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Minecraft Ported To the Raspberry Pi 57

An anonymous reader writes "The amusing 'but does it run Crysis?' question has a cousin: 'but does it run Minecraft?' The makers of Raspberry Pi can now officially say that yes, yes it does. Called Minecraft: Pi Edition, the latest flavor of the popular game carries 'a revised feature set' and 'support for several programming languages,' so you can code directly into Minecraft before or after you start playing. That means you can build structures in the traditional Minecraft way, but you can also break open the code and use a programming language to manipulate things in the game world."
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Minecraft Ported To the Raspberry Pi

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  • Is it really ported or still running on Java? The API for hooking into the game world and controlling it sounds pretty cool though.
    • Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)

      by PhrostyMcByte ( 589271 ) <phrosty@gmail.com> on Saturday November 24, 2012 @10:12PM (#42084881) Homepage
      Java has yet to be ported to the Pi's floating-point, so the only option is to use soft floats. I can't imagine Minecraft running at any acceptable speed. LibreOffice is also painfully unusable on the Pi at the moment, but I don't know how much that depends on float ops.
      • Java has yet to be ported to the Pi's floating-point, so the only option is to use soft floats.

        Does Minecraft work with Icedtea? From what I've seen Icedtea works fine with hard floats, it's just the Oracle Java that doesn't support it yet.

      • Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)

        by petermgreen ( 876956 ) <plugwash&p10link,net> on Sunday November 25, 2012 @07:26AM (#42086265) Homepage

        Quick summary of the java situation on raspbian:

        Oracle java doesn't currently work on armv6 hard float.
        Openjdk with zero works but is SLOW
        Openjdk with jamvm works and seems to be the most workable option right now
        Openjdk with cacao is broken on all arm hardfloat platforms at the moment*.
        I haven't tried openjdk with shark or avian.

        * see debian bugs 688703 [debian.org] and 688702 [debian.org]

    • Even though minecraft is java, it uses several native libraries, liblwjgl is one of them.
      These *need* to be ported to the target OS+archtecture in order to run minecraft.

    • It's apparently a port of Minecraft Pocket Edition [minecraftwiki.net], which is already on Android and iOS. No idea as to the programming language, but I fully imagine it's something with less of a footprint than a full-sized JVM.

    • No, they ported the Minecraft Pocket Edition, which is written in C++.

  • Nostalgia Sorta (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 24, 2012 @10:11PM (#42084879)

    I remember the days of not 'IF it can run' but 'lets MAKE it run Doom'...

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      My watch runs doom now.

    • Re:Nostalgia Sorta (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Sunday November 25, 2012 @12:42AM (#42085343) Homepage

      Some time last year I'd vaguely heard about the Raspberry Pi, and how it was a super-cheap, super-basic ARM board. I'd really not been paying much attention when I happened to click on a YouTube link [youtube.com] apparently showing the Raspberry Pi running 'Quake'.

      That's nice, I thought - expecting a 320x200 software-rendered Quake 1 running at an abysmal framerate, in a let's-try-one-up-from-Doom kind of way.

      Shitting heck, it was Quake 3 - running at an anti-aliased 1080p at quite a speed.

      Having owned multiple, expensive generations of PCs incapable of that kind of graphical performance - nostalgia's awful. Can't they just run Doom and be happy? Stop this relentless, amazing progress, please!

      • Duh, just run an openGL port of Doom.

      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Some time last year I'd vaguely heard about the Raspberry Pi, and how it was a super-cheap, super-basic ARM board. I'd really not been paying much attention when I happened to click on a YouTube link apparently showing the Raspberry Pi running 'Quake'.

        That's nice, I thought - expecting a 320x200 software-rendered Quake 1 running at an abysmal framerate, in a let's-try-one-up-from-Doom kind of way.

        Shitting heck, it was Quake 3 - running at an anti-aliased 1080p at quite a speed.

        The thing is, the chip used in

  • by loony ( 37622 ) on Saturday November 24, 2012 @11:54PM (#42085195)

    ... does it run emacs?

    • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by Cito ( 1725214 )

      Hell even trying to run Pico on the Pi bogs it down and VI brings it to it's knees as bad as a forkbomb.

      so far the best way is to edit code/configs/scripts on a local desktop/laptop then ftp it them over, cause even basic text editors bring the PI to a slow crawl.

      I sorta wish I didn't waste the money on it

      my wrt54GL router "seems" to be faster and more responsive in shell than the PI

      I was gonna use the PI as a network storage device, chaining 3 or 4 external usb hard drives to it via powered usb hub, and it

      • Re:Yes but... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Sunday November 25, 2012 @03:14AM (#42085683) Homepage

        so far the best way is to edit code/configs/scripts on a local desktop/laptop then ftp it them over, cause even basic text editors bring the PI to a slow crawl.

        If you're running 'pico', you're getting 'nano' instead, and it's nano's syntax highlighting that's the problem. Switch it off with Meta-Y and the editor becomes positively speedy. I'm SSH'ed into a Pi right now, and for basic shell stuff it's pretty indistinguishable from any other machine. There's probably something up if it's gratuitously slow.

        (I'm on an up-to-date Raspbian [raspbian.org], and I've overclocked things slightly. Software has improved loads the past few months!)

        I was gonna use the PI as a network storage device, chaining 3 or 4 external usb hard drives to it via powered usb hub, and it worked and all but the PI is soooooo slow the transfer rate would dip down to 5K-10K/sec over LAN when trying to save a large file or copy a large file from it to desktop.

        USB support is now merely 'not very good', while it used to be 'downright terrible'. I get ~3MB/s SCP-ing a large file to the Pi's (slow) SD card, so network performance shouldn't be an issue. Try again with recently updated firmware? Although it's unlikely to make a terribly good NAS anyway, with both disks and ethernet hanging off a slow USB connection...

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        This is on my raspberry pi: http://ompldr.org/vZ2Z5dg/out.ogv (recordmydesktop seems to make everything pink when "quick subsampling" is active).
        It's running X with fbdev, plasma and recordmydesktop and vim still doesn't feel l ike a "slow crawl". I just wait until kwin_gles runs on it then it will be really smooth.

        I tried a usb hard disk, just for you. nfs, ext4, noatime. On another computer, nfs mount on mnt/: dd if=/dev/zero of=mnt/zero bs=5M count=200
        X is getting sluggish and it has 100% cpu usage, most

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Liar, I run both gvim and vim just fine on the pi. Nano loads up nearly instantaneously. And you're lying about the the transfer times as well, I can get a few megs a second over wired ethernet. I'll give you that wireless usb sticks suck on the pi, but everything else works well. You're just trolling or clueless and blaming the pi on your own failures.

      • by zeptic ( 323902 )

        I was gonna use the PI as a network storage device, chaining 3 or 4 external usb hard drives to it via powered usb hub, and it worked and all but the PI is soooooo slow the transfer rate would dip down to 5K-10K/sec over LAN when trying to save a large file or copy a large file from it to desktop.

        I think you are doing something wrong. I'm getting 8-9 MB/s using SMB shares on an external USB HDD (whcih also contains the root fs).

        Check out this thread to get some pointers: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=13695 [raspberrypi.org]

      • by slim ( 1652 )

        VI brings it to it's knees as bad as a forkbomb.

        Since I used to run Vim (and X) perfectly happily on a 486SX25 with 4 MBs of RAM, I don't believe you.

        Just to recap, that's a CPU clock 28 times faster - along with other improvements in CPU technology - and 64 times more RAM if you have the older model.

        I wonder what you're doing wrong?

    • yes. I t runs emacs nicely, although the startup time can be a tad bit long (20-30sec in my case), depending on your .emacs . Once it's loaded it is completely useable and fast.

      One of my two rpis (both are ~old~ ones with only 256MB RAM) is running apache, mysql, dovecot, postfix and bitlbee. It also has weechat (connected to bitlbee and 4 channels on #freenode) and mutt running 24/7. Additionally roundcubemail is installed. Again, depending on the amount of mails to sort and show, RCmail can be a bit slow

    • Re:Yes but... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 25, 2012 @04:18AM (#42085807)

      The day that a computer can run a modern-ish video game but not a console text editor, that text editor may need to rethink a few of its life choices.

    • ... does it run emacs?

      Yes. Yes it does.

    • More importantly, what're the commands to make emacs run it? Other than going through C-x M-c M-butterfly [xkcd.com]
  • It's always been possible to code against minecraft - Notch has kept the level format open since the game released (even if he did change it a bunch of times after he said he wouldn't).

    I've already written a bunch of level generators for it, like these two:

    Planetoids [minecraftforum.net]

    Dungeon Adventure [minecraftforum.net]

    • I stand in awe in front of any decent minecraft world, but this one truly took my breath: http://www.lo-ping.org/2011/05/29/earth-mapped-to-minecraft-to-scale/ [lo-ping.org]

    • YOU wrote planetoids? That was a simple but very good idea! The worlds tend to end up a bit useless after updates: for example, when railtracks couldn't be placed on goldstone anymore, my train system was ruined.

      Also, when there are new items you cannot get them on your old maps, because those maps are are finite- infinite planetoid maps would be great, not to mention tekkit compatibility!

      Sorry to get off-topic, but I got excited- good job!

      • Just an aside, have you tried Feed The Beast? I've been playing that for a while now, and I like it better than the Tekkit pack. It works with Minecraft 1.4.2 and took out some items I felt were overpowered. I love the biomes it added, some of them are simply amazing.
        • Just an aside, have you tried Feed The Beast?

          I did, following your reccomendation, and I was shortly after spammed with an unsolicited email from curse dot com, complete with invisible tracking links.

          Obviously, my login credencials were intercepted.

          I am NOT pleased.

  • I really hope that we can also use this port on other Linux ARM boards such as all the A10 platforms that are ever so popular and my old Nokia N900.

    I ordered a Cubieboard (mostly for SATA and real Ethernet) and would love to have it run Minecraft when it finaly arrives.

    The question is, will binaries compiled for the Broardcom chip's armv6 and FPU work on other chips?

    • I suspect it should be possible to make it work. The CPU features are there.

      The one thing that may be a problem is the 3D graphics situation. 3D libraries on embedded boards are a bit of a mess and some messing arround and/or writing of shims may be needed to make things work together. I know you used to have to use a Pi specific method to get an openGL es context on the Pi. I don't know if that is still the case (I haven't been following that side of things myself).

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