Idiots guide to installing Minecraft on Raspberry Pi

I had read about the Raspberry Pi port of Minecraft and had been waiting for a chance to try it out.

This opportunity arose when the boy-child was moaning that his tablet had died so he couldn’t play Minecraft on it. I was on the PC doing “important grown up stuff” (actually i was playing Warcraft but SHH!) So I thought “I’ll try the Pi version see what its like” and off we went.

 

I Finally Made It To 90

I’ve finally hit level 90 on my Mage on World of Warcraft. Woo!

It was a bit of a baptism of fire as prior to quitting wow about 18 months ago my mage was only level 34. I was given a Scroll of Resurrection to come back to wow for 7 days for free. As well as that I could choose 1 character to be boosted to level 80. Most of my other characters were already at or past 80 so it had to be my little Worgen mage Terriworgan (he does the Floral Dance y’know). As a result, I jumped 46 levels.

80 To 85 was kind of a settling in period getting used to all these nice spells I didn’t have before and a new spec (I was previously Frost but had now switched to Arcane and had to get to grips with the new talent structure)

PI Update: I Made It Pretty!

My Lego case complete with Windows (*snigger*)

I’ve not really posted much about my Raspberry Pi yet. Truth is, although I’ve had a little play with it during the day when I’m on my own (and should be doing laundry) but only having 1 spare HDMI cable means its hooked up to the main TV in the front room. This means that most of the time someone is commandeering it for Xbox, Wii or watching very important things on Sky.

Anyway, I’ve done all the basic things with it. set it up, had a faff about with Scratch. I did attempt connecting my ancient and underused webcam to it but alas, the drivers were incompatible. As were the drivers to my equally ancient Linksys USB WIFI card. Oh and I made a rather cool case out of Lego for it. Just a shame the colours don’t match 😦

Hacking a Wii

Right so my Wii.

New Wii Old Wii (and a very dusty shelf)

I’d been reading bits and bobs on the web about how I can mod my Wii so it can play DVD’s, back up game discs and emulators. All this sounded very exciting. BUT it’s only possible on older Wii’s. So I was hoping that this scabby old £20 job was going to be old enough.

There is a way to tell and its called the Wii Drive Chip Database. In simple terms you type in your serial number from the back of your Wii and it will tell you what type of DVD chip is inside your Wii.
So I put in my newer black Wii’s serial and got GC2-D4 (Boo! This chip won’t play DVDs)
I then tried the old white one  and got GC2-D2E (Yay! This chip will!)

And So It Begins

Well Christmas and New Year have been and gone and this year I was quite lucky and received some Christmas money from relatives. So I’ve been scheming as to what to spend the pennies on. I’d been eyeing up Raspberry Pi computer for ages. For those who don’t know what it is, Raspberry Pi is a tiny credit card sized computer. You plug it in to your TV or monitor, slip in a SD card to use as a hard drive and away you go! Its very basic and is intended to be used to teach programming and basic computer science to school kids. Its also very cheap (£25ish) so is accessible to all.

Mmmm Raspberry Pi

The other thing I’ve been on the look out for was another Wii. I wanted to have a go at soft modding a Wii but didn’t really want to do it to our lovely sleek black one from Father Christmas 2 years ago. I didn’t want to brick it and make my kids cry. So I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled in our local Cash Converters for a cheap second hand one.

We went shopping to Doncaster to spend Fluff’s (my 6 year old son) birthday money. We went round our usual places and ended up at CeX so we had a look at Xbox 360 games for him. Whilst looking in the cabinets i spied a teeny tiny circuit board and stifled an excited squeal. They had a Raspberry Pi B! It was priced at £40 but given the wait time I’d have for it online it was worth it!

*Much excite*

After buying that (and some other DVD’s including the complete Lord of The Rings trilogy on Bluray for £15) we wandered off in the direction of the market. On the way we decided to pop in to Cash Generator (like Cash Converters) and have a nose around. Again perusing the cabinets of second hand electrical my eyes fell on a large sign labelled “White Wii’s £20”. I had to contain my excitement  while the shop girl went to get me one. How sad am I?

So here I am with my 2 purchases. Quite excited.