[tipoto]

I’m very curious about all this and I’m very interested to read your feedback after all your tests. :).
I also use Xbox 360 Wireless controllers, so it’s a good start to know that they are recognized, but I also need to connect an ipac2, hopefully it can be recognized too.

[tipoto]

I didn’t test Android for my retro-gaming project and maybe I missing something great, I have a few doubts and questions though (but you don’t really have to answer them ;) ):

– I heard that Gamesome was probably the best solution to get a frontend on Android, but, is there any important options missing, like the option to edit the settings and emulators on a per game basis, use videosnaps, edit my layouts and add animations? I use Attract-Mode as frontend and I have all these options, I can basically do whatever you want.

– I use a lot of scripts to launch my roms and do others tasks, I guess I can install an app that gives me bash script on Android, but is it the same as on linux?

– Same thing with Python?

– Are all the emulators stable?

– How many versions of Mame are available? I currently have 11 versions of mame + 2 versions of fba installed and I need them all because certain roms are difficult to emulate correctly unless you use the right emulator.

– I also have an Arduino connected to my XU4, in order to control RGB leds (I created my own LEDBlinky system), I guess I can also find an app for the communication between the 2 boards, but is it as reliable as on Linux?

I’m sure that with a lot of work and research, we can get something cool with Android, but I’m wondering, once the best apps and options has been picked and set correctly, once everything has been optimized at its best, what are the missing things that I will never find a solution to replace and make me frustrated because of the limitation?

[tipoto]

You can also try OGST (Odroid GameStation Turbo), which I use on my XU4:
http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=7322

It’s very well done and the guy that supports it is very active, he answers every single question and updates his image very often.

I don’t know if you just bought your XU4 or not, but you’ll see that there is a big problem with the latest mali drivers… There is a huge tearing issue with the 2D scrolling games (Sonic, rayman 1 etc…) and Vsync doesn’t work with these drivers so forget about it to fix the problem.
I personally use an old kernel just because of that, but in consequence I have to deal with an old problem very annoying, the “black screen issue” (it has been fixed in the latest drivers), basically you can crash your system in certain conditions and you get a black screen when it happens. I managed to avoid it in almost all the situations but one, the only case where my system can still crash sometimes, is when I quit a game with Reicast, which is very frustrating since I bought the XU4 especially for its performances with Reicast, mupen64 and ppsspp. :/

[tipoto]

Have you tried to increase the latency in the audio settings? It could maybe fix the problem.

[tipoto]

Some bash commands sometime need additional flag depending on the distro you use. Maybe it’s not the case here, but you never know, you should try to debug your scripts to see if there is any command that doesn’t work anymore.

[tipoto]

Hmm… This request is not about Attract-Mode the frontend I think ;) it’s about having an “attract” mode showing random games after a few minutes of inactivity.

[tipoto]

Do you manage to modify the aspect ratio directly in game with the retroarch menu?
If so, select the right aspect ratio from here, save a config file and take a look at it to see what it looks like.

[tipoto]

I’m currently trying to switch from the Rpi2 to the Odroid XU4 for my retro gaming console project, I received the board 1 week ago, so it’s still too early to give a definitive opinion. I have been participating and reading on the retropie forums since the Rpi2 came out and I know pretty well the system now, I think I should be able to give an interesting feedback soon. ;)
Btw, there is a port of retropie for Odroid, but I don’t know the limitation since I didn’t test it, I’m using the OGST image (Odroid GameStation Turbo), which is great, but I use it as emulators manager, I don’t use XBMC, which is the default frontend, there is also the option to use EmulationStation, but I didn’t test it either.

My first impressions (but again, it’s really early):
Pros:
– Performances are better than on the pi. I will give more details later, after further testing.
– The community is not that small, it’s why I decided to try one of their board, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. Check their forums and the number of topics and posts: http://forum.odroid.com/
– Nothing else unfortunately

Cons:
– Even though the community is OK, it’s not as big as the pi’s
– No VSYNC support with X11 (but works with FBDEV with the latest drivers) -> Because of that, if your entire system works with X11 (like OGST), you get some tearing problems, especially with the 2D scrolling games, I didn’t notice the problem with the 3D games for the moment though and it’s not horrible with the 2D games, but still annoying when you come from the Rpi.
– It’s not possible to switch from FBDEV to X11 (from the terminal mode to the window mode), the only switch you can do is by using startx and go to the GUI, but forget about using xinit command in the console…
– You need to deal with the so called “black screen issue”, which makes the XU3/4 users’ life hard. Basically the graphic driver keeps the screen black when you switch from fullscreen to window mode, they have a workaround to limit the issue, but you still can get it once in a while. However, once you know how to avoid it, it’s possible to build a black screen free system, but it costs you some limitations on what you can do with your frontend and emulators. This problem can only be fixed if arm finally decide to fix something on their side first, it’s why Hardkernel didn’t solve it yet.

I’ll try to update my feedback soon…

[tipoto]

I haven’t test FBA next yet, but since it’s a libretro emulator, I guess you need to enable the unibios from the retroarch menu. Unless I didn’t understand what you were looking for and you were maybe precisely looking for a way to display the retroarch menu.

[tipoto]

Maybe I will say something completely stupid, but is it possible to make it run with x by using the xinit command from the terminal?

[tipoto]

I did a quick video to show Attract-Mode on my Raspberry Pi 2.
I don’t have a video capture card so I had to do it with my DSLR camera and the quality is not as good or course and it’s recored in 24 fps only, so it doesn’t really do justice to how it runs in real.

https://youtu.be/ZNVuFV9mfZA

[tipoto]

I attached 2 snapshots to give an idea of what you can do with Attract-Mode on the Pi, everything is animated, works smoothly and is in 1920×1080.
This is the only layout I created yet, since I’m not working on this part for the moment, I did this layout just to see how far I could push the Pi2 with Attract-Mode then planning with my results (for what I have left to do). My conclusion is that you can really do lot of things! I have to mention the code for the wheel system comes from an existing layout, I modified it though, for all the other animations (that you can’t see on the snapshots), I did my own system to keep the layout perfectly smooth, because for some reasons the available animation modules, kill the real time.
I’ll do a video soon.

[attachment file=”neogeo_1.png”]

[attachment file=”neogeo_2.png”]

[tipoto]

I’ll try to do a little video (probably next week) to show the potential of using Attract-Mode with Retropie, I also have a few things that can be interesting to show ;). My retro-gaming arcade console project is completely in work in progress, I have been working on this since the rpi2 was released and I think I have done only half of what I really want to do… But the main features are already done (system to get RGB leds inside arcade buttons that change depending of the game you pick, OpenBOR system included, elaborate random game selection system, layouts with animations, filters and videosnaps…). Hopefully I will finish this project someday, because it takes a lot of time ;)

[tipoto]

I personally use Attract-Mode as frontend and retropie to manage my roms and emulators, so I get the best for each parts ;)
The snapvideos work great on both SD card or external HD (now I use an external hdd). You can also create a lot of animations in your layouts without any slow down, as long as you don’t use their animation modules which just kill the Pi.

[tipoto]

Cool! Thanks!
I will try rebuilding retroarch from source and see if I have any issues with the systems I use.
Do you know which systems are concerned by the problem with the select button?

[tipoto]

Thanks for the info. I guess I forgot to try A or B, but I think I’m going to keep the previous version of the file anyway, it feels more natural to me to be able to navigate over the menus immediately.
If anyone wants the file, I can share it, it the same version of retroarch (1.2.2) without the search box.

[tipoto]

Update:
Ok, so I manage to unlock the menu by pressing alt, but I still don’t know what it is searching for when the menu is displayed.

More important: I found a fix for the problem, I overwrote the file /opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch by the same file I had on another SD card (with retropie 3.1), and now everything works fine again. It’s weird because retroarch hasn’t been updated between 3.1 and 3.2.1, we still have retroarch version 1.2.2, but the files size are slightly different.

[tipoto]

I didn’t know about the es_systems.cfg in ~/.emulationstation/, it’s good to know!

[tipoto]

Well, sometimes it really needs to modify this file, let’s say you want to update from 3.0 to 3.1, the script will have to modify your es_system.cfg file to add the necessary lines for the new emulators (lr-mame2003, lr-fba-next…), otherwise you wont be able to use them, unless you add the lines manually.
But I agree with you that it’s sometimes annoying, it would be great if it could just add the new stuffs at the end without touching anything else.

[tipoto]

I think ES always creates a backup of your es_systems.cfg file before replacing it. It should be called es_system.cfg.bak, in the same folder (etc/emulationstation), I never checked if the backup was done properly though.
I personally always keep a copy of all the modified files on my windows PC and for some specific files, like this one, I also create a backup myself on the sd card on the same location, that way it’s easy to switch the files just by renaming them.

[tipoto]

Have you tried to create the config file for your joystick manually, with the correct name and the right button mapping?

[tipoto]

You need to change the permission settings of your bash scripts. From the terminal, go to the folder where your scripts are located and use this command:
sudo chmod 777 on.sh
sudo chmod 777 off.sh

You can do it through fileZilla as well, if you use it to manipulate and upload your files on you rpi, to change the permission settings, just right click on the file and select “permission”, then you can modify the permissions the way you want.

[tipoto]

If your system boots on ES directly, you can try to edit “usr/bin/emulationstation” (if I remember well) and add your lines right after #!/bin/bash.

[tipoto]

I created a random game section in my system which works pretty well I think, but I changed so many things in the Retropie/ES installation that I can’t really share it because it’s part of a bigger system of rom launcher which allows me a lot of things, but uses custom bash scripts (connected from each other), new type of config files, also some files have to be modified in ES and the whole thing is in work in progress.
But if I have time, I’ll do a short video to show how it works, it can maybe give some ideas… I can run a random game through the whole library or only on a specific section. I don’t have an auto demo mode though, but it’s probably doable with some work and using a USB monitoring to check if there is any activity on the buttons or controls.

[tipoto]

You have to use the correct romset :
https://github.com/retropie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/MAME

It seems that you use mame-Libretro, so you have to use 0.37b5, but I don’t think this rom is in the romset, you should probably use FBA-Libretro instead, which uses another romset:
Romset Used: FBA 0.2.97.30 which is based on MAME 0.154 (Jul 2014)
https://github.com/retropie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/FinalBurn-Alpha

[tipoto]

Well, let’s say you want to create a Mega-man theme, if you just want to create the theme with one type of emulators (snes ones for example), then you just have to edit a few files and you’re good, however if you want to be able to emulate all the different platforms to get all the different versions of Mega-man in one place, then it’s way more complicated.

[tipoto]

You can do whatever you want and you can have different consoles or arcade emulators in the same theme, but you need to script a lot and modify a few files here and there.
I have my own themes, but I launch my games through a script that I created, which reads a text file (1 text file by theme) where I put all the settings I want per game (emulator, button layout, shader, index ratio, etc…), then my script modifies all the config files needed, then it executes runcommand.sh.
Here is an example of what my text files look like:

ROM_NAME EMU IDX ITG SHR CFG BTN LED
———————————————————————
bublbobl.zip fbaLr 0 1 2 0 250341 ***BY**
plotting.zip mameLr 21 0 2 0 250341 ***B***
…

If I don’t put any settings for one game, I have a line at the top of my text files that gives the default settings it has to use.
Basically, in one theme, I can use any emulator I want (fba-libretro, pifba, mame-libretro, mame4all, advmame 0.94, advmame 0.12…or any console emulators).
I’m still working on it, the acrade section works like a charm, the console part should theoretically work already, but I didn’t really test it yet, so I’m expecting to have a few exceptions to create in my script, probably nothing big.
I’m also working on a random game launcher, which already works at 80%, I just need to fix one little thing, I can launch a random game for all the library or for one specific theme (like neogeo for example).

Everything is possible ;)

[tipoto]

https://github.com/retropie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Managing-ROMs

Close to the bottom of the page, you will find it.

[tipoto]

Have you tried this?
sudo nano /etc/default/keyboard

[tipoto]

Actually with any retroarch emulators, you can already have 1 retroarch file per rom/game and so you can change buttons, ratio or anything you want per game, but I only managed to make it worked with the old way to launch the emulators with es_systems.cfg (not using “_SYS_”).

Here is my solution:

1) You need to create 1 config file per rom using this type of name “rom_name.zip.cfg” (for example arkanoid.zip.cfg) and put them into your roms folder (they have to be in the same folder as your roms)

2) You need to edit your es_systems.cfg by adding one flag into the line that launches your emulator (only emulators using retroarch of course).
Here is the flag:
–appendconfig %ROM%.cfg

A real example:
/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 4 “/opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch -L /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-fba/fb_alpha_libretro.so –config /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg –appendconfig /opt/retropie/configs/EmulatorName/retroarch.cfg –appendconfig %ROM%.cfg %ROM%” “lr-fba”

It works on my rpi2!

By the way, anyone would know how to add an “–appendconfig” argument into the new _SYS_ command? I tried different formulations, but none of them workded.
I guess we could slightly modify the runcommand.sh file to add a 5th argument in the launch command. In the end we would have something like this:
/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 4 _SYS_ fba %ROM% /The/Path/I/Want/

[tipoto]

I also moved the texts away and it worked perfectly.
There are 2 numbers for the text position (x, y), from 0 to 1, which represent 0 to 100% of your screen, so from 1 to infinity the text is out screen.

[tipoto]

Have you done these steps before trying anything in ES?

1) You need the unibios 3.1 (easy to find)
2) Extract the unibios -> you will get a file called ‘uni-bios.rom’
3) Rename this file to ‘asia-s3.rom’
4) Use this file to replace the one that has the exact same name inside neogeo.zip (I personally just switch the file names asia-s3.rom <-> uni-bios.rom, that way I keep them both)

Then you should be good using A+B+C while the splash screen

[tipoto]

For the games that need a second rom to run, I have a solution (I tested it only with 1 rom though, but it worked).
Let’s say you want the USA version, but the Japanese rom is needed, you just have to extract the content of the Japanese rom and put it into the USA zip.

EDIT:
Oh… amadhiX you were faster than me ;)

[tipoto]

Any rom placed in the folder called “mame” will be launched using mame4all.

[tipoto]

You should just do a quick test to see if it works, it sounds like it should though.

For your first problem, I think it doesn’t work because you have set 2 functions to the same button “8”.

EDIT:
Oh, yo edited your post at the same time ;)

[Author]

Posts