The other day I wanted to play a game. To be honest I didn’t really know what game I wanted to play so I walked around the apartment for a bit. The reason it took me so long in deciding was that I didn’t know what I wanted to play. Did I want to shoot stuff up? That’s usually the main reason I play Destiny 2 now. Or did I want to race on Mario Kart? I just couldn’t decide.
So instead I sat on the couch and then realized I had a computer that was setup specifically to play old retro games. I had some Nintendo, Super Nintendo and then it hit me that I could try to update the computer’s operating system. It would be fairly easy since it’s just a few commands that would need to be run and I would have the latest version of Ubuntu in which I could play with.
The messages begin
So I turn on the computer and watch as things start to load up. Great! At least things have not died since I hadn’t actually used that computer in quite some time. I open a terminal window and do my initial setup for upgrading to the latest version of the operating system. I run sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade and watch as things start to spew out of the terminal window. Okay, not literally but I’m sure that you get the idea.
All is updated and I see there are a few that are still not quite upgraded. That’s fine. I can do that manually which I do. I, then, start to get ready to update the computer from version 22.04 to the latest which at the moment is 24.04 of Ubuntu. Yeah, I know it obviously has been quite some time but you know what I didn’t really use it very often so there was little reason to update that machine.
I run a few commands and it finally registers that there is an update available.
Yay!
Sigh. That was actually a fairly short lived one too because after about 3 minutes the screen tells me that it can’t update. Take a deep breath and attempt to compose myself here because it took me nearly 20 minutes to finally get the computer to realize there was at least one available system upgrade.
I read the message and start looking online for any other ideas of what is causing this error to even happen. Sure enough there is at least one other instance of this happening. A very similar one from 20.04 from what I can recall. Yeah. That far back. So, I type out the command and try to run the upgrade again.
No dice.
This is where I start to lose my cool a little bit because I had now been trying to update this machine for nearly an hour. I was getting frustrated and annoyed because I, at the time, felt like I was doing things correctly.
Reading matters
And I iterate that part, felt like. I wasn’t. The key part that was actually missing was that I was doing things a little out of order. The message itself was telling that update-manager was going to be removed but it couldn’t be removed because it was on the deny list. Yeah, that makes all the sense, right? So, as it turns out, I had to remove ubuntu-desktop, upgrade the operating system, then reinstall ubuntu-desktop in order to finally get updated to version 23.10 for the machine.
From there it was a bit easier because all I had to do was re-run the previous commands to get the latest version of Ubuntu. And with that I was finally on Noble Numbat.
The next thing would be getting RetroPie updated with their latest versions being used. That was a little easier after realizing I could run the commands on the terminal too. With that out of the way I could at least now get some of the older games to play.
I played SSX Tricky for a little bit to see how it would fare. I do have to try and get other things fully updated though because it does look like a few of the games may not quite play correctly but that’s for another time. This did, though, sort of spark my joy of tinkering so I’ll probably look at getting some parts in order to build out an arcade controller for when I do feel like playing an arcade game and not use a controller.
Looking ahead
I will have to do a bit more research too in order to build out the arcade controller and I also do want to do a little more reading on what is needed in order to get the few games that won’t load so that’s probably going to be the next time I feel like playing a game from my childhood.
For now, I’ll stick to the ones that do work and enjoy those while I can. And hopefully my kiddo will also tag along on a few of them.