Amiberry Auto Height Causing Black Screen

George Spiggott

Kudos to @nemo93 for suggesting to bring this issue up. I have the following specs.

Pi Model or other hardware: Pi 4B 4GB overclocked to 2100 CPU / 850 GPU
Power Supply used: Official
RetroPie Version Used: 4.7.1 with the KMS driver
Built From: Pre made SD Image on RetroPie website
Controller used: PS3 Sixaxis (Bluetooth)
Emulator: Amiberry 3.3 (with WHDLoad XML updated today).

The problem.

When I load a game that has the 'auto height' feature set as part of the XML (or as a config file) the game loads to a black screen (with audio). If I enter the Amiberry menu and quit out of it again the picture returns until such time as the screen mode changes. I can replicate this best with Agony (both PAL and NTSC). Games are fully playable so long as I am willing to keep re-entering the amiberry menu.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

BuZz

@george-spiggott you have switched to kms instead of fkms?

BuZz

I'll assume you are using kms and not fkms and have installed from source to get a kms build (The script will build a pure sdl2 version if dispmanx is not available as it is on fkms)

It may well be a bug/issue in amiberry - I saw some thing before on their bugtracker relating to this but I thought it was fixed. The pure sdl2 version had some issues before on kms but I've not tested it for a little while. However kms is not yet officially supported but it's probably not a RetroPie config issue but upstream in amiberry, or perhaps SDL2.

George Spiggott

@buzz I haven't. I'd rather avoid losing the benefits of KMS just for a small visual improvement to some Amiga games. I will try FKMS tonight as I think it will be useful to isolate the problem. I always install from source where I can so I assume that I have. I will double check this with a full reinstall from source of Amiberry.

I have also lost CD audio in split audio (CD + Paula) games, specifically the in game background music in Xenon II CDTV. I know CDTV support is being worked on at the moment so I'll probably wait for the next release. Getting Xenon II CDTV to work on Amiberry is a bit of a hack job at the moment anyway.

myzar

@george-spiggott pure sdl2 build without dispamax is broken for me with kms & fkms , i get the blackscreen like you , only the dispamax build works for me with fkms

George Spiggott

I tried both FKMS and a reinstall of Amiberry. No joy. @myzar how do I go about setting that up?

myzar

@george-spiggott switch to fkms and let retropie compile or use his own bin , it will build the dispamax hybrid , i think that we should report this bug upstream

BuZz

Somehow my brain forgot the auto height mentioned in this thread and I went and debugged it myself and came to the same conclusion. Actually it's a bug reported before - and I'd read that too in the past (I mentioned it but didn't provide a reference). I'm putting it down to old age :-)

https://github.com/midwan/amiberry/issues/650 is the older ticket.

I have updated the recent ticket added here https://github.com/midwan/amiberry/issues/743

nemo93

@BuZz @George-Spiggott @myzar thanks all for reporting + debugging. I just wanted to add a couple of things not very useful I'm afraid for that case but in order to keep everything clear :) So that it's easier to follow at my old age :D

on a stock pi4, Retropie default image, kernel and OS packages, Amiberry (from Retropie_setup) will compile and run fine as far as my tests went. I still rely on the "fKMS" backend (no change in /boot/config.txt) and I take the compiled binary is achieved via make -j2 PLATFORM=rpi4. Agony is a package which exemplifies best the auto-height feature and so it's the one I'm using. It works fine here.
In very short, the auto-height feature is triggered for games that I was unable to test with. My testbed is made of 481 (!) Amiga games/WHD packages + few CD32 images. I know there are more :) But I just can't test with all packages provided some comes in different flavour or languages. Therefore such "untested" games obviously don't have a HEIGHT value. Decision was made to enable auto-height only for these OR for any game(s) that work 100% ok with that feature (eg. Agony).

If you really want to assign specific parameter(s) for a game please let me know and I'll be happy to add it to the whdload_db.xml. At least for the time being. It's likely that at some point the HEIGHT parameter will be stripped down entirely from the "xml" in favour of auto-height but it's not set in stone as we speak. Objective remains to provide the best Amiga experience out-of-the-box for all users.

George Spiggott

@nemo93 I was planning to go through all my WHDLoad Amiga game saved settings once this was fixed and remove those that are not needed. Generally I found that screen height and controls being set to the other port were the majority of the issues. Where is the best place to report XML file suggested changes?

nemo93

@george-spiggott please raise an issue per game on that Github. Shoot any you got about height issue. For controls I'd say be patient if you can as a lot of improvements have been made in the dev branch of Amiberry. It will be merged to master when it's ready but in the meantime I will make no change to controls.

George Spiggott

@nemo93 Will do. My plan is to hold off with the controls anyway. It will be easier to delete all my WHDLoad game settings at once when screen height is fixed, then fix the ones where controls are the issue. It is possible that the updates to XML since I set the custom settings have long since fixed them anyway.

I will continue to use Agony as my tester. I think there are a few other games that swap PAL/NTSC screens mid game. I'm sure Eliminator and Turrican have PAL intro screens but the game is NTSC.

Also should I raise the Xenon II CDTV audio issue on Github?

nemo93

@george-spiggott hi. If you could hold off a bit longer before reporting the CDTV audio issue that would be great. Amiberry 3.4 is around the corner with lots of new stuff. Alternatively you could give a try to the dev branch to see if it fixes the issue already. I have to confess that I never tried CDTV emulation myself ;-(

George Spiggott

@nemo93 Technically neither have I. It runs as a CD32 game if you rename the .CUE file. I've been running it like this for a while but 3.3 (or maybe an earlier version) seems to have broken it,

I'll wait to see what 3.4 brings.