[michael]

gotcha. mine is running in a neogeo cabinet with a usb keyboard emulator connected to control panels. I’m only running mame and FBA for neo geo games though.

i think on this platform you’ll have to compromise somewhere.

(and I agree on your controller choices. I play all my console games on my mac and managed to secure a couple of super famicom controllers out of Japan that I then plug into a usb adaptor. it just “feels” right.)

[michael]

Good luck. I went with a hardware solution and finally got it working just last night.

Pi b+ with a gert vga666 gpio adapter out to a T-SLG v1.6 scanline generator.

Perfect scanline without the slowdown. :)

[michael]

fixed, though not sure which setting made it work. I did a fresh image flash, updated everything, and disabled emulationstation auto-start, and splash screen. I also left the memory split at 256 and only overclocked with the high setting.

successful boot to prompt. so I re-enabled emulation station and rebooted.

successful boot to emulationstation. so I re-enabled splash screen and rebooted.

successful boot at 1080p over VGA and I have scanlines. so I’m loading up my roms and then making an image backup before I do any further tinkering.

[michael]

[quote=84762]You could probably do this remotely even if the screen freezes as it should have network facility by that point?[/quote]

does not. blinky lights on the NIC, but no registered address on my router and no activity lights on the board (just power indicator). it literally locks up and has to be hard rebooted, reflashed, etc because I can’t get to a point where I can edit config.txt and remove the dt-blob.bin.

[michael]

is there anything enabled by default in the vanilla retropie 2.3 image trying to access the GPIO for controllers, etc?

per the vga666 installation: “Don’t forget that the dt-blob.bin will disable all GPIOs 2-21 for any other use.”

[michael]

not sure. i can try. i also need to make a backup image with all of the updates applied before i switch over and test the vga device. that’s been the biggest time suck so far.

i guess ultimately i’m still scratching my head why the intial boot sequence is displayed perfectly with the official raspberry pi logo up top, the retropie boot screen displays, and THEN the screen goes blank and the pi locks up.

what could possibly be loading at that point that would be an issue?

before installing the vga software i expand the file system, run rpi-update, all of the apt-get updates/upgrades, overclock to turbo, and split memory at 384 – all of which works fine with the default hdmi.

[michael]

Just saw this, i’m running an iPAC keyboard emulator mapped to a standard set of neo jeo arcade buttons (added dedicated buttons for coin). If you want to disable the escape function just add a # in front of that line. How do you plan to exit out of the emulator?

[Keyboard]
# Get codes from /usr/include/SDL/SDL_keysym.h
# Using default Mame key mapping
A_1=306 #LeftControl
B_1=32 #Space
X_1=308 #LeftAlt
Y_1=304 #LeftShift
L_1=122 #z
R_1=120 #x
START_1=49 #1
SELECT_1=53 #5
LEFT_1=276 #Left
RIGHT_1=275 #Right
UP_1=273 #Up
DOWN_1=274 #Down
<strong>QUIT=27 #Escape
</strong>#player 2 keyboard controls, disabled by default
A_2=97 #a
B_2=113 #q
X_2=115 #s
Y_2=119 #w
L_2=101 #e
R_2=116 #t
START_2=50 #2
SELECT_2=54 #6
LEFT_2=100 #d
RIGHT_2=103 #g
UP_2=114 #r
DOWN_2=102 #f

[michael]

No issues with overscan – the scanline overlay effect in mame4all just sucks. and trying anything else is probably too resource intensive for the pi, so I’m thinking about offloading that function to a dedicated scanline generator. the slg3000: http://bit.ly/1yw6MvD

[michael]

wow that scanline filter sucks. and audio (was expecting that). when running mame in windows with multiple cores, 6GB of RAM, and full mame configurations it was no big deal to do software shading. the pi is capable, but limited in that regard and it seems that while mame4all is solid with the older rom set it’s definitely limited. i’m also thinking about doing the dedicated neo geo emulator so i can get the full spectrum of neo geo games and not have to sift through the mame list. so I need something consistent and universally available for all emulators.

follow my logic here:

hdmi to vga + 3.5mm adapter. this allows me to connect my little lepai amp to the hdmi audio, which i understand to be better supported.

since I’m using a widescreen monitor that has vga input, converting the hdmi video to vga will allow me to insert an slg3000 into the video chain so that I can get more accurate scanlines and without bogging down the pi’s limited resources.

any issues with this train of thought?

[michael]

cool, thanks!

[michael]

That all clicks, thanks for the clarity.

I do want to clarify – If all I’m running is mame4all, then I don’t need to run the RetroPie-Setup script whatsoever? just the kernel updates and raspi-config script?

[Author]

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