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."
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nostalgia Sorta (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
I can confirm that Minecraft runs on Icedtea (it's what I usually run it on), though there's an issue with hardcoded library paths on my system which is easily fixed.
Re:Yes but... (Score:4, Informative)
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!)
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:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
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]