Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color

edmaul69

@francemsr You cannot switch it to enable dismanx or displaycolordepth 8 if your macos is in thousands of colors or millions of colors. They do not work with dispmanx enabled. And if you try to switch to 256 colors without dispmanx enabled it crashes basilisk. If you try to boot a thousands+ colors set in macos with dispmanx enabled everything crashes. Hence why you need to either switch to b&w or have it already set to 256 colors before being changing dispmanx on the pi.

FranceMSR

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

@francemsr You cannot switch it to enable dismanx or displaycolordepth 8 if your macos is in thousands of colors or millions of colors. They do not work with dispmanx enabled. And if you try to switch to 256 colors without dispmanx enabled it crashes basilisk. If you try to boot a thousands+ colors set in macos with dispmanx enabled everything crashes. Hence why you need to either switch to b&w or have it already set to 256 colors before being changing dispmanx on the pi.

You're wrong. I installed MacOS 7.5.3 that by default is set to thousands of colors. Then I enabled dispmanx, then changed color depth to 8 in configuration file. At that point I started MacOS and change colors from thousands to 256. It works without any problem, see here for the result:
http://www.retropie-italia.it/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=753

edmaul69

@francemsr i have done this many times. Even tested it three times today with the same results as the many many times i tried before.

edmaul69

@francemsr i made a video as proof.

FranceMSR

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

@francemsr i made a video as proof.

I'm using MacOS7.5.5 installed from scratch by me. I don't know what you have done in your system and which parameters you're using on basilisik configuration file. Again, if you see the screenshots at the end of this thread you will see the result:
http://www.retropie-italia.it/viewtopic.php?f=61&p=4695

edmaul69

@francemsr im using 8.1 but it did it on 7.5 as well. In earlier thread comments in this thread or the other one when i was setting this up it was stated to do it the same way i mention for the same reason. But at any case for the tutorial it should be mentioned to change it to b&w so others dont have the same issue me and others have had and not know why and never get it working because of that. B&w will guarantee it works for them.

Meneer Jansen

@edmaul69 and @FranceMSR: thank you both for the input. I added the info to my post at nr. 137. I included as mucht info as possible there. I made a choice to make it not as short as possible but as complete as possible.

FranceMSR

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

@francemsr ...B&w will guarantee it works for them.

If I use B&W Basilisk crashes...

What I can guarantee is that if you follow this guide for installing MacOS:
http://www.retropie-italia.it/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=752

then my step for playing 256 colors game:
http://www.retropie-italia.it/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=753
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/1049/macintosh-basilisk-ii-8-bit-color/171

it ALWAYS works ;-)

P.S.: compile Basilisk from source code, don't use binary version

edmaul69

@francemsr i do have it installed from source. Are you changing it to 16 color b&w?

FranceMSR

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

@francemsr i do have it installed from source. Are you changing it to 16 color b&w?

No, never used 16 B&W mode because in this way Basilisk crashes

spud11

Hi. So I tried both ways - changing the dispmanx and the displaycolordepth 8 both before and after changing the same option on MacOS. I couldn't get either to work and I tried on multiple occasions.

So I tried @FranceMSR's guide on the the Retropie Italia website for installing the Macintosh system and then I installed POP2 using his other guide. This did work and POP2 works fine and it does seem to work every time. Thanks.

However, I've got 2 questions please.

First, every time I start up the Mac emulator I get the warning about the floppy disk. Is there a way of stopping this?

Second, is there a way of starting POP2 automatically from the emulationstation menu please eg by altering the emulators.cfg file or altering the basiliskii.cfg file? At the moment, I have to start the Mac emulator and click a couple of times in the MacOS disk before I can start up POP2. Thanks.

Meneer Jansen

@spud11 said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

Hi. So I tried both ways - changing the dispmanx and the displaycolordepth 8 both before and after changing the same option on MacOS. I couldn't get either to work and I tried on multiple occasions.

So I tried @FranceMSR's guide on the the Retropie Italia website for installing the Macintosh system and then I installed POP2 using his other guide. This did work and POP2 works fine and it does seem to work every time. Thanks.

That's strange, because other than the Italian guide making it's own disk image the guide here in post 137 is, AFAIK, the same procedure. Maybe the disk images from the "PoP Macintosh Total Pack" are set to 256 color which is making them crash...?

FranceMSR

@spud11 said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

So I tried @FranceMSR's guide on the the Retropie Italia website for installing the Macintosh system and then I installed POP2 using his other guide. This did work and POP2 works fine and it does seem to work every time. Thanks.

I'm glad that you found the guides helpful ;-)

Thanks for your feedback, maybe now other guys will try to follow those step :-)

The guides are here:
http://www.retropie-italia.it/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=752
http://www.retropie-italia.it/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=753

spud11

@meneer-jansen @FranceMSR I added the oldgames image (disk02.imgon which POP2 appears) to the emulators.cfg, so that I could start up POP2 from that ready made disk I'm using (and which I suspect most people are using).

That works too, so I suspect the difference in reliability is actually something to do with the installation of the MacOS. Starting from scratch using @FranceMSR's guide seems to be the most reliable way of getting POP2 working avoiding the Black Screen of Death.

Also, I switched the Pi off overnight and started it up again this morning. That seems to have removed the floppy disk issue I was having. When I started up Basilisk this morning, it rebuilt the Mac emulator on startup, so all is good at that end.

I'm still not sure, however, how to get POP2 to start automatically from the retropie/emulationstation menu. I'm still having to click once or twice in the MacOS to start POP2 manually after the emulator starts.

spud11

@meneer-jansen There are in fact quite a few differences in the basiliskii.cfg between the 2 processes of setup:

Retropie Italia's version is:

rom /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/color_classic.rom
#disk /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/DiskTools_MacOS8.image
#disk /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/InstallationDisk
disk /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/MacOS753.img
disk /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/Stuff-it_Expander55.dsk
extfs /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh

displaycolordepth 8
seriala /dev/ttyS0
serialb /dev/ttyS1
udptunnel false
udpport 6066
bootdrive 0
bootdriver 0
ramsize 33554432
frameskip 0
modelid 5
cpu 4
fpu true
nocdrom false
nosound false
noclipconversion false
nogui false
jit false
jitfpu false
jitdebug false
jitcachesize 0
jitlazyflush false
jitinline false
keyboardtype 5
keycodes false
mousewheelmode 1
mousewheellines 3
dsp /dev/dsp
mixer /dev/mixer
ignoresegv true
idlewait true

The "normal" Retropie version is as follows:

displaycolordepth 8
extfs /
seriala /dev/ttyS0
serialb /dev/ttyS1
udptunnel false
udpport 6066
bootdrive 0
bootdriver 0
ramsize 8388608
frameskip 6
modelid 5
cpu 3
fpu false
nocdrom false
nosound false
noclipconversion false
nogui false
jit false
jitfpu false
jitdebug false
jitcachesize 0
jitlazyflush false
jitinline false
keyboardtype 5
keycodes false
mousewheelmode 1
mousewheellines 3
dsp /dev/dsp
mixer /dev/mixer
ignoresegv false
idlewait true

The cpu, frameskip and the ramsize are different.

FranceMSR

Pay attention that during installation modelid is 14 but at the final step modelid is 5. You posted a wrong configuration files, that is not the same of RetroPie Italia Forum ;-)

edmaul69

@francemsr which mac is modelid5? I use a quadra900.rom so the modelid i use is 20. I used 14 as well seems to function the same.

Edit: found it is a macintosh se

spud11

@francemsr Okay, thanks. I've changed that now. The only things different are the cpu, frameskip and ramsize. Is it likely any of them would make any difference at all?

Meneer Jansen

@spud11 said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

@francemsr Okay, thanks. I've changed that now. The only things different are the cpu, frameskip and ramsize. Is it likely any of them would make any difference at all?

I Changed the procedure in post 137 to include the frameskip setting to 0 (did that myself already but forgot to put it in post 137). PoP2 rus much more "fluently" that way.
What the CPU setting does is not explained in the official documentation here. Just like the "displaycolordepth" setting it might be a recently added setting that is still undocumented. On my system it is (still) set to "5"
My RAM size is set to 8 MB (i.e. 8388608). Don't think it'll make much difference though. PoP2 still runs kinda slow and the background music runs at 60 BPM (1 beat per second). Oh, well.
My model ID is set to 5 and I work w/ MacOS 8. The official help file says that one must set it to 14 for MacOS 8. Did that just now and I don't notice any difference.

FranceMSR

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

I Changed the procedure in post 137...

I don't understand why you continuously change your post when the correct procedure is this :D
You have to install your own system! Don't use a pre-made disk ;-)