Picade without Retropie

Picade
1

I have recently finished building kit with 8" screen. A lovely kit, right down to the beautiful packagaing. Thanks, Pimoroni! :)

I don’t know if most people run RetroPie. I so far just want to use Picade to run some home-brew Python//Pygame and maybe C/SDL games. The Python thing is to resurrect some 2D retro games I did a year or two back with a Code Club in a primary school.

Anyway, at the moment I am running standard Raspbian desktop. I followed the advice to put hdmi_force_hotplug=1 in boot config. Worked fine and booted to desktop. Looks cute! The driver for Picade Hat installed fine too. After a while I realised display was not running full resolution - only 640x480 I think. Suppose that makes sense as safe mode for not detecting display powered from USB, Eventually I ended up with this in /boot/config.txt:

hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=16
frame_buffer_width=1024
frame_buffer_height=768

which gives native 1024x768 and looks nice and crisp.

Maybe I should just try running Raspbian lite, without desktop, but this has got me started. Good luck to fellow Picade builders!

2

There is an option in raspi config to boot to the command line instead of the desktop GUI. It doesn’t make your install image any smaller but will save on resources when the Pi is running.
I do it on my headless setups as I find it easier to do thigs from the GUI than the command line. Once I have everything the way I want it I toggle it to boot to the command line. Then latter on if I need to tweak something I just toggle it back and reboot to the desktop.

3

Ah, thank you. That sounds very handy.