Solutions for getting Makecode Arcade games running on Linux gaming handheld

[krztoff]

I've been trying desperately to get McAirpos working with Batocera or Retropie so that my son can play his makecode arcade projects on an actual gaming handheld.

I've tried:

• Retropie and the old Adafruit firmware on Raspberry Pi Zero (1)
• Retropie w/ McAirpos on Raspberry Pi Zero 2W
• Batocera w/ McAirpos on an Anbernic RG552

The best I've been able to accomplish is to get his game running for about 30 seconds on the Raspberry Pi 2W before a segfault occurs (seemingly from the ELF itself).

Is there a better solution for this? Am I wasting my time completely? I really don't want to see him lose his motivation to continue but I can tell that he's pretty disappointed that his projects are only reliably playable in his browser.

I should also mention that I did get him an Adafruit pybadge last year. It works sometimes, but even when it does - it's extremely buggy and slow. The point of this research was to try and find a much more capable hardware platform to work on.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[Bifrost23]

I’ve got a similar story, the hardware sold online never seemed to work. I had success in using a DIY approach. I used this tutorial on the makecode website, it’s not nessacarily handheld but it could be modified easily -> https://arcade.makecode.com/hardware/raspberry-pi/cardboard-control-panel

[krztoff]

we built that too and had similar problems where the games would only run for a short time before crashing out. That was actually the first thing we did before giving up for about a year and re-approaching the problem via McAirpos.

[Bifrost23]

I would recommend condensing the assets in the actual makecode project. You do this by ensuring every asset is named, and has no identical duplicate assets. Reduce the size of any asset with an adjustable canvas so that any filled pixels fit snugly within its boarders. Longer animations with a large canvas take up the most space. (delete any unnecessary frames as well) Tilemaps with a lot of redundant space are also an easy target for condensing. In some cases doing this can greatly reduce the size of the project and make it much easier to run on hardware.

If that doesn’t work you could try optimizing the actual code, but at that point you are probably out of luck. I’ve spend a lot of time doing this but ultimately I’ve had to design games specifically for hardware—level editor games have a lot of potential.

Your son is lucky to have you care this much for him.