Amiga – simple no keyboard involved way…?

[nemo93]

Hello People,

I have so much fun with Retropie. It’s good to see how good the various emulators and games from my childhood run smoothly on a pi2. Yet I can’t be satisfied enough as Amiga is still not very easy to launch and run.

All I’m looking at is a way to simply run a game (ie. Speedball 2 \o/) from Retropie menu wihtout having to configure anything from my sofa or messing with a keyboard. Just my controller, a sofa and that’s all :)

Is there any way to ease the Amiga emulation on Retropie please? any advices? Thanks a lot! and yes I’m lazy!!
cheers,

[trixster]

I’m going to make the assumption that you know how to manipulate files on the pi and you can use a program like winscp to ssh into the pi to edit config files.

Basically what you want to do is add a small script for each game which tells uae4arm to launch and load a config file which will immediately start an amiga game rom without all the hassle of using the uae4arm interface.

At the moment the directory /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/Amiga probably has two scripts in it called “+start UAE4ARM.sh” and “+start UAE4ALL2.sh”

+start UAE4ARM.sh contains the following text:

#!/bin/bash
pushd “/opt/retropie/emulators/uae4arm”
./uae4arm
popd

This is telling it to change directory to /opt/retropie/emulators/ and then execute the ./uae4arm program.

You can make a copy of this file and add a flag to tell uae4arm to run a config file immediately after it starts.

I have one for speedball 2 called “+start Speedball2.sh”

It contains:

#!/bin/bash
pushd “/opt/retropie/emulators/uae4arm”
/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 “./uae4arm -f conf/speedball2.uae”
popd

This is essentially the same as the other scripts with an added config file.

Go into uae4arm. Load your speedball2 config but make sure in the miscellaneous options that you deselect “show GUI on startup”. Save the config with the same filename that you’re telling “+start speedball2.sh” to execute, so in my case it is speedball2.

Then in winscp ensure you change the permissions of your new script so that the owner is pi and it’s executable.

When you reload emulationstation you should see you script under the Amiga menu and clicking on it should start UAE4ARM and boot straight into Speedball2.

HTH

[yorkie]

I wrote a Python script which basically automates the approach you describe;

Launch Amiga games from Retropie menu

In brief, it looks for the adf files you have in a given directory and creates a config file for each one. It copes with games having multiple floppy disks, provided that their file name is exactly the same except the floppy disk number.

Using this script has allowed me to populate the Amiga tab in Retropie with all my amiga games that I can launch directly from the menu. However, I’m still finding myself using the keyboard and mouse. Most of the games in my collection (even those that are legal and approved by the game authors) have “crack” screens that require a mouse-button press to escape. Moreover, to exit a game I have to press Ctrl on the keyboard. Perhaps there is a way to map keys and mouse to the joypad in uae4arm that I’m not aware of? Anyways, I have a mini bluetooth keyboard and mouse that I use for this purpose. It was about £20 from Amazon.

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