[labelwhore]

No rush, it’s just fun to work on this stuff. I’m learning as I go, so if I can implement things others haven’t, then that seems like a great thing to experiment on.

I was gonna try simply installing Recalbox’s version of ES just to see how things work there. Idk how many changes they’ve made to the standard ES build so it may or may not work.

[labelwhore]

I do have an idea of how to add music via brute force (ie., shell scripts) but I’d rather not use it as it’s cumbersome and will break anytime I install or update an emulator,

[labelwhore]

[quote=106952]Actually on further perusal it looks like you may be right in that they were never integrated:

https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation/issues/215

I tried a bunch of different code snippets in the xml and the sound would never play.

seems development halted before sounds were included for the carousel and systemselect unfortunately.

I may bug you in the future though for some sound effects for some boot videos I’m contimplating making for retropie ha ha

[/quote]I know this is a little bit old, if you still need sound effects, I might be able to help on that also.

[labelwhore]

I was gonna say, try running it in the background, but it looks like that’s exactly what you did. :)

[labelwhore]

plus there was a 5th option: scroll down

I did’t even have to click through to the 2nd page of posts, that post was literally the fist page.

[labelwhore]

your emulators.cfg should look like this:

cool_cv="/opt/retropie/emulators/cool_cv/coolcv_pi %ROM%"
default="cool_cv"

Sorry if that wasn’t clear, the entire command needed to be replaced.

[labelwhore]

[quote=105367]Crikey. Cant be many roms for that?
I’ll have to check it out.

[/quote]
There isn’t much out there as far as games, and what is there for games are mostly just emulated zxspectrum games. A least, that’s all I found when I looked.

[labelwhore]

Next time please use the forum search feature, this was on the front page of posts. We don’t want to make this place a mess.

Roms on External Hard Drive

[labelwhore]

lol, I think I’m gonna be the one to ultimately implement this. I just thought of a solution. It isn’t real pretty, and not nearly as fancy as certain music per system. It involves a bunch of shell scripts, one for each emulator to stop the music once an emulator launches, then start it again once you quit the emulator. It’s gonna take a bit of effort, but should work.

I’ll need to write some ambient music for this. At first I thought chip tunes, but that’s really not gonna fit, at least mine won’t. I need something less aggressive for menu music. ;)

[labelwhore]

That’s likely not anything to do with your hdd, if ES sees the roms, I think you’re hdd is probably good. To me, that sounds like the wrong roms, the wrong bios, or some other error.

[labelwhore]

LOL my solution is cool as hell. First I installed FAPGand ran it against a folder on the HDDattached to my pi that happens to contain a copy of my mp3 collection to create an m3u playlist containing everything.

Then I edited /opt/retropie/configs/beebem/emulators.cfg to look like the following (I kept the old musicless one in there just because):

beebem-0.0.13="/home/pi/.beebem/beebem-0.0.13/src/beebem %ROM%"
default="beebem-0.0.13-music"
beebem-0.0.13-music="/opt/retropie/configs/beebem/beebmusic.sh %ROM%"

Next I created a file called beebmusic.sh in /opt/retropie/configs/beebem which contains this script:

#!/bin/bash  
ROM=$1
mpg123 -z -@ /home/pi/playlist.m3u &
/home/pi/.beebem/beebem-0.0.13/src/beebem $ROM
sudo killall mpg123

Now, my mpg123 will play random mp3s out of my collection while I’m playing BBC Micro. The music stops when I stop the emulator.

:)

[labelwhore]

…still no sound on version 0.0.12 of beebem.

I’m keeping it anyway, unless some smart folks add an autolaunch feature to adv-mess.

[labelwhore]

Just to add to Herb’s reply. You can see the commands ES is using when it starts an emulator by looking at the emulators.cfg files in the respective folders here /opt/retropie/configs

[labelwhore]

[quote=115986]I have ps1 games on an external drive. I do use a powered hub for it but I have it formatted fat32 and I have no issues. They seem to play just fine for me, though I haven’t played a ton of them yet.

[/quote]
My work recently gave me a 1TB usb drive, which I’m now using with my pi. I had originally formatted it as exfat. When I put a bunch of psp .iso files on it, only about 5 showed up in ES. I tried fat32 next, which wasn’t much better. After that I tried ext4, and that works flawlessly. It’s worth mentioning that I was using a USB hub because this USB drive is unpowered.

I have another usb drive permanently connected to my pi, that I believe I have formatted as fat32. That one is not on a usb hub, is powered, but is a lot slower than the ext4 drive in terms of copying roms to the pi via SSH and onto the drives. Copying files the same way to the ext4 drive is much faster. (I found this out by mistake. lol) Since they’re both going over the network and through usb, the only difference I can conclude is the file system on each drive.

[labelwhore]

[quote=115978]Apologies for my ignorance, but how would I go about formatting a usb hdd to ext4, can it be done through the raspberry pi 2 terminal? Once the drive is ext4, what would be the procedure for copying roms onto the drive using windows 7.
[/quote]
I used a GParted live cd to boot from, then formatted the drive with that. It gives you every option under the sun.

http://gparted.org/download.php

Once you have it formatted, windows can read/write to it as well.

[quote=115978]
Also, if I changed the usb port max voltage or used a powered usb hub, would that be sufficient for a non-powered usb hdd?

thanks again![/quote]
I don’t know. I’ve considered modding one of my pis to try to increase the voltage to the usb ports, but haven’t gone through with it.

[labelwhore]

it might be a non-issue given my last post. ;)

There aren’t many command line options in beebem it seems. Nothing for sound. I’m building an older version now just to see what happens. All in all, beebem is working ok for me, except the sound issue.

If all else fails I could probably start it with a script and simply play some mp3s in the background lol. It wasn’t important that I had a BBC emulator, tbh, I just wanted the challenge of running an emulator few have working.

[labelwhore]

huh… Strangely with the on screen keyboard up, if I hit tab, a message is displayed that says “configure” and on screen I can see that the tab key is depressed. So it’s mapped correctly, but I get no configuration menu.

I may just keep messing with beebem. I almost have that one working 100%. I have my controller working with some keyboard emulation via xboxdrv. (that thing is magical lol) I got some sound on it just now. I think it may just need to start with certain sound options. I’ll experiment with that and report back.

[labelwhore]

Tab doesn’t actually open a menu for me, idk why. Escape works, I get the exit menu.

[labelwhore]

haha, yeah US layout is what I meant. I almost typed “qwerty”, but I think you guys use the same basic layout aside from a few keys. I effectively have no “.” key so I can’t enter the command to launch games.

[labelwhore]

Thanks guys! sound works now, but launching games is a PITA, especially considering that the keyboard doesn’t map directly to a ‘normal’ one. Since there is no command line option to auto-launch games, I’m gonna have to leave it up to somebody a bit more skilled than me to figure that out.

Great work once again! :)

Edit: actually scratch that. I can’t launch any games. (The emulator beeped when I launched it the first time, that’s how I determined sound was working.) Because of the keyboard mapping issue I mentioned, I have no “.” key so I can’t type in the name of the file I’m trying to start once the emulator starts.

[labelwhore]

A powered one would be better. (It may actually be a need.) The pi has issues when things draw too much power from it’s USB ports.

[labelwhore]

With xboxdrv, you need to start it with some commandline options like --ui-button-map GUIDE=KEY_ESC or something to that effect. This would map the xbox button to the escape key. It works for the other buttons too. I’d double check the syntax in the manual though, as I’ve only ever done this with config files and the –alt-config tag.

http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/xboxdrv/xboxdrv.html

[labelwhore]

Probably. You could use a usb hdd as well if you format it with ext4. That’s what I’ve done for some systems. there are no performance issues, but the filesystem type is very important. For example with exfat, the drive won’t be fast enough and ES will only see a handful of roms before it starts up.

[labelwhore]

That depends… what type of controller? I know how to do it with an xbox360 controller, but not others.

[labelwhore]

[quote=115943]Yes… But there is also the chance I found the correct bios and romset comvination. Is there a way to find out what romset a certain file is? I don’t remember where I got the rom from to check.

[/quote]
There is no way to tell other than building the set yourself. If you use a .dat file for version .106 to build a set, then you have version .106. That’s really the only way there is.

[labelwhore]

[quote=115934]I finally got the chance to look at the log file. It’s empty. So that won’t help

I did find a rom that works though. I don’t know how I did it but I managed to get that one single rom working. Is there a way to find out what romset version it is?

[/quote]
That can happen. chances are that particular rom hasn’t changed over a few different fba versions.

[labelwhore]

Also, if you try to start a game and it immediately goes back to ES without anything in runcommand.log, that usually means you have the wrong bios.

[labelwhore]

your best bet is to get the very latest complete set you can find, and look for the rollback rom set to match that verion. (rollback roms are a set of files from previous mame roms that may be needed to build some older rom sets.) Then run through the instructions here twice, once using the complete set as a source, then again using the rollback romset as a source:

https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Managing-ROMs

Doing all of that will give you a 100% complete set of any version mame or fba roms that you need.

[labelwhore]

The only thing you can do is convert a romset with clrmame. Converting them yourself is the only way to be sure what version of mame or neogeo roms you have.

[labelwhore]

Thanks! that just saved me a ton of frustration. It does not appear that AdvMESS can auto launch BBC Micro games. We have to launch them by typing in the commands once the emulator starts.

http://www.progettoemma.net/mess/system.php?machine=bbca

[labelwhore]

Ok, I’m not averse to doing the leg work there. However, I’m struggling to find any sort of manual for advmess. Does such a thing exist, and would anyone know where I can find it?

[labelwhore]

So am I reading that correctly, that we can’t launch bbc micro games directly from ES? (As in, we’ll need to type in commands to start the games once the emulator launches?) Is there a way to have adv-mess type in the commands for us ala Vice?

[labelwhore]

I’ve been wondering how to add things to that menu. Now I have a couple things to play with. Thanks!

[labelwhore]

Nope the B+ is more powerful than the A+ and the B+ struggles with PS1, the games *can* run on a B+, but not well.

You can pretty much forget about n64 games on a B+, performance is terrible.

[labelwhore]

For the main systems it works pretty well. Where you start running into problems is on the older systems, and especially ones that aren’t officially supported by the scraper.

If you are willing to babysit it though, you can actually scrape some of the older and lesser known systems. I wouldn’t recommend it for more than around 100 games, since picking the art manually is a real pain. I have managed to scrape a decent amount of art that way for TRS-80 though.

I’m probably crazy for doing this, but for a handful of systems, I’ve manually created the gamelists and added the art; virtual boy, C-128, commodore PET, a prboom section I added, and retropie config scripts. ;P Any scraper is better than that. lol

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