Combine Mame Roms

[Fredthedoggy]

If it helps:
I have a raspberry Pi 0
32 gb storage
External Buttons/Joystick, that I could program

I have 2 mame roms (pac-man & donkey kong).
I was wondering If anyone knew how to make 2 buttons (one for each game) that would switch the current game, as long as no-body was currently playing.

I was also wondering if you could combine the coin system, so if I put 5 coins in 1 game I could get 5 coins in the other game, when I switch?

Thanks in advance,
-Fred

[Fredthedoggy]

I was told on the retropie reddit that this is impossible

[Halvhjearne]

@Fredthedoggy said in Combine Mame Roms:

I was told on the retropie reddit that this is impossible

its not impossible, but perhaps it would be better not to run emulationstation and just boot directly to the prefered game, then make 1 button to kill the process of the current game and boot the other and maybe another button to shutdown/reboot the system.

the coin handling would be another matter ... not sure if its possible to save the current amount somewhere, but i belive its possible to start mame with a specified amount of coins already inserted.

[Fredthedoggy]

@Halvhjearne I know how to make a button that exits the game, but how do I make the button go to the next game?

The one Idea I had was make my autostart.sh file somehow repeat itself, so
It would be:

/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 _SYS_ nes ~/RetroPie/roms/nes/pacman.zip
/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 _SYS_ nes ~/RetroPie/roms/nes/donkeykong.zip
sh /opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh

But the issue I realized, is I cant get it to turn off because this repeats forever, and when I exit it goes to the next game

[Clyde]

You could try to read the joystick buttons with jstest between the games, and shutdown the system instead of starting the other game if a particular button is pressed. I don't have a script ready for that, but here's a start on how to read joystick inputs and process them in an if…then…else statement:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/350132/using-a-shell-script-with-jstest-how-can-i-get-a-gamepad-to-interact-with-my-sc

[Halvhjearne]

@Fredthedoggy

if this works and runs forever, why not just make a button for reboot/shutdown using gpio pins?

[Fredthedoggy]

@Halvhjearne It would lose the current data, unless I switch games before shutting down

[Halvhjearne]

@Fredthedoggy

if it saves when you change game, you could just make it change the game before it does the shutdown/reboot

[Fredthedoggy]

One more thing, when I try calling autostart.sh I get the error:

/opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh: Line 3: /opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh:  Permission Denied

Edit: You need to give autostart.sh run permission (source: https://askubuntu.com/questions/409025/permission-denied-when-running-sh-scripts?newreg=26d23eba961648029db8523b79a7d901)

[Clyde]

@Fredthedoggy said in Combine Mame Roms:

Edit: You need to give autostart.sh run permission

Alternatively, you can put sh in front of each line.

[Fredthedoggy]

oh, ok thanks @Clyde

[cyperghost]

@Fredthedoggy Better use bash instead of sh
Or try to get familiar with dialog, so you can toggle and select some games with a simple menu. But it's an usual error that is spit out in your setup....

But if I read your posting history ... first you want to autostart PACMAN, now Donkey Kong or PACMAN ;) ....

[Fredthedoggy]

@cyperghost My overall goal is to make a pacman & donkey kong machine that has a power button (on/off that saves the current state), and a button that switches games seamlessly (because currently it has to wait for the games to load each time) and hopefully a way to have the credits transfer between games.