch custom shell scripts.
  • Wifi configuration under RetroPie menu.
  • PS3 controller setup improvements
  • Various other fixes / improvements.

Pre-built images and further information are available from the RetroPie project website. For those who want to install on top of Raspbian – the system can be installed directly from the GitHub project, where you can also find a detailed list of changes.

RetroPie_Logo_Col2

Insert Disk 2 album by Instant Remedy

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Seven years in the making, the latest album Insert Disk 2 by Instant Remedy is now available to pre-order from Dutch label 010101 Music (of “Paula Agnus Denise” fame). The album features 12 remixes of Amiga game and demo music, expertly mastered by Holger Lagerfeldt and will premiere June 20th, 2015 at the Back in Time Brighton party.

Links:

ZX Spectrum: a visual compendium / The Spectrum Works album on Kickstarter

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It’s the final week of this latest venture by Bitmap Books. This Kickstarter has several stretch goals, the highlight of which has to be The Spectrum Works album by veteran musician Allister Brimble. Tracks on the CD will include modern remixes of classic ZX Spectrum tracks such as Robocop (Jonathan Dunn), Agent X (Tim Follin) and Glider Rider (David Whittaker). This CD will only be available to Kickstarter backers and not available afterwards.

Links: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2146199819/zx-spectrum-a-visual-compendium-by-bitmap-books

Update for Xubuntu / Ubuntu Base 14.04 for the O2 Joggler

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Xubuntu 14.04 and the 14.04 Ubuntu base image have been updated. I have discontinued all the Joggler distros except this one now.

Changes from previous image:

  • Some package changes/pinning to fix some dependency issues
  • Includes Kodi 14.2 (With the Re-touched skin)
  • Kernel 3.2.69
  • Use r8168-dkms from Ubuntu repository
  • Package Rollups

Images and instructions are available here:

https://jwills.co.uk/projects/joggler-xubuntu/

XBMC4Xbox 3.5.1 is released

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XBMC4Xbox 3.5.1 is now available. It is a minor update from 3.5 to fix some recent problems with scrapers and the Addon installer:

  • Fixes for the TMDB scraper – including search, certification, and images.
  • Updates to the Addons installer script – it now includes the XBMC Gotham repository, as well as the Kodi Helix repository. Unfortunately we have no working youtube addon currently as there was an API change on youtube which stopped the older youtube addon working. There is a newer one for Kodi, but it requires some changes to be made compatible with XBMC4Xbox.
  • Moved our XBMC4Xbox Addons repository off Google Code, since that service is closing down. It is now hosted on our own equipment along with the main XBMC4Xbox repository.

Thanks

Thanks to Dan Dar3 and Dom for contributing to the TMDB fixes. Thanks also to everyone who helps out on the forum.

If you enjoy using XBMC4Xbox and want to show your support for the ongoing development please consider making a donation to the project. Please also do join in the discussions over at our Forum.

Obtaining XBMC4Xbox

See the development page for links to the source code and the SVN repository. For binary builds, read the information on the download page. For those that want to build from source, 3.5.1 is tagged here: https://svn.exotica.org.uk:8443/xbmc4xbox/tags/3.5.1/.

Dave Lowe / Uncle Art on Kickstarter

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Tuesday, 10 March 2015


Dave Lowe aka Uncle Art and his daughter Holly Jazz Lowe have started a Kickstarter project to create a double album called “A Temporal Shift” – with originals and remakes of Dave Lowe’s Amiga, Atari and C64 Music – Link to project. Well worth backing in our opinion!

Apologies (again) for lack of news updates here. There have been some changes around the site though. Changes since the last update include:

Versions 61 & 62 of the High Voltage SID Collection were released by the HVSC Team. Our mirror and search interface has been updated with v62. The collection now contains more than 46,000 SIDs!

There has been some work on the wiki too – recently updated pages include List of games and demos with studio CD versions, and Lost In Translation/Shadow Of The Beast which now has platform screenshots and audio comparisons. The Shadow of the Beast page has also been updated with screenshots – thanks XtC.

Links:

Kernel/Package updates

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All currently maintained images have been updated to kernel 3.2.63 as well as having all packages updated. XBMC 13.2 has been added to the Joggler repository, and is included in the updates. Currently the squeezeplay installer script isn’t working, but hopefully this will be fixed soon by the maintainer. As the script is downloaded – it can be sorted later without needing to change anything in the builds.

XBMC4Xbox 3.5 is released

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SettingsAfter more than a year’s work since v3.3, we are very pleased to announce XBMC4Xbox version v3.5. A large number of new features and improvements have been made since v3.3, including the integration of Python 2.7, improved video playback, updates to the skinning engine, scraper fixes, and plenty of bug fixes.

Key improvements:

Python 2.7 & API improvements

Python support in XBMC4Xbox has been overhauled, with the out of date Python 2.4 replaced with Python 2.7. This update, along with the addition of some missing API functions brings much better compatibility with Kodi (Formerly XBMC) plugins. The Addons4Xbox installer has also been updated, allowing many plugins written for Kodi to work right out of the box. The Python 2.7 update also brings performance improvements, and comes with fully working libraries for sqlite3, and SSL amongst others.

DVDPlayer updates

DVDPlayer (The main video player in XBMC4Xbox) has received numerous changes, including having the FFMpeg core libraries updated to v1.2.8 which brings a variety of new codecs, bug-fixes, and optimisations from the previous 0.10.x version. The libraries used for DVD navigation have also been updated which should bring better compatibility with problematic DVD menus.

Scraper fixes and clean-ups

We had a lot of broken and unmaintained scrapers with the previously version of XBMC4Xbox. With the 3.5 release only a few are included, but they are all maintained and working. We have scrapers for themoviedb.org, thetvdb.com as well as theaudiodb.com for music. Please do support and contribute to these open database projects, as the content and results are only as good as the information people have contributed.

PAPlayer updates

PAPlayer (the core audio player in XBMC4Xbox) has received some updates since the last version of XBMC4Xbox. DVDPlayer’s FFMpeg libraries are now used for decoding of some audio formats which means some of the old out of date libraries we used previously are no longer needed. This simplifies maintenance, and brings with it better performance and compatibility. The FFMpeg libraries are now used for OGG, FLAC, AAC, AC3,and DTS.

Skinning improvements

A variety of improvements have been backported from Kodi for the skin engine. This allows skins and features for Kodi to be more easily implemented. Thanks to the skin developers who requested changes/features and helped with testing. We currently ship with the same selection of skins as with v3.3 – Confluence Lite, Confluence, Project Mayhem III, and the PM3HD skin, but more can be found on the skin development section of our forum (such as the excellent Xbox Extended skin from Dom).

New branding

Thanks to SwedishGojira we now have our own project branding – our new XBMC4Xbox logo is used on our project site as well as for the XBMC4Xbox boot-up splash. Since the renaming of XBMC to Kodi, there has been some discussion regarding our name. I can confirm we are keeping the name XBMC4Xbox for our project. Changing it now would just introduce more confusion.

Transifex integration

Thanks to Kodi and their useful tools for handling translations, we are now using the on-line service Transifex to manage translations for the project. This means anyone who wants to help improve translations can now go and sign up over at https://www.transifex.com/organization/xbmc4xbox and start translating the software to their favourite language via the easy to use web interface. The updated translations can then be merged back into the XBMC4Xbox code base by us.

Bug fixes

There have been many bug fixes around the software with around 44 issues on the bugtracker resolved/fixed as well as more reported via the forum. Thanks to all those that have reported bugs, provided fixes & patches, and helped with testing.

Thanks

As well as the key features above, many other changes have been made with a lot of backported features and fixes from Kodi. Thanks to Team Kodi for creating our favourite media center software 🙂 Thanks also to all those who help and contribute to our project and forum.

If you enjoy using XBMC4Xbox and want to show your support for the ongoing development please consider making a donation to the project. Please also do join in the discussions over at our Forum.

Obtaining XBMC4Xbox

See the development page for links to the source code and the SVN repository. For binary builds, read the information on the download page. For those that want to build from source, 3.5 is tagged here: https://svn.exotica.org.uk:8443/xbmc4xbox/tags/3.5/.