Adventure Game Studios

[Anonymous]

I couldn’t find much information on the AGS engine in the experimental menu. There are no forum posts and nothing in the wiki, but I decided to give it a try anyway in an attempt to get some of AGD Interactive’s VGA remakes of some old Sierra games working.

The program built from the script just fine, I loaded the game data into the proper roms folder, but nothing would load. Looking at /opt/retropie/configs/ags/emulators.cfg I see that ags needs to be loaded with xinit, so I ran sudo apt-get install xinit

BTW – It would be nice if someone could provide a quick “Linux 101” lesson on the whole “X” thing.

Now I could get the game to load from the command line myself, but not from EmulationStation. Maybe a “runcommand” problem/bug?

The only problem I have now is even though I use the –fullscreen option, the game is not being scaled fullscreen. I still need to look at the command line options or config files for ags to try and solve this problem.

[Anonymous]

Nobody replied to the last post, so I’m not sure if anyone is interested, but I’ll continue to post about my findings:

The only games I tried are the King’s Quest VGA remakes from AGD Interactive. My monitor resolution is 1024×768. If I used the –fullscreen option already in RetroPie’s emulators.cfg file, AGS would not be able to scale the image to fullscreen. Looking at the log file, I could see that it eventually resorted to windowed mode at 320×200. If I started in windowed mode, it would actually be able to scale 3x to 960×600. It isn’t fullscreen, but that’s the best I could manage with the launch options and editing the acsetup.cfg file.

I can see why this emulator is stuck in the experimental menu.

[petrockblog]

I added dependencies in for xinit – the old image had xinit by default, so it was missed out. It used to launch ok from runcommand I will check, but for full screen i used the runcommnand launch menu to set the screenmode and the framebuffer will be scaled – it might be enough to just resize the framebuffer also from the runcommand menu.

[petrockblog]

sudo dpkg-reconfigure x11-common

and choose “anybody” and it will work from ES

[Anonymous]

The “sudo dpkg-reconfigure x11-common” worked, but so did adding “sudo” to the xinit command in “emulators.cfg”

I think they both accomplish the same thing, but which would be the preferred method?

Also, the games I’m trying to play are 320×200 resolution, not 320×240. If I select 320×240 in the runcommand framebuffer options, the game does run close to fullscreen, but it is letterboxed. I believe these games were intended to be stretched to 4:3. Is there a way to add that option to the runcommand settings?

[petrockblog]

The instructions I gave.

you can add a 320×200 entry to /etc/fb.modes and see if that helps.

[Anonymous]

I found this at the bottom of /etc/fb.modes

# added by RetroPie-Setup - 320x240 mode for emulators
mode "320x240"
    geometry 320 240 320 240 16
    timings 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
endmode

So I added:

mode "320x200"
    geometry 320 200 320 200 16
    timings 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
endmode

But I think I’m missing another step, because that didn’t give me an additional framebuffer option in the runcommand menu.

[petrockblog]

it requires manual changing of the runcommand script also, or manually change the config – edit configs/all/videomodes.cfg and change it to 320×200

but actually it won’t help I think as the framebuffer will maintain the aspect ratio so will end up letterboxed itself.

[Anonymous]

I tried the games I’m interested in on my PC using their normal Windows installer, and they appear to run in a 16:10 aspect ratio there too, so I guess even though these games were designed in 320×200 they were never intended to be stretched vertically to 4:3 like most 320×200 games of that era were.

So in that regard, I’m perfectly happy with the performance I’m getting with the AGS emulator in RetroPie.

—–

Now my next problem seems to be a bug in the installation script and its recent update to install xinit on its own:

Clean install RetroPie image v3.5 – don’t update the script
sudo apt-get install xinit
Install AGS from experimental menu
sudo dpkg-reconfigure x11-common
transfer game data
AGS runs perfectly

Clean install RetroPie image 3.5 – update script
Install AGS from experimental menu (looks like maybe a different # of packages installs when it tries to include xinit)
sudo dpkg-reconfigure x11-common
transfer game data
AGS will not run from ES

[petrockblog]

check /tmp/runcommand.log

the only differences should be the addition of installing xinit also, but ill try and reproduce.

[herbfargus]

There might be a similar problem with minecraft

[Anonymous]

http://pastebin.com/WDgBehPH

Here is my runcommand.log

It’s definitely an xinit thing. Somehow it’s different if I manually install xinit vs the ags.sh script installing it.

[petrockblog]

should be fixed now.

[herbfargus]

Can confirm minecraft is fixed. haven’t tested ags but I would assume that is functioning too.

I did have to run

sudo dpkg-reconfigure x11-common

and set it to anyone.

I know its bad practice to have sudo in the start script, is there a way to automate the aformentioned line of code or something when a user installs minecraft or ags from the experimental script just so people don’t think they are broken? I’ve added the aforementioned line to the wiki of course, but as we know few people actually rtfm.

[petrockblog]

it is already corrected for the future images. For those that install on raspbian – this should be something that gets documented.

[herbfargus]

Much appreciated. great work :)

[Author]

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