Use LinApple for easy AppleII retro-Gaming?

caver01

A few months ago I loaded LinApple via the RetroPie menus. As you might know, this is a nice AppleII emulator. It works, but I was hoping to make the experience better for a retro-gaming cabinet.

My goals are:

Ability to select disk images via Emulation Station, like any other emulator.
Ability to remap the EXIT function to my dedicated panel button (IPAC4, ESCAPE key)
Ability to have custom key maps per disk image

Let's discuss these. I am looking at you @edmaul69, hoping you can help after your recent comments.

I'll start off talking about #1.
I understand there is a LinApple fork (if it hasn't been merged) that allows better ES integration so a disk image file can be passed to the emulator via the launch command. This is referenced in the wiki, and described in this thread. Is that still the way to go? I like to have exact steps if possible, because a year from now, I won't remember what I did today to make this work. Ideally, it's all integrated into RetroPie, but the last time I did the LinApple install, Disk Image selection had to be done from inside the emulator.

Regarding #2 and #3 (these may be connected, as they both deal with key maps)
The spirit of these requirements is to avoid the need for an external keyboard. I realize, we are emulating a computer, but you can get pretty creative with an arcade panel if you can map keys per disk image.

At minimum, I want to swap ESC for F10 so my dedicated exit button will quit the emulator. MAME and other emulators often use ESC to exit, so my arcade panels have always had a dedicated button to send the ESC key. Remapping ESC is a problem that creates another problem--the escape key is quite often used as PAUSE in AppleII games. There's a domino effect here. I need to remap ESC to my "P" key, since that is my dedicated button for pause.

This is leading into #3
With some clever remapping, you can, for example, set the Player 1 Start button to "K" which tells many AppleII games that you want to start a game with Keyboard input. Then, you map the arrows, or I,J,K,M or whatever to your joystick, space is button 1, and so on. Each game will be different, so a per-disk image keyboard config is necessary.

Ok, that should get the discussion started. Note that these are NOT just wild ideas I have. These requirements actually describe a setup I built in 2009 that used MESS as the emulator. I could use the MESS GUI to map keys in the emulator however I wanted. I just needed to save the config using pre and post scripts to copy them in and out out of the working directory by ROM (disk image) name.

Who's with me?

edmaul69

Ok i am not reading through your whole post but i can answer your first two questions. The latest version of linapple lets you select games in emulationstation. Go into retropie settings then go into retropie setup then update retropie setup then download newest linapple. Then you need to copy the linapple.conf from /opt/retropie/emulators/linapple/ to /opt/retropie/configs/apple2/ overwriting the old files. The new config has the options for button configuration which controller controls what buttons are used, button configuration, axis configuration and even a 1 or 2 button exit. I disable the second player joystick because because you cant use both buttons on player one if player two is using a joystick. Player two can still use the keyboard. Then i use lode runner to figure out the right and left button and configure it that way.

briankross

@edmaul69

Awesome, thank you for this, I'm keeping my eye on you guys lol... nothing creepy ;-)

Have you seen a way to change the screenshot directory? It's currently set to:

/home/pi/

This is also where a blank copy of linapple.conf is, can we get rid of that now that it's updated to the latest version?