OpenBOR / Beats of Rage – Cracked it! :)

[smithers]

Hi. This is my first post here so hi and thanks for all the hard work on RetroPie! :)

Anyway, I have been desperately trying to get OpenBOR to work in emulation station as its own system, (i.e. with its own proper system logo and gamelist in Emulation Station)… and I have finally figured a way of doing it! See below video:

OpenBOR running on Emulation Station

I’ve seen a few posts on various forums from people who have been trying to implement OpenBOR / Beats of Rage so figured this would be the best place to share how I done it. Its kind of a dirty workaround, but it works perfect as far as I can tell. See below, and apologies it is a bit long winded! :s

This is assuming you have already installed OpenBOR on your Pi so have the relevant files and folders necessary for it to run.

I created a ‘bor’ directory in /home/pi/, and inside the bor directory I created a new empty folder for each mod I was planning on installing (just 2 for now as a test – ‘dda’ for Double Dragon Advance and ‘gaxe’ for Goldenaxe – Curse of Death Adder). I then copied the OpenBOR binary and all other files and folders that it needs to run and pasted them into both of the mod folders (into gaxe and dda in my example). Then in the ‘Paks’ folder, I pasted the relevant (unpacked) game data. The file structure looks like this:

/home/pi/bor/gaxe/Paks/gaxe/data
/home/pi/bor/dda/Paks/dda/data

(do not just copy the ‘Data’ folder into ‘Paks’ as it wont work – the data file still needs to be a sub-folder prefixed with the mod name, as above)

I then created an ‘openbor’ folder inside the normal ‘roms’ folder and inside I created a shortcut for each game. It is important here that you do not just run directly from the /roms/openbor/ directory as if you do then OpenBOR will assume this is the directory where all the game data is held! Instead you must use the following script to get it to work:

#!/bin/bash
cd /home/pi/bor/gaxe/
sudo ./OpenBOR

Now make sure you set the permissions to make these shortcut files executable:

sudo chmod 777 “gaxe.sh”
sudo chmod 777 “dda.sh”

Test it works by typing sudo ./gaxe.sh then sudo ./dda.sh (whilst still in the /roms/openbor/ directory) and if so, happy days!

You now need to create a theme, find / create some artwork, create a gamelist.xml file and get some screenshots. Then you can play it via Emulation Station like any other emulator / system. I assume these steps are already covered by someone elsewhere but I can help out if need be.

Hope this helps and makes sense! Its a tad late and I should really be off to bed, but any questions let me know.

Cheers!

Steve

[smithers]

*just realised, I forgot to menton why a workaround is needed – it is because if there is more than one mod in the /Paks/ folder then a game selection screen appears which can only be controlled by keyboard. The method above gets around that screen appearing at all and launches directly into the game selected. :)

*Edit – I think I may know a slightly less dirty way of doing this, where only one binary would be needed in the parent folder, but can’t test this until later on after work! It’s dependent on whether Linux allows you to point a .sh script to another .sh file? (both containing shortcuts).

[smithers]

OK so I tested out a slightly different take on this (to make it less hassle when adding new mods), and it works great. Setup is still much the same as above so the OpenBOR binary will be here:

/home/pi/bor/

Unpakked mods will go into their own directories within the /bor/ folder as such:

/home/pi/bor/doubledragon/Paks/doubledragon/data
/home/pi/bor/goldenaxe/Paks/goldenaxe/data

Now inside each mod folder create a script named ‘openbor.sh’ with the following inside:

sudo /home/pi/bor/OpenBOR

Be sure to set the file as ‘executable’.

The file is exactly the same for each mod so just copy and paste it as many times as needed.

Now for the games to appear in Emulation Station, in your OpenBOR folder within the normal /roms/ directory you need to create scripts for each game, naming them however you wish (eg goldenaxe.sh), and entering the following text:

cd /home/pi/bor/goldenaxe/
sudo ./openbor.sh

Be sure to set the file as ‘executable’.

Now reboot, start up emulation and test them out! :)

This may seem a bit of a long winded way to add games, but it is actually really easy this way and only 1 OpenBOR binary file is needed so no duplication for every mod you add. I just added another 4 games to my setup and it only took about 15 mins in total to get them all up and running.

Anyway, hope this helps anyone who is a fan of the OpenBOR games! As an added bonus, here is a link to a ton of mods you can try out:

OpenBOR game collection

(these aren’t copyrighted roms, they are free ‘fan’ games so I am assuming this is ok to link?)

Cheers.
Steve

[smithers]

…I guess I’m the only one interested in OpenBOR then! :/

[robertybob]

I’ve never heard of this game, but if I ever check it out I’ll definitely use your tutorial :)

[Omnija]

Thanks for the guide, ill have to check it out once i gain more space.

[rapolsive]

I used your dual boot image and was very happy with the vanilla kodi/es image on Pi2. I want to add this maybe to the “ports” folder in emulation station. First I probably need to install the Openbor on the pi and get that working then I will try to do your other steps to get it to appear on ES. I am a little shaky on doing scripts with the clunky editor but I am going to try doing them from text editors in windows and just dropping them in through SSH. There might even be options in the clients to make them executable otherwise I can either do that in putty or actually on the system. Cheers.

[rookervik]

I was just reading up on Open Beats of Rage yesterday! I’ll definitely have to try this out. I was a little overwhelmed at the lack of organization on the OBOR “mods” as I guess they call them. I couldn’t really find a resource that had a screenshot and description of each of the mods. Is there a good place to read up on Open BOR and find information on the alternate games “mods” ?

[rapolsive]

Has anyone tried getting Streets of Rage Remake to work on Pi? I unpacked the Tar.gz from their website but couldn’t figure out how to install or play from there. Any tips?

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