Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons

Used2BeRX

@future-child Yeah... I was one step ahead of you and was installing DB Browser for SQLite when I read this post.

You're right. There's no way I'm going to try making sense of that. I was hoping it was going to look more like an Excel spreadsheet, but whatever this database is is way above my paygrade.

I managed to dig up a really old mouse with a ball on the bottom. I'm unable to have wi-fi and a 2nd controller while setting up these games because now my 3 inputs are taken up by a controller, the keyboard and the mouse.

Maybe I can still salvage this. It won't be pretty.

EDIT: Crap.... well that's that. Can't do it with the tech I have available to me. I've got a mini-keyboard that doesn't have a numpad. When I try typing out 1 for Device Num for the 2nd joystick, it types a ' instead.

Impossible for me to configure the 2nd player controllers in the UI because of this, and 90% of the games I was going to try to configure in kat5200 played fine 1 player and only ran into problems with the 2nd controller.

Oh well. :(

EDIT 2: Wow. Double nope. Looks like kat5200 won't match any of my headered rom CRCs either, so I can't even save any profiles I make in the first place.

Sorry everybody. I officially wash my hands of the Atari 8 bit emulation on RetroPie.

future.child

@used2berx said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

EDIT 2: Wow. Double nope. Looks like kat5200 won't match any of my headered rom CRCs either, so I can't even save any profiles I make in the first place.

Did you try adding them (File -> Launcher -> Misc. -> Scan for Files ) ?

0_1529596124630_ded7bdc2-39f4-4ecf-ac74-182e2bcd3783-image.png

Used2BeRX

@future-child Tried that and it didn't work. It doesn't find a single image.

I can go to Misc and then Add Media Image and that will allow me to pick the specific image one at a time, ~~but when I try to change the input configuration for the one I made for Pole Position it doesn't even show up on the list. All I get are the default choices.~~ (Pole Position's config actually was there, but it wouldn't show up in the drop down box for some reason. I had to press the down arrow one more time and then it was selected).

A new problem seems to have come up though. I had mapped the Select and Start button combo to exit the game. That works fine, but when I have Start mapped for that, the actual Start button will not work in the game, so you can never start a game in Pole Position.

I changed the combo to Select and Home to leave a game, and then I was able to start a game in Pole Position.

Unfortunately, the #1 and #7 buttons that I mapped to the L-Bumper and R-Bumper to shift from high to low gear are completely ignored as well, so I can only race in low gear. The strange thing is that I can get it to change from LO to HI and back some of the time. It seems to randomly just respond to me pressing the L-Stick up or down while racing, but not all of the time. The bumpers are completely unresponsive. I doubled checked these settings in Atari800 and I can easily change from LO to HI with the L-Bumper and R-Bumper.

Used2BeRX

@mediamogul @future-child

Do either of you guys know if you can alter the palette in Atari800?

I've got to admit that the palette that kat5200 uses is much more vibrant than Atari800 and to me looks way better.

mediamogul

@used2berx said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

Do either of you guys know if you can alter the palette in Atari800?

Here's a post detailing palette settings that I use myself. I'd be curious to hear how it compares to kat5200.

Used2BeRX

@mediamogul said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

@used2berx said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

Do either of you guys know if you can alter the palette in Atari800?

Here's a post detailing palette settings that I use myself. I'd be curious to hear how it compares to kat5200.

This is actually a LOT better than it was by default. It's still not as rich as the kat5200 emulator displays it though. I'm playing Pole Position on kat right now and the yellow of the car is almost verging on the slightly orange side. The sky really looks a great blue and the grass is really green.

These settings still seem a bit flushed out for the colors, but it's already such an improvement over the default colors. I didn't realize how dead everything looked until I saw the differences in the 2 emulators with Pole Position.

Now that I know the four lines that seem to control this, I'm going to play around with it a bit and see if I can come up with a closer match. Thanks man. :)

Used2BeRX

@mediamogul Here's what I've come up with. It looks great on Pole Position. I'll have to try it on other games though and see how it looks.

I have no clue how accurate it is since I haven't actually seen the Atari 5200 in action in decades, but I think the color looks great.

You'll have to get the OliverP.act palette first, then put these options in your config.

You can get it here: https://github.com/ilmenit/RastaConverter/blob/master/Palettes/OlivierP.act

Then put the palette in the same folder as the emulator: /opt/retropie/emulators/atari800/bin/

COLOURS_NTSC_SATURATION=1.1
COLOURS_NTSC_CONTRAST=0.5
COLOURS_NTSC_BRIGHTNESS=-0.2
COLOURS_NTSC_GAMMA=0.2
COLOURS_NTSC_HUE=0.1
[UNRELATED LINE HERE]
COLOURS_NTSC_EXTERNAL_PALETTE=/opt/retropie/emulators/atari800/bin/OliverP.act
COLOURS_NTSC_EXTERNAL_PALETTE_LOADED=1
COLOURS_NTSC_ADJUST_EXTERNAL_PALETTE=1

Let me know what you think if you try it out. It's about 1,000% better than the default atari800 colors were IMO.

Used2BeRX

It would be nice if the libretro-atari800 core was usable now. I've been trying to configure the controls on it for about 1 1/2 now and haven't gotten anywhere. I was hoping that I could configure both a 1st and 2nd player joystick in there since the regular atari800 core that @future.child updated does not allow the 2nd player the use of both triggers, so games like Moon Patrol will not work for the 2nd player.

I think I'm going to have to abandon fixing that issue since there doesn't seem to be a legitimate fix in any of the 3 options currently available to us on RetroPie.

Pole Position doesn't seem to run any better in kat5200 than it did with tweaking atari800 a bit. I haven't bothered trying Kaboom! in kat5200 yet.

mediamogul

@used2berx said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

Let me know what you think if you try it out. It's about 1,000% better than the default atari800 colors were IMO.

Nice. I'll give it a look later this evening.

the regular atari800 core that @future.child updated does not allow the 2nd player the use of both triggers, so games like Moon Patrol will not work for the 2nd player.

I've got the second action button for player two working on my setup, but the key is shared between it and the first player for some reason. Either player could sabotage the other by pressing it during game play.

Used2BeRX

@mediamogul said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

@used2berx said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

Let me know what you think if you try it out. It's about 1,000% better than the default atari800 colors were IMO.

Nice. I'll give it a look later this evening.

Hope you like it.

the regular atari800 core that @future.child updated does not allow the 2nd player the use of both triggers, so games like Moon Patrol will not work for the 2nd player.

I've got the second action button for player two working on my setup, but the key is shared between it and the first player for some reason. Either player could sabotage the other by pressing it during game play.

Which emulator are you using for that? I'm assuming the atari800 that wasn't updated?

Is there a way I can download that somewhere and put it on my system without using the RetroPie menus to do it? I've got future.child's upgrade already named atari800 so it would overwrite it if I did the standard download. I just need to download it so I can make it an alternate instance of the emulator to try launching on the problem games.

I don't recall for sure, but I think I really only need future.child's upgrades for the robotron fix. It's been so long, so there might be something else I'm forgetting.

Could you provide me with an example of a configuration file you have with a working 2nd player controller?

mediamogul

@used2berx said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

Could you provide me with an example of a configuration file you have with a working 2nd player controller?

My controls in atari800.cfg are just the default settings. I have an external map running in parallel that takes advantage of the keyboard controls in Atari800 that aren't able to be mapped to a controller from the emulator itself. This approach is very flexible, but it's still far from perfect, as Atari800 just wasn't designed with a thoughtful control scheme to work with in the first place. It's really odd too considering that the software can emulate all the available control devices necessary to play every game out there, it just can't map those devices to a modern controller effectively.

mediamogul

@used2berx

I was reading a little bit about the OlivierP.act palette file and apparently the 'P' stands for PAL. There's an NTSC OlivierN.act alternative available here.

Used2BeRX

@mediamogul I'll try it out and see if there is any real difference.

I wasn't aware that the colors were any different between NTSC and PAL. I thought that just had to do with framerate and speed due to the difference in the amperage to the systems?

mediamogul

@used2berx said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

I wasn't aware that the colors were any different between NTSC and PAL.

There is indeed a difference, although here it has more to do with cosmetically adhering to the regional color encoding standards than anything else. It won't hurt anything to use the PAL palette if you are so inclined. It'll just have the subtle differences that exist between the two standards.

Used2BeRX

@mediamogul said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

@used2berx said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

I wasn't aware that the colors were any different between NTSC and PAL.

There is indeed a difference, although here it has more to do with adhering to the regional color encoding standards than anything else. It won't hurt anything to use the PAL palette if you are so inclined. It'll just have the subtle differences that exist between the two standards.

I see.

Did you give it a shot yet, either way?

mediamogul

@used2berx

I did. The settings you have above seemed to be a bit over-saturated, so I employed a hybrid setup between my original settings and the NTSC palette. A good game to test with is 'Ms. Pac-Man', as it has a very distinctive shade of pink used in the title screen that can be referenced in many other games and locations.

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Used2BeRX

@mediamogul Care to share your setup?

mediamogul

@used2berx

Sure, although it's not really any different from the settings @pjs posted a year ago. In that post, he notes that he used other Atari systems, such as the 7800, as a baseline. The benefit there is that the colors are going to be as close to what was intended as you're likely to find. ~~Of course the one exception to my settings is that I'm offsetting them slightly with the Atari800 NTSC palette file that you turned me on to.~~

COLOURS_NTSC_SATURATION=0.5
COLOURS_NTSC_CONTRAST=0.5
COLOURS_NTSC_BRIGHTNESS=-0.5
COLOURS_NTSC_GAMMA=1.2
COLOURS_NTSC_HUE=0
COLOURS_NTSC_GTIA_DELAY=26.8
COLOURS_NTSC_EXTERNAL_PALETTE=
COLOURS_NTSC_EXTERNAL_PALETTE_LOADED=0
COLOURS_NTSC_ADJUST_EXTERNAL_PALETTE=0

Edit: I went into the Display menu and it didn't have the color palette set at all, despite adding it manually to the atari800.cfg file. Once enabled, the result was pretty extreme when combined with the the other settings. This being the case, I've decided to just use @pjs's custom settings as it produces a result that seems correct more often than not when compared to other examples.

Used2BeRX

@mediamogul That's cool man. It's all a matter of personal preferance, right?

I haven't seen what an Atari 7800 actually looks like on a screen in probably 20 years or more, and except for once when my brother showed me a 5200 with working controllers he got off of ebay it's been closer to 30 or more years since I've seen the 5200.

I'm pretty much just going with what I like over accuracy. Plus, I only have one screen to work with so trying to compare things is really just by memory in between launches.

I noticed that outside of kat5200, the colors that everybody uses are extremely muted compared to later systems. Seems that the 8-bit Atari systems used pretty washed out colors from what I remember them to be. Either way, anything I've tried in the last 24 hours since you posted that link with the way to change them has brought a lot of life to the screen compared to the default settings in atari800. Thanks. :)

BTW... that Atari 5200 I spoke of is actually in my possession now. :)

It's even got the original box and everything, even though it's pretty damaged. Last time my brother used it he says both controllers worked. I'm going to have to figure out how to rig that thing up to a more modern TV and try it out one of these days. Too bad we never found that gray cart.

mediamogul

@used2berx said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

I'm pretty much just going with what I like over accuracy.

I can definitely understand that. I'm an art director by profession, tasked with making sure every little artistic detail is correct before anything goes out the door. Needless to say that once I start going down these rabbit holes, it's tough to stop until I get things looking as accurate as possible. Two things you may want to consider after looking at the settings more closely is that one; these settings apparently don't go over 1.0, so anything over won't do any good and two; a brightness setting of anything less that 0 will increasingly darken colors to the point of gradually turning anything white into a shade of grey. Mileage may vary between displays, but it seems that -0.16 is the lowest setting possible that will still result in a black background.

BTW... that Atari 5200 I spoke of is actually in my possession now. :)

Very nice. A friend of mine has one with a damaged power supply and I've been meaning to help him with it. The 5200 power supply is pretty unique in that the RF runs through it as well. I'm betting that'll be somewhat of a challenge to mod for a modern TV.