hardware

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Retropie MegaDrive

After creating my own Retropie, I built another one as a surprise gift for my friend Mark. Behold, the MegaPie!

The parts list is the same as in my last post, but using a Sega Mega Drive skin.

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About a year ago, I built my own RetroPie, a Raspberry Pi retro gaming machine that runs just about every video game published more than 10 years ago. Perhaps you’d like to build your own?

Here is how I built mine. I use it to run games from the Arcade (MAME), Commodore 64, Famicom and Famicom Disk System, Game Gear, Game Boy (+ Color, Advance), Neo Geo, NES, PC Engine (+ CD), Sega Genesis/MegaDrive (+ CD, 32X), Sega Master System, SNES, and Vectrex. But it supports many more.

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The new mouse

I’ve just bought a Logitech M205 wireless notebook mouse. Like my older MX650, this mouse uses the 27 MHz spectrum. The wheel doesn’t tilt, but it has a power switch and you can stow the receiver on the underside of the mouse. So far I’m very happy with it as a travel mouse. I’ll keep the MX650 for my regular work desk.

It seems Logitech is going entirely to 2.4 GHz for their mice. This is very disappointing, as the spectrum is so crowded. I’d love to switch, but the interference problems with wifi are horrible. The tiny “unifying receiver” used by their new devices is pretty slick too, but I doubt you could put an effective 27 MHz antenna in such a small dongle. Does anyone make a modern mouse which doesn’t use 2.4 GHz or bluetooth?

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Update 2010-05-02: See this comment.

I read an article in the Dec 2009 issue of Linux Magazine, one of several Linux-focused magazines we get at the office. I’d like to link directly to it, but it the magazine’s own website doesn’t offer the article or even a reliable permanent link to the issue number. Hint: hey guys, sort that out.

The article was about configuring ACPI hotkeys to support your specific laptop. IE, the buttons for “sleep”, “brightness up”, etc. For most laptops this already works on Ubuntu. On my Dell Vostro 1500, every button except for “sleep” worked right after install. This is Linux, so there is always some way to fix that.

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I recently switched my primary mouse from a Logitech V450 to a much simpler Logitech RX650. The RX650 is a basic OEM mouse. It is larger than the V450 and doesn’t have the useful space below the mouse to store the compact USB receiver. It only has a range of 1.5m from the receiver, compared to 10m for the V450. So why did I switch? Because the RX650 uses 27 MHz for communication, whereas nearly every other cordless mouse on the market today, including my old V450, uses 2.4 GHz.

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