Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color

mediamogul

No luck here either. It seems like it's one of those SDL issues that might come and go as it pleases.

it gives an error about the runcommand-onstart. do you know what this means?

Can you post your runcommand-onstart.sh up until line 6?

edmaul69

@mediamogul ok well i cant get 256 to ever boot fully. here is my runcommand-onstart

edmaul69

@mediamogul so it dawned on me that 32bit works with dispmanx enabled. So i am pretty sure dispmanx isnt working on basilisk. Not sure how to test it in another emulator.

mediamogul

@edmaul69 said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

here is my runcommand-onstart

Three things. First, you should add a shebang to the top of your script

#!/bin/bash

The second is my fault. Both if/else statements for onstart and onend are missing a 'then' in my original example. I've corrected it above. Lastly, you have $2 as being the system name when it should be $1

if [ "$1" = "macintosh" ]; then

edmaul69

@mediamogul top of what script am i putting a bin bash?

edmaul69

@mediamogul up top you have $2 not $1. It wont boot at all with $1

Meneer Jansen

Only thing that I can add to the discussion at this point is I've set my HDMI mode to VGA via the following option in /boot/config.txt:

hdmi_group=1
hdmi_mode=1

The other thing I might add is that on my Pi MacOS does boot, but when it crashes, it crashes on the colored logo (I'm convinced that that's when the virtual Mac goes into 256 color mode). As @mediamogul pointed out I'm using a Mac image that uses MacOS 8 rather that the free OS 7.

Last thing I might mention is that in the past I had to compile BasiliskII from source code (to work w/ framebuffer) on the Pi because on the Pi the "stock" BasiliskII version (which works w/ SDL) refused to work in 256 color mode. Like I wrote 2 years ago in a post of mine in this here topic: "So one has to compile BasiliskII w/ framebuffer support instead of SDL. Unfortunately this also means that BII has to be started from within X (i.e. LXDE in Raspbian).".

There is something very, very strange going on w/ Retropie, SDL, dispmanx, framebuffer and 256 colors. Of these I do absolutely not know what the heck dispmanx is.... The others I can understand a bit. It appears to be a solution for software that needs a windowing system to be run outside of a graphical user interface (GUI), quote: "Dispmanx is a windowing system in the process of being deprecated in favour of OpenWF (or similar), however dispmanx is still used in all API demos and it's replacement may not yet be available". Am I right to assume that programs like BasiliskII and PSX emulators, who need dispmanx, do not run in "framebuffer mode"? If so, then one does not have to fiddle w/ setting framebuffers.

mediamogul

@edmaul69 said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

top of what script am i putting a bin bash?

The runcommand-onstart/onend scripts. You can get away with not having it many times over, but some script elements will misbehave without it.

up top you have $2 not $1. It wont boot at all with $1

There may be an example that I'm overlooking, but the first one I'm seeing is this and has

if [ "$2" = "basilisk" ]; then

which should work as an alternative to

if [ "$1" = "macintosh" ]; then

mediamogul

@meneer-jansen said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

There is something very, very strange going on w/ Retropie, SDL, dispmanx, framebuffer and 256 colors.

From what I keep hearing, the problems likely boils down to SDL in some way. I keep reading post after post that updates usually break just as many things as they fix.

Meneer Jansen

Did a little experiment to see if dispmanx and SDL get confused by (re)setting a framebuffer. They (or one of them) do.

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ fbset --verbose
Linux Frame Buffer Device Configuration Version 2.1 (23/06/1999)
(C) Copyright 1995-1999 by Geert Uytterhoeven

Opening frame buffer device `/dev/fb0'
Using current video mode from `/dev/fb0'

mode "616x456"
    geometry 616 456 616 456 32
    timings 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
    rgba 8/16,8/8,8/0,8/24
endmode

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ fbset -depth 8
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ fbset --verbose
Linux Frame Buffer Device Configuration Version 2.1 (23/06/1999)
(C) Copyright 1995-1999 by Geert Uytterhoeven

Opening frame buffer device `/dev/fb0'
Using current video mode from `/dev/fb0'

mode "616x456"
    geometry 616 456 616 456 8
    timings 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
    rgba 8/0,8/0,8/0,0/0
endmode

After setting the framebuffer to 8 bit I can get it back the way it was: the command fbset -depth 32 will do the trick. However, pcsx-rearmed (the PSX emulator) still wont start in Emulationstation (Mame does) and pressing F4 to escape to the command line leaves me w/ a black non-respensive TV. Only thing I can do is reboot the Pi via ssh.

We really need help on this from somebody who knows everything about graphics on computers.

Meneer Jansen

@mediamogul said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

@meneer-jansen said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

There is something very, very strange going on w/ Retropie, SDL, dispmanx, framebuffer and 256 colors.

From what I keep hearing, the problems likely boil down to SDL in some way. I keep reading post after post that updates usually break just as many things as they fix.

That's why I live by the saying "If it ain't broken don't try to fix it". So many, many, many, many times I've been left w/ a system that does not work after an "update" that I hate updating anything with a passion! I'm afraid that after "updating" Retropie I'm, again, left w/ some non-working emulators. What a mess!

P.S. SDL2 does not seem to work w/ framebuffer, SDL1 does. Maybe I've somehow gotten sdl version 1 because I'm on a Pi 1 B+?

mitu

@meneer-jansen said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

P.S. SDL2 does not seem to work w/ framebuffer, SDL1 does. Maybe I've somehow gotten sdl version 1 because I'm on a Pi 1 B+?

That's not really accurate, ES is SDL2 regardless of the PI system used and it works fine. So is RetroArch.

Meneer Jansen

@mitu said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

@meneer-jansen said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

P.S. SDL2 does not seem to work w/ framebuffer, SDL1 does. Maybe I've somehow gotten sdl version 1 because I'm on a Pi 1 B+?

That's not really accurate, ES is SDL2 regardless of the PI system used and it works fine. So is RetroArch.

Okay. Thank you for that info. So the fact that I have a Pi 1 is not the reason that it (sometimes) works on my system.

edmaul69

@mitu so my issue i believe comes down to dispmanx isnt working at all on basilisk. I can never get 256 color to work because of this. With dispmanx turned on i can get 32 bit mode to boot which it shouldnt which tells me the dispmanx isnt working. Do you know how i can reinstall the dispmanx?

Edit: i used to have it working and never updated anything other than retropie setup

Meneer Jansen

@People having trouble starting BasiliskII in 256 color mode: try starting BII without the config file from Retropie. I.e. delete the following line from /opt/retropie/configs/macintosh/emulators.cfg:

--config /opt/retropie/configs/macintosh/basiliskii.cfg

I can start BII in 256 mode from a terminal in a graphical user interface (a GUI called "Pixel") on my Raspberry Pi. I installed Raspbian first and Retropie afterwards: you guys might not have a GUI installed. But I experience terrible crashes (segfaults) when I use Retropie's config file.

You can install the Pixel desktop enviroment (formerly LXDE) w/ the RaspberryPie setup script (sudo RetroPie-Setup/retropie_setup.sh ) and then choosing: Configuration / Tools >> Raspbiantools >> Install Pixel Desktop Environment . You can exit Emulationstation with F4 and then start a GUI with the command startx.

Strange thing is that I cannot find anything in the BII config file regarding graphics mode...

mediamogul

@meneer-jansen said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

I can start BII in 256 mode from a terminal in a graphical user interface

This jibes with everything I've been reading. There are quite a few threads outside of this forum where people just can't get 8-bit color working on the Pi without the Pixel desktop environment. I think this is a situation where we had a hacky workaround that was on borrowed time. I've tried quite a few things and can only get 8-bit colors without crashing maybe one out of twenty times. Personally, I'm not too keen on having a full desktop environment on my setup just to service the few games I'm interested in that would need it, so I'll probably just make do with titles using a higher color pallet.

Meneer Jansen

@mediamogul said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

@meneer-jansen said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

I can start BII in 256 mode from a terminal in a graphical user interface

This jibes with everything I've been reading. There are quite a few threads outside of this forum where people just can't get 8-bit color working on the Pi without the Pixel desktop environment. I think this is a situation where we had a hacky workaround that was on borrowed time. I've tried quite a few things and can only get 8-bit colors without crashing maybe one out of twenty times. Personally, I'm not too keen on having a full desktop environment on my setup just to service the few games I'm interested in that would need it, so I'll probably just make do with titles using a higher color pallet.

If you still have some time and energy left then you could try it from within Emulationstation but without the Retropie config file, i.e. delete the following line from /opt/retropie/configs/macintosh/emulators.cfg:

--config /opt/retropie/configs/macintosh/basiliskii.cfg

mediamogul

@meneer-jansen

Sure, it's certainly worth a shot. I'll give it a try this evening.

mediamogul

@meneer-jansen

Sadly, it was a no-go.

mediamogul

Holy carp, I think I may have made progress. I've now been able to boot ten times in a row with 8-bit color by adding:

displaycolordepth 8

to /opt/retropie/configs/macintosh/basiliskii.cfg in conjunction with changing the framebuffer color depth using the onstart/onend script method. I don't want to start celebrating just yet, but my success rate has gone from 1/20 to 10/10.

From what I'm reading in a few places, there are apparently several undocumented settings that have been added since main BII development ended in 2006. That got me looking for such an addition that might help us out and I ran across this posting. I first tried it without the onstart/onend trick, but it blacked out the screen during startup.