LÖVE is a great gaming framework! I created PiLove to make it easier to play Löve games on the Raspberry PI for everyone to share.

So what is it?

It's a Raspberry Pi bootable image. It is based on a Raspbian Jessie derivative OS .

PiLove has the latest version of Löve 0.10.0 in it, up and running. It has the minimal packages and no Xserver so it boots really fast.

How is it built?

The SDL2 library needs to be built with OpenGLES and RaspberryPI support. The RetroPie team have come up with a branch that gets this done.

For SDL 2.0.4 you need to add the option --host=arm-raspberry-linux-gnueabihf .

Then build the official Löve Linux sources on top. There are discussions on the Raspberry PI and Love2d forums.

The source code to create the PiLove image is available here .

Ok, let's play!

Download PiLove v0.3 image, burn it to an SDCard of 2GB size or larger, and boot it up.

You should see Löve running on your display which looks like this.

Pressing the Escape key should bring you to the console login prompt. Type sysop for the login name, and posys for the password.

The Löve program is available here: /usr/local/games/love-0.10.0/src/love .

Version History

All versions are available in the downloads page. I also keep a more detailed changelog .

• PiLove 0.3 - February 20, 2016 - Lua Periphery and RPi.GPIO.Lua to access the IO ports, i2c, spi, mmio, UART.
• PiLove 0.2 - January 17, 2016 - Comes with SDL version 2.0.4, Love2d 0.10.0
• PiLove 0.1 - January 9, 2016 - First version, SDL version 2.0.3, Love2d 0.10.0

Sample games

There are no games installed at the moment.. Oooooohhh... !

If you have the time to collect some, drop me an email so we can add them on the next release!

FAQ

• Can I install it on other distros?

It should be easy, but have not tested fully. SDL2 Debian packages and Löve binaries for Raspbian Jessie, are available at the downloads page .

Install the SDL2 package with sudo dpkg , followed by unzipping the Löve binaries tarball that match the SDL2 build.

Please keep in mind that Löve has a special build method which hardcodes the paths during compilation.

This means you need to extract the binaries under the /usr/local/games directory, as root, or rebuild everything yourself :-)

• I get EGL / GLX Errors

This problem may appear when trying to run Love on top of an X server.

Export this variable and run your game again: export SDL_VIDEODRIVER="rpi" , or try to unset DISPLAY .

See this document for more SDL options .

• How do I connect PiLove to a wireless network?

Edit the file /etc/network/interfaces to set your ESSID / Passphrase pair, then sudo systemctl reboot .

• Does sound work?

Yes, it should go to the analog output. pulseaudio is automatically started during boot. If it stops working, try to start it with pulseaudio --start .

To send audio to HDMI edit /boot/config.txt and uncomment the line hdmi_drive=2 .

• How do I start my preferred game on boot?

Edit the file /etc/rc.local to launch the game of your choosing.

If you prefer to mute to boot log messages, edit /boot/cmdline.txt and add this flag systemd.show_status=0 .

• Does it work on the RaspberryPI touch screen?

Games will show perfectly fine but there is no touch event support just yet. If you find the way to add this feature let us know !

Love2d Tutorials

Here is a list of some resources I found really useful:

• If you're a newbie start here: http://osmstudios.com/tutorials/your-first-love2d-game-in-200-lines-part-1-of-3
• Really good video tutorial to create a game from scratch: http://cupm.net/public/love2dtutorial/
• Love2D tutorials page: https://love2d.org/wiki/Category:Tutorials
• Great tutorials from Michael: http://nova-fusion.com/tags/love2d/
• Game tutorial from kikito: https://github.com/kikito/love-tile-tutorial/wiki
• Love2D for android: http://www.fysx.org/code/love-for-android/
• LoveFrames is a UI framework for Love2D: https://github.com/KennyShields/LoveFrames/wiki/Getting-Started

Credits

Löve is released under the ZLIB license .
The Raspberry PI is a trademark of the Raspberry PI foundation .
PiLove is free and released under the MIT License .

Albert Casals - January 2016