Raspberry Pi Explorations

Since I got challenged to porting my game to the Raspberry Pi, I got myself one of these devices. Here I will document my explorations of this device.

• I installed an OS image using RPi sd card builder tool.
• Upon booting, you get access to a tool called 'raspi-config' which lets you resize the root filesystem to take up the full size of the SD card.
• raspi-config also lets you change the keyboard mapping. This worked for the text mode keyboard, but in X I still have a UK keyboard mapping. Editing /etc/default/keyboard did not help. Typing 'setxkbmap us' in a xterm does fix it though. Why is this still a problem? It got reported a long time ago.
• I am not impressed with the case I bought for it. It is very fragile and hard to open and close. My advice is to shop for something better.
• Hooking it up to the DVI input of my Samsung SyncMaster 172w did not work. My Dell Ultrasharp works superbly at 1920x1200 though.
• You can power the device with a microUSB cable that is pligged into an iPhone charger.
• The graphics chip is the Broadcom VideoCoreIV and there is a github for it. Note that a misspelling as VideCoreIV is often repeated.
• Apparently you can do OpenGLES2 without X.
• A guide on EGL on the Pi.
• The VideoCoreIV driver lacks both GL_OES_texture_half_float and GL_OES_depth_texture which would make shadow mapping a very expensive operation. I think I will have to leave out shadows from my Little Crane port.
• I have not been able to find support for OpenSLES on the Raspberry Pi.
• To get XWindow use the full screen on TVs, you need to disable overscan in /boot/config.txt
• To get natural scrolling, like OSX does, you need to: apt-get install x11-xserver-utils followed by echo "pointer = 1 2 3 5 4 7 6 8 9 10 11 12" > ~/.Xmodmap && xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap