PiLove — Löve2D on the Raspberry PI

What it was

PiLove put the Löve2D game framework — SDL2 + OpenGL + Lua — into a burnable Raspbian image. Five minutes from download to running your first game: a favourite of hobbyists, classroom teachers and indie devs who wanted a zero-friction PI game platform.

How it was built

SDL2 compiled against the PI's OpenGLES backend (2.0.3 via the RetroPie branch; 2.0.4 with --host=arm-raspberry-linux-gnueabihf)
Official Löve 0.10.0 built on top, statically packaged
Based on a Raspbian-derivative pipaOS strip-down for minimal footprint — boots fast, no X server
Lua periphery bindings for GPIO, i2c, spi, mmio, UART — games that could touch hardware

Version history

PiLove 0.3 — Feb 20, 2016 · Lua Periphery + RPi.GPIO.Lua for IO ports, i2c, spi, mmio, UART
PiLove 0.2 — Jan 17, 2016 · SDL 2.0.4 + Löve 0.10.0
PiLove 0.1 — Jan 9, 2016 · First version: SDL 2.0.3 + Löve 0.10.0

Classic quickstart

-- main.lua
function love.draw()
   love.graphics.print("Hello PiLove!", 400, 300)
end

Burn to an SD card (2GB+), boot, and that is your first game running natively on a PI. Login sysop/posys; the love binary lives at /usr/local/games/love-0.10.0/src/love. EGL/GLX errors over X? export SDL_VIDEODRIVER="rpi" or unset DISPLAY. Sound goes to analog (PulseAudio starts at boot); HDMI audio via hdmi_drive=2 in /boot/config.txt. Launch your favourite game from /etc/rc.local.

Why it mattered

Games are the gateway drug to programming. By making the toolchain invisible — download, burn, play — PiLove lowered the barrier to entry for hundreds of kids and beginners who wanted a PI and a rendering engine that just worked.

Löve2D is released under the generous ZLIB license. Raspberry PI is a trademark of the Raspberry PI Foundation.

💜 PiLove

What it was

How it was built

Version history

Classic quickstart

Why it mattered