BBB standard Angstrom: how to launch the X desktop and are there any emulators for console/computer?

I wiped my internal memory for the BBB, to try Debian(BBB-eMMC-flasher-debian-7.5-2014-05-14-2gb), but I discovered that Debian was made to run on 2 GB, but on the Rev C, which has 4 GB of memory…My BBB was basically running with 120 MB free, which is unusable.

So I decided to put back the 2 GB Angstrom version on it. But I see that at boot I get no desktop…how do I install the desktop on Angstrom distro? (I have the BBB-eMMC-flasher-2013.09.04.img).

Also, is there any emulator for the BBB? I would like to have few roms to play old classics, especially for Amiga, Genesis and Super Nintendo. I know about Linux version for various emulator (I use Ubuntu on virtual machine), but I don’t see version either for Angstrom nor ARM/BBB.

I even tried the ubuntu release, running on SD card; which has a desktop pre-configured, but it is quite slow and also has no emulator whatsoever.

Any help would really make my day, I’ve been banging my head for the past 10 hours to make it happen.

I was able after 3 attempts to find a way to have the X server to run.

Looks like the Angstrom build start as soon as you put the card in the BBB; and at the same time it is flashing the internal memory. This threw me off track, since the restore on the internal memory was not completed, and this caused the OS to boot incomplete.

Now I am just trying to figure out if there are emulators for the BBB, in particular for Amiga, Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis.

Thanks.

Hello Karl. There are several emulators that run OK, but could run much faster with some tuning. Basically, any of the SDL-based ones that can use a framebuffer target will probably work OK. I’ve found that you need to hack on them a bit to get decent performance, though. I think that you are out of luck on the N64 for now, since we’re still sorting out some details on capes for the 3.14/3.17 kernels that have SGX support for OpenGL ES and EGL support. The N64 would run too slowly using software rendering, but it might run semi-acceptably with an accelerated OpenGL ES.

Here is my BeagleSNES emulator system for SNES titles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8IbhJ7xH6g
I am also taking performance measurements on a few other platforms and doing some tuning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kjJrflm5mU

I would not worry about using X. Instead, look at emulators that can run on the framebuffer.

Andrew