uae4arm v0.5 - testrun under retropie4.1 by amiga professional

[Substring]

@RustyMG i didn't take it as "compile it right here right now". I just wanted to explain that amiga emulation it still quite on the move, despite me having not much free time these days. I've spent quite some time on amiga in the past months. Adding an emulator the recalbox way is hard, takes time. And although I could run the emulator on my dev pi, i just couldn't rech the point where it works like any other recalbox emulator because of the auto configuration step that we do in Recalbox.

The real problem with uae4arm has always been the configuration part (as this is definitely not documented and looks like a real mess). I don't see the point in adding an emulator that forces users to have a keyboard, adding emulators that are not maintained, or emulators whose author hardly cares about users' recommendations ...

Also, hardly any chance I add an emulator that requires SDL1 ... come on, it's 2017 now ... having SDL1 on pi is totally abnormal (and was never meant to happen).

Now I'm still keeping an eye on amiga emulation. But the main priority for now is to hunt for bugs on 4.1

[voljega]

@Substring Well I can say now that I master uae configuration and it is not that hard at all, you just have to know that a lot but really a lot (I would say 60 to 80%) of a uae generated by uae4arm is useless and not necessary, especially around controls.

And with the future enhancement of amiberry especially around SDL2 I'm sure we'll still be able to reduce that.

Custom generation doesn't cause too much of a trouble either

[Ratte]

AmigaCD32 is now working very good.
Tested a lot of stuff, all seems to be ok.
I hope to build a tiny archive and a how-to during this week.
BR
André

[Ratte]

@voljega: I also tested a lot of "Amiga Compilation" discs for the cd32 ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmV6DEJ2y4c
(it is not my video, only an expample for cd32 compilation disc)
BR
André

[Ratte]

@Substring
https://forum.recalbox.com/topic/7331/amiga-cd32-emulation-how-to

Should also work with amiberrys uae-binaries for pi1 & pi2.
Sorry, but i have no idea how to contribute a package or so ....
Perhaps the team can build a package with my guide.

[RustyMG]

@Substring
Hi,
Well, it's a month to the day that the "other lot" released their latest update, v4.2.
In that release, the part that got my attention was the updates to C64 and Amiga emulation, ie. "Multi disk zip support for Vice (C64 emulator), fs-uae, uae4arm and Amiberry (Amiga)".

They can now launch Amiga disk images directly from Emulation Station with uae4arm or Amiberry it seems, so I'm wondering if they have managed to resolve the issues everyone (in both camps) has been having with C64 and Amiga emulation?

[Substring]

@RustyMG If you're talknig about retropie, their philosophy is much different than ours. In their opinion, it's up to the user to configure every emulator on their own, when recalbox aims a "configuration-less" experience. Of course I could have added an amiga emulator and say "guyz, plug a keyboard, and you're on your own to configure", but that's not how we, at Recalbox, see things.

So, as long as we can't release a "recalbox-spirit emulator", we don't do it.

Also, we are not based on raspbian, which makes adding an emulator (compiling it + integrating it) much harder.

And I'm quite surprised they added fs-uae when its dev team said the emulator shouldn't run very good on a raspberry ... This is also how we differ : we only add emulators that have a meaning (like why would we add saturn that runs at 5fps ? PSP is already at the limit, too many people complain that it's not very fluid).

Anyway, no time yet for amiga. Among things i'm trying to solve, C64 is the priority.

[voljega]

@RustyMG said in uae4arm v0.5 - testrun under retropie4.1 by amiga professional:

They can now launch Amiga disk images directly from Emulation Station with uae4arm or Amiberry it seems

And so is my custom integration, there's really no issue around that, I already had a working prototype a yeah and a half back. And tody it's working perfectly, mounting multi adf up to 4 and even WHDLoad images

The only real issue is mapping special controls on gamepad : gui, exiting emulator, mouse, cd32 pad

[RustyMG]

@Substring
I agree totally.
Recalbox has always been the more.....what's the word....."polished" . Recalbox has always been more polished, more professional, more "complete".
As you say I think more people will be wanting C64 emulation up and running before anything else.

[RustyMG]

@voljega
Regarding the issues you mentioned, Ive tried about 80 cd32 iso's using Ratte's CD32 setup and there has only been 1 game where the joypad mapping didn't seem quite right, plus, every game exited back to the menu as expected, and the CD32 controller mapping seemed fine.
Has he possibly solved some of the issues you have?

[voljega]

@RustyMG
I don't think so given those issues are related to the emulator itself but what I meant is that you should be able to configure precisely each button in a conf file before launching the emulator (to be able to use multiple different controllers), more than just using the one configured by the emulator by default.

Do you exit the game by a controller button or with the GUI ?

[RustyMG]

@voljega
Hi, you exit the games in the same was as most of the other emulators, the 2 button combo "hotkey" & "start".
Its not like the PSP where you need to enter the GUI.

[voljega]

@RustyMG hmmm then I don't know how he did that, I'll have a look

[lolo]

@voljega
For now you can have any button you like to quit, but not a combination such as Start+Select.
Just add this line in the uae config file. It also depends on your controller, xbox360, Sony... You will need to establish what button number your input device (joypad) has for the button you which to assign to quit.
For exemple with the PlayStation 3 joypad, (16) correspond to the PS button.
With the xbox360, (8) correspond to the back button.

button_for_quit=16

[voljega]

Which emulator are you talking about ? Amiberry ? Because I already did what you said (also for GUI) and I thought the usable buttons for that were only the 0-3 ones, at least it is the case in the GUI

[lolo]

@voljega said in uae4arm v0.5 - testrun under retropie4.1 by amiga professional:

Amiberry

Yes with Amiberry. You have to edit the config file.

[RustyMG]

@voljega. Ratte's cd32 emu setup definitely uses uae4arm. I know this as during the setup process you need to pick the correct version depending on what Pi you have, deleting the other 2.

[lolo]

Amiberry is uae4arm emulator updated and optimized with bug fixes.
This is the version to have.

[Ratte]

@Substring said in uae4arm v0.5 - testrun under retropie4.1 by amiga professional:

@RustyMG If you're talknig about retropie, their philosophy is much different than ours. In their opinion, it's up to the user to configure every emulator on their own, when recalbox aims a "configuration-less" experience. Of course I could have added an amiga emulator and say "guyz, plug a keyboard, and you're on your own to configure", but that's not how we, at Recalbox, see things.

With the CD32 Emulator this is no longer a problem.
No keyboard - done
No mouse - done
One unified configuration - done

So, as long as we can't release a "recalbox-spirit emulator", we don't do it.

recalbox-spirit - done (in my opinion)

we only add emulators that have a meaning

It is listed under "Board Compatibility"
https://github.com/recalbox/recalbox-os/wiki/Board-Compatibility-(EN)
I understand this as "emulator that have a meaning"

Anyway, no time yet for amiga. Among things i'm trying to solve, C64 is the priority.
Amiberry is raspberry pi only, which is quite a b*mmer for odroid boards
... Having an arch specific emulator is not what I believe to be the best thing for recalbox. It would really sadden me (and take sooo much dev time) to have say amiberry for pi, uae4arm on odroid and fs-uae for x86 ...

The offical way seems to be different ...
https://github.com/recalbox/recalbox-os/wiki/Board-Compatibility-(EN)
It is not the only emulator thats integrated for one specific system.
Take x86 (Wii) or missing emulators for PI1&PI2.
From this perspective, I find your argument quite weak.

And CD32 is like emulating A1200 ... it's still the same deal : have the emulator, and preconfigure it in the recalbox philosophy and scripts. To be honest, I personnaly don't have much time for now to do anything else than support.

You've listed a lot of personal reasons.
I feel somewhat reminded of the 80/90s computer wars.
Where can I find offical developer support?

BR
André

[Substring]

@Ratte said in uae4arm v0.5 - testrun under retropie4.1 by amiga professional:

Where can I find offical developer support?

That's me dude. I'm one of the developpers. Depending on what you're trying to achieve, there is a wiki for compilation basics. The next big thing is understanding buildroot as we don't add pre-compiled binaries.