Super Noob Question, initial PiPlay setup
  • Oldgoat
    My Pi 2 is supposed to be delivered today. My intent is to use it as the engine for a multicade with a modest number of titles. I purchased Shea Silverman's book Raspberry Pi Gaming to provide some assistance; however, I have a very basic question. Per that book, I went ahead and downloaded the NOOBS operating system and have formatted and loaded onto an SD. I am looking at the next step in the process, which is the loading of the PiPlay components. It appears to me that PiPlay is an operating environment in itself. My background (dated) would suggest that I would need to reimage my SD and replace it with PiPlay. However, perhaps PiPlay does not really contain the operating system per se and/or NOOBS is constructed to identify PiPlay and boot into that environment or perhaps PiPlay modifies the appropriate config files to ensure the system boots into Piplay. See, I told you it was an super Noob question. Basically, do I download Piplay, and reimage the SD or download Piplay and copy the components onto the SD or none of the above?
    Thanks
  • mholgatemmholgatem
    NOOBS is basically just a multi-boot selector. Think of it more as a BIOS. So what you do is load NOOBS onto the card, then you copy the piplay image to the /images directory in the NOOBS filetree.
  • Oldgoat
    Ah ha makes sense. (I was kinda wondering what it was doing when it asked me to install on the initial boot; however, thinking of it as the BIOS makes the lightbulb come on....well, at least for now)
    Thanks!
  • Oldgoat
    Well, that didn't take long. There is no images directory on the SD. Also, even though I have a 16GB card, it says that I don't have room to place the files on the SD. Interestingly, when I first booted, I came to a menu to increase partition size, which I tried. However, it displayed a message saying, in effect, 'it looks like you have NOOBS, which has fully partitioned the card'.
  • Oldgoat
    Trial by fire. Never could get this approach to work properly so I went to plan B. Here is what I ended up doing, in case someone else runs into this

    Started from scratch reformatting the SD (I used SD Formatter V4.0 with full erase in addition to the format size ON option. Lesson 1, you need to pay attention to that ON option even when in a hurry).
    Downloaded the NOOBS onto my laptop and then extracted it directly to the SD (I'm sure I could have extracted to my laptop and then copied to the SD)
    Booted the Pi with the SD
    Selected the option to install base Raspbian OS
    Went to PiPlay, which directed me to Github
    Followed the directions in the readme file:
    git clone https://github.com/ssilverm/piplay-installer
    cd piplay-installer
    bash installer.sh

    The main issue I had was a prompt for user id and password
    Maybe it was fat fingers or maybe the initial startup process places you in a non-credentialed or improperly credentialed state but I could never it get it past that until I logged back into the Pi with the standard Pi Raspberry default user/pw
    Then magic! It took a fair amount of time, but loaded fine. Upon completion and rebooting I was happily greeted by PiPlay!

    Now onto controllers and games
  • mholgatemmholgatem
    cool. glad you got it working!
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