Raspberry PI with Touch Screen Net Dimm Issues

[OldSchoolNeo]

I purchased a Naomi 2 setup complete with Net Dimm and Raspberry Pi with a touch screen on ebay that came loaded with pretty much every Naomi and Atomiswave game out there. It came with no instructions so I watched a video from Jansens Customs on YouTube and was able to write a game to the Net Dimm and it played without issue. So I know my setup initially works although I was a bit confused on how to write the game to the Dimm.

The problem is it is setup to use a Ada Fruit touch screen which I'm not familiar with (came with no instructions). The screen has scrolling arrows on the right and left to cycle through the games on SD card and a third "sprocket" looking icon in the bottom/middle portion of the display. It has four physical buttons on the side that are simply labeled with numbers. The first time I used it, I simply guessed that the "sprocket icon" was the equivalent of the "Select" button on the non touch screen Pi setups. I touched it and it went through the writing process, restarted, etc. It worked, I played the game and thought "this is freaking awesome"!

My problem is I went to load another game and somehow in the process it deleted the currently loaded game and will not load a new one. Hitting the sprocket icon does nothing, the arcade monitor is simply stuck on the Error 31 message.

Here's my setup: Naomi 2 with Net Dimm in a Sega New Net City cabinet. I have the cross cable connected from the Pi to the Dimm, my Dimm is 4.01 per the Dimm Tests. When I power up, I get the "Checking Network" message so I go into the test screen and set the IP address (192.168.1.2 and 255.255.255.0) save the settings and exit. The Naomi reboots but I get a Error 31 as there is no game written to the Dimm.

The Pi is using an infernal touch LCD which looks nice, but it does not have any buttons labeled to test the connectivity between the Pi and the Dimm nor do I see a physical "Select" button to send the game from the Pi to the Dimm. I would have much rather have had a "basic" Pi plate setup. So basically the Error 31 is legit as there is no game loaded. All the videos I see online are for the older Ada Fruit Pi Plate setups, so I have no idea how this thing works.

The Dimm appears to be fine, the crossover cable works (I connected the Pi to my laptop and it recognized it) and it worked the first time. This is extremely frustrating.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[PascalP]

If I remember correct with my netdimm setup, the IP should be 192.168.2.1

This could be checked in the diagnostic/tools via the RPi, also I could do a ping test there, but that was with a adafruit non-touch display with buttons.
The ‘left’ button took me to this menu

 

[PascalP]

also the error 31 - no game error is quite normal, the netdimm’s battery loses its charge in a few hours and the memory goes blank.

So you have to load a game again everyday you turn your setup on

 

[OldSchoolNeo]

Thanks for the replies; I tested the IP you mentioned and it did not make any difference. The Pi is simply not loading anything to the Net Dimm. I think the problem is the touch screen, it's not detecting me pressing the icon that I guessed at the first time (which appeared to work). I'm basically dead in the water with this thing.

 

[obcd]

Do you have a netboot security pic in your netdimm?
If not, the program that downloads the game keeps running to prevent an error popping up.
If not, you might need to reboot the Pi before you can download a new game to the netdimm.
(You probably already tried that?)
You could connect the pi, your laptop and the netdimm together using a small network switch. With that, you can test if you can ping both the pi and the netdimm. Are you sure you didn't change the netdimm ip address? The Pi makes a tcp connection to the netdimm. If the ip address has changed, this obviously won't work anymore. They probably didn't implement the popup of an error message when the connection and upload fails. Maybe the seller can provide more information.

 

[OldSchoolNeo]

It does not have a security pic; I was told by the seller one was not needed. I did reboot the game.

I don't have a network switch and I think I've gotten in over my head. I was looking for "plug and play" and this isn't it.

I'm guessing I changed the IP address and now I have no idea what it is or how to change it back. If the seller would have simply included instructions on what to do, this would have been much easier.

Does the Pi and the Net Dimm both have an IP address? When in the test menu under Network Settings what IP address do I enter or should I have entered there?

 

[obcd]

I meant rebooting the pi, not the game.
Yes, the Pi and the Net Dimm both have an ip address.
If it's in the form of 192.168.xxx,yyy, than xxx (also being a number between 0 and 255) has to be the same on both Pi and netdimm. The last yyy number has to be correct or the pi won't connect to it.
You could try to ask that ip address to the seller. It's always possible that he bought the system like that himself and has no idea of it. If he created the system, he sure should know.

If the pi boots, isn't it showing some text on the display? A normal Pi linux boot should show it's ip address at the end of that text. If you have an usb keyboard, you could try to connect it to the pi. Maybe it will respond to some keys like the <esc> or <ctrl> <c>.

Someone with computer knowledge could take a look at the pi sd card and figure out the pi ip address on it. (You need linux for that)

A pc is "plug and play" as well, but if you run a "format c:" it's also game over...

How did your laptop recognised the pi when you connected them? (Trying to find an easy way to fix things again)

 

[OldSchoolNeo]

A pc is "plug and play" as well, but if you run a "format c:" it's also game over...

How did your laptop recognised the pi when you connected them? (Trying to find an easy way to fix things again)

Ha no doubt on format c:

I just plugged the crossover cable into my network port on my laptop and went into Network and Sharing Center. The Pi showed as a network device there. When I unplugged the crossover cable it disappeared.

In any event, I finally heard back from the seller and he set me straight. It's a different setup than anything I've seen or read about. He actually had me go into the Network settings and clear everything so that there was no network. According to him, his Pi/Net Dimm setup is "Auto Enabled" and there is no need to set an IP address.

Sure enough when I made those changes, restarted everything and simply clicked in the middle of the Game LCD screen (not the "sprocket") the game would start the loading process after a few minutes.

I feel like a McDonalds commercial as "I'm loving it".

 

[obcd]

Good to hear it's fixed.

The "sprocket icon" is usually a way to change settings. It looked strange as icon to download the game.
If it's functional, be carefull with it.

Your netdimm settings are probably set to dhcp now?
This means that the Raspberry Pi is running a dhcp server and delivering an ip to the netdimm at startup.

Time to start gaming....