Any of you have one of these?

Sounds nice with a bit of custard on top.

I've got a couple. The first one is running XBMC in the living room and the other is temporarily broken (just needs a little component re-soldered).

I've got a couple. The first one is running XBMC in the living room and the other is temporarily broken (just needs a little component re-soldered).

You are the man to ask then! I would like one for cramming full of old arcade emulators games....but I'd also like one for xbmc and streaming. Can I do this with one pi? Can they boot into different modes depending on the SD card that's in it?

You are the man to ask then! I would like one for cramming full of old arcade emulators games....but I'd also like one for xbmc and streaming. Can I do this with one pi? Can they boot into different modes depending on the SD card that's in it?

 

It's definitely possible to make a dual boot SD card so i'd be surprised if you couldn't put XBMC on one partition and the operating system with the emulators on the other. I should say i have no idea how to actually do that though. I think it's also possible to have XBMC and the emulators on the same partition and run them using the default linux operating system (called Raspbian) in the same way you'd run different programs in Windows. Again, I've never tried this myself so please don't take my word for it. The raspberry pi forums are a great place to get more knowledgeable advice about this sort of stuff. 

If I had two SD cards - one for XBMC and another SD card for games would that be workable?

As in I just stick in whatever SD card I want into the pi depending on what I wanna do?

Edited June 2, 201412 yr by Zola

If I had two SD cards - one for XBMC and another SD card for games would that be workable?

As in I just stick in whatever SD card I want into the pi depending on what I wanna do?

 

You can definitely do that, although it might get a bit annoying having to faff around with different SD cards all the time. You can get ready made SD images for XBMC, emulators or whatever from various places on the web. For XBMC I'd recommend Raspbmc (it's what I've been using). I'm not very familiar with emulators but I remember reading about Chameleon and thinking that looks pretty good. I might give it a go myself actually when I've fixed the other Pi:

 

http://www.raspberrypi.org/raspbian-chameleon-remix/

One OS is enough for that. You can go with something like Raspbian or Arch Linux and just simply run xbmc or an (arcade) emulator from the desktop. Or you can go with Raspbmc and use the Advanced Launcher add-on to run emulators from xbmc. Obviously you can use only emulators those available for linux with both solutions.