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Naomi Pi 'WiPi Netbooter' - compatible with Pi 3&4

Hi, after I DL the AIO file and unzip it,
1. Can I just copy past it into the 32g micro sd card?
2. What I need to do when I received a brand new pi 3B (I need a micro USB interface to power the Pi from Naomi system )

Thank you so much.

P.S. I bought a JAPAN original Blast city cabinet, it cost me $1,900
 
Hi, after I DL the AIO file and unzip it,
1. Can I just copy past it into the 32g micro sd card?
2. What I need to do when I received a brand new pi 3B (I need a micro USB interface to power the Pi from Naomi system )
1. Copy & paste will NOT work. You need to write the disk image directly to the SD card at the block device level. The best solution depends on your PC's OS.
2. You can power the pi with a regular AC adapter.
 
1. Copy & paste will NOT work. You need to write the disk image directly to the SD card at the block device level. The best solution depends on your PC's OS.
2. You can power the pi with a regular AC adapter.
Thanks, I burn the AIO image into the micro SD, that was easy, no problem at all. And when I power on my BC, (also the Pi3B+) I can not find the pi wifi signal... and this showed on the screen.

What I did
1. I have changed the IP address to 10.0.0.3 as the wipi netbooter overview doc recommended.
2. I hook up all the cable

What are the problems I encountered
1. I can not search the wireless network - wipi-betbooter
2. It says error 34 gateway cannot be found (this is not unexpected)

so I think I need to access the pi to set its IP address and check if the wifi module is working properly. But I don't know how to do that.

Thank you in advance, if anyone can help. I want this wipi-netboot very badly. This BC has taken up space but does nothing for almost 2 wks.
 

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Thanks, man.

It works partially, after

1. I used the freeware balena etcher to burn image again, then the pi can broadcast the wifi signal.

But some other problems still occurred, the wipi netbooter wifi connection is not stable. Every time when I boot up the arcade, the pi can start to broadcast the wifi signal, but after a couple of mins, (0-15mins) the wifi connection will be lost and then the screen will go freeze. On one occasion, when I adjust the system test mode, the wifi was lost , and it froze in the test mode. (not even launched any game yet.)

I figure it could be some reasons as below
1. My pi 3b+ is not work well as expected. I may need to buy another one to try my luck. (But the seller said he tested it before ship to me, no issue with other system\image)
2. I did everything as the doc "wipi netboot overview" told to, but I can only use 64GB micro SD card to burn the image file, not 32 GB one. ( balena etcher did not allow me to, always said I am 800MB less than it required. After formated my 32GB card, it has 28.9GB left)
3. My naomi console has some hidden flaws that I can not identify.

Thank you for further help...
 
Thanks, man.

It works partially, after

1. I used the freeware balena etcher to burn image again, then the pi can broadcast the wifi signal.

But some other problems still occurred, the wipi netbooter wifi connection is not stable. Every time when I boot up the arcade, the pi can start to broadcast the wifi signal, but after a couple of mins, (0-15mins) the wifi connection will be lost and then the screen will go freeze. On one occasion, when I adjust the system test mode, the wifi was lost , and it froze in the test mode. (not even launched any game yet.)

I figure it could be some reasons as below
1. My pi 3b+ is not work well as expected. I may need to buy another one to try my luck. (But the seller said he tested it before ship to me, no issue with other system\image)
2. I did everything as the doc "wipi netboot overview" told to, but I can only use 64GB micro SD card to burn the image file, not 32 GB one. ( balena etcher did not allow me to, always said I am 800MB less than it required. After formated my 32GB card, it has 28.9GB left)
3. My naomi console has some hidden flaws that I can not identify.

Thank you for further help...
After you power up your pi and connect to the WiPi network check the settings menu the WiPi webpage and make sure you don’t have power save on. If it is on it starts a 10 min timer which will shut down the WiFi signal.
 
After you power up your pi and connect to the WiPi network check the settings menu the WiPi webpage and make sure you don’t have power save on. If it is on it starts a 10 min timer which will shut down the WiFi signal.
Yes, I did notice this on the doc. But my problem is, the wifi connection lost could be in just 3-5 mins. Is this normal that lose the wifi connection from pi then the system got freeze?

And another issue may cause the problem,

1. When I manage netdimm IP on the pi, it need to select the specific console. for instance, 10.0.0.3 naomi \ 10.0.03 naomi 2 \ 10.0.03 aw (mine is naomi 2) Maybe I choose the 10.0.0.3 naomi2 , but boot a naomi1 or aw game, this incompatible cause some clashs in the program lead to some problem? I don't know

2. And does anyone can help me why my 32GB card can not be used to burn the image while the doc recommend to use 32GB instead of 64GB.

Thanks
 
Yes, I did notice this on the doc. But my problem is, the wifi connection lost could be in just 3-5 mins. Is this normal that lose the wifi connection from pi then the system got freeze?

And another issue may cause the problem,

1. When I manage netdimm IP on the pi, it need to select the specific console. for instance, 10.0.0.3 naomi \ 10.0.03 naomi 2 \ 10.0.03 aw (mine is naomi 2) Maybe I choose the 10.0.0.3 naomi2 , but boot a naomi1 or aw game, this incompatible cause some clashs in the program lead to some problem? I don't know

2. And does anyone can help me why my 32GB card can not be used to burn the image while the doc recommend to use 32GB instead of 64GB.

Thanks

SD cards can vary slightly in size by a few hundred KBs, 800MB sounds like you might have a partition left on the card that needs to be deleted. You can download Minitool Partition Wizard to view the partitions and delete any that are not visible in Windows then create a new FAT32 partition that uses all of the SD card storage.

The way the dimm management works is: if your dimm is set to be 'Sega Naomi 2' it can play all Naomi/Naomi 2/Atomiswave games, if it is set to 'Sega Naomi' then it will only play Naomi/Atomiswave and will show an error if you try to play a Naomi 2 game so if you have a Naomi 2 you only need to set up one netdimm for it to play all supported games.

It sounds like you might have a power issue on your Naomi unit, do you have a multimeter to measure the voltage when the system is powered on? check the 5v (yellow wire) and 3.3v (brown wire) levels, if they are low your system could freeze or even not boot at all.
 
SD cards can vary slightly in size by a few hundred KBs, 800MB sounds like you might have a partition left on the card that needs to be deleted. You can download Minitool Partition Wizard to view the partitions and delete any that are not visible in Windows then create a new FAT32 partition that uses all of the SD card storage.

The way the dimm management works is: if your dimm is set to be 'Sega Naomi 2' it can play all Naomi/Naomi 2/Atomiswave games, if it is set to 'Sega Naomi' then it will only play Naomi/Atomiswave and will show an error if you try to play a Naomi 2 game so if you have a Naomi 2 you only need to set up one netdimm for it to play all supported games.

It sounds like you might have a power issue on your Naomi unit, do you have a multimeter to measure the voltage when the system is powered on? check the 5v (yellow wire) and 3.3v (brown wire) levels, if they are low your system could freeze or even not boot at all.
Thank you very much, very valuable information. I will update here if I fixed the problem.
 
So, from looking initially at this : https://gitlab.com/ian57/pidimboot, i then started looking at multi-bios's, and then ended up here (that was a deep rabbithole!)
I am now looking at the wonderful work that everyone has done in this thread.

I have an Atomiswave cab, running Naomi2 with Zero Key and netboot from the original piforcetools (2 line display)... was set up several years ago and has served me well, however thinking about upgrading to one of the "newer" solutions...

Does anyone have any pics etc of this great solution at all?

@chunksin - Any idea of the differences between yours and the one in the link above?

Thx
 
I've added some images to the first post in the thread - just had a look at pidimboot, looks really good, I think I saw an earlier version a few years back. Just to add to Murray's comments, I found in testing that the touchscreens aren't very responsive unfortunately which can make for a frustrating experience, for me it works better on a mobile browser.
 
Thank you very much for your work, @chunksin

I just bought a Naomi Cabinet with Virtua Tennis (my favourite arcade game of all time) and I want to try Netboot. Definitely I will install your AIO solution very soon.
 
NOTE: I just bought a PNY 32gb class 10 micro SD card and the AIO image won't fit. Etcher shows my card as being 30gb. I also tried Win32diskimager with the same results.
Is there a way I could edit the image to remove some games, say Naomi 2 Triforce and Chihiro, so that the image would fit my card?

Is the v5 the same version of wipi as in the AIO image, so I could just use the v5 and manually create the partitions followed by copying only the Naomi '1' games to the card?

Update (pardon me as I try to work through this):
It does look like my PNY card is not actually 32gb. It's showing 28.8 in Minitool partition wizard.
I downloaded the v5 img and the date on it is 9/21/2020, so I'm guessing the AIO is v6.

Update 2:
I copied the games from my incomplete AIO image burn to my PC. I then successfully installed the v5 image that doesn't contain games. I copied the games from the incomplete image burn to the proper folder of the v5 install.
I can now connect to wipi via my phone and the UI works but it doesn't see any of the games I copied over.

Update 3:
I ran the game audit and it still doesn't show any games available. I noticed the game names in the CSV ended with .bin but the game files I have end with .bin.gz so I removed the .gz from one and extracted another but still no luck.
I then remembered I have a 64gb card in my tablet that I never use. I was then able to install the AIO image and right off the bat it's showing all the games. Fantastic! I won't be able to test the Naomi and net dimm until next week but it's looking promising.
 
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I assembled my Adafruit 16x2 blue LCD (navigation buttons on right side) today but all I get is a brief backlight flash when booting wipi. This is on a Pi3 B+ board running the new AIO image. The wifi and UI is working fine, although I haven't connected it to a net dimm yet to finish testing.

I do see a few posts in this thread of people having issues with the LCD but no clear cut answer on what to change after you SSH in. It seems a shame not to get it working since I bought and built it, as well as printed a case for it.

Suggestions from anyone who has the same combination of Pi and LCD working would be appreciated.
 
I'm struggling to get my Netbooter pi to connect to my home WiFi. I made a reset.txt on the root of boot, connect to the hotspot with my phone, open netbooter.local/network.php, tap Wifi Setup, select my WiFi SSID from the dropdown, and enter my wifi password in the Password field. Then I tap Apply and Reboot and...nothing. The pi resets, I can tell it's booting, but it never connects to my network.

I was able to get it to connect the very first time I tried, but I attempted to apply a static IP address in that network page afterwards and ever since doing that it doesn't show up. I just have to pop out the SD card, make a new reset.txt, and start over. What am I missing here?
 
I do not. It's not that my phone alone can't see it, it's not connecting to my router at all, as I can see in my router's home page.
 
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