Amiberry 4.0 released

George Spiggott

I finally got through checking my whole collection.

Blues Brothers, Lionheart, Jim Power and Prince of Persia still have some graphical issues. I'll update my dev copy and see if they remain.

A couple of games also suffered from memory shortages. Pinball Illusions and Fears both failed to load through WHDLoad (error 10) but if I change the available memory to 2MB chip and 8MB z2 fast they both work fine. Exile CD32 has memory issues in game and crashes.

I found most of my settings changes were for games that needed double fields to remove flicker on interlace screens. I need to check to see if there is an option to make this the default.

nemo93

@george-spiggott what setup do you have on your Pi please? For instance do you rely on the Full KMS or the Fake driver? If possible please stick to the fKMS (fake) one for now. Also do you rely on the "XML" file for your games settings or your own?

I'd like to avoid adding Z2 whenever possible hence something weird with Pinball Illusions. Please if you have time to try the latest dev branch feel free to report back. That's very helpful.

I apologize as I'm still unable to test these days...

George Spiggott

@nemo93 I'm using the full KMS. Weighed against the benefits for other systems it isn't worth downgrading back to FKMS. I'm prepared to accept that some Amiga games may be glitchy in the short term. The games were relying on amiberry.conf and the XML. I modified any for which these settings were not suitable. The primary changes were for flicker and mouse control set to the joypad.

I wonder if the new WHDLoad has a larger memory overhead and this is causing Pinball Illusions and Fears to require more than the existing 2MB chip / 4MB Z2 fast that they are set to by default? Possibly similar with Exile CD32 except that setting 2/8MB of RAM didn't fix the problem and the game still crashes.

I will update my dev copy this week and report back.

On the plus side I didn't have to change the joystick settings for any game that required joystick control although I still don't seem to be able to map anything to the sdelct button on my PS3 controller. I also hear that .CHD may be coming to Amiberry. Hopefully the sound issues plaguing CD games will be resolved soon.

George Spiggott

I tried the latest dev version last night. I tested all the games that were faulty apart from the ones that I had fixed with settings (Pinball Illusions and Fears). No changes to my last report except to say that I should have described Jim Power as having stuttering sound rather than graphical issues.

I'll try again in a week or so.

Also on further investigation of Exile CD32 (.lha) I have discovered that it is not a chip/fast RAM shortage issue. It is lacking NVRAM (the CD32's save game memory). This may be a settings issue. Whatever it is it causes the Amiga to crash rather than the emulator.

BuZz

I have locked RetroPie to v3.3 in the module for now so if you update be aware of this. If you want to run v4.1.2 you can edit the scriptmodule and use the master branch or dev for the latest code.

Note that the update functionality will override your new version with the older with this change. I will likely keep amiberry tracking specific releases from now as it's easier to manage then.

George Spiggott

As I suspected the problem with Exile CD32 is fixable in settings. I changed the Kickstart and chipset options to CD32 and the game runs fine.

nemo93

@george-spiggott thanks again for putting so much efforts in testing and reporting back. Much appreciated. This issue you mentioned with CD32 package should be avoided by passing the correct parameter on the command-line at launch.

@BuZz hi! I may have some free time to spare soon hence I'll be glad to have a look at Amiberry 4.x and to the "wrapper" script used by Retropie. I've read the conversation from the ticket and I don't want to step on anybody's shoes nor reinvent the wheel. Let me know whether you already have plan to change anything in that script. Otherwise I'll start fiddling with it soon. I'll also check the associated scriptmodule while I'm at it again if you don't mind.

EDIT: after a quick look (been a while hence I needed a "refresh") I'd prefer to let the emulator to set whichever settings work best when a specific Amiga model has to be picked up. Retropie is picking a specific conf file with specific settings (rp-a1200.uae or rp-a500.uae) based on file name being executed. I'd like to rely on Amiberry command-line parameters instead. People would still be able to use those conf files if they chose to. I have to mention that I have only WHD packages, no longer disk/ADFs so I have an incomplete picture here.

I'll start doing some test too with the Revision 2021 winner demo (The Martini Effect by FLEX):

Amiga is still very much alive in 2021 :-)

George Spiggott

Has anyone tried the latest build of Amiberry recently? I was thinking about giving it another test. The latest is 4.1.6 and was released in October.

If I can install it I will give you a heads up. Is the Retropie update still still fixed at 3.3?

BuZz

@george-spiggott It is. I will be looking into updating it soon.

Stuffu

Amiberry 4.2.0 is just released. A lot of fixes and have my fingers crossed this will be available as a binary :)

vaccinemedia

@buzz please do! I have just updated my RetroPie setup and it reverted my Amiberry to 3.3 which basically removed most of the new functionality I was using....

vaccinemedia

@george-spiggott have you managed to get Amiberry 4.x installed from source on RetroPie? I keep getting an error about a missing file after it has finished compiling

vretro

Looking forward to running the latest Amiberry in RetroPie, the new features really add to the experience.

George Spiggott

@vaccinemedia No, I've been busy with other projects. I'll probably wait until Retropie updates to update Amiberry.

Lolonois

For the fans of the "system that refuses to die", I will share here my how-to install 4.1.6. Make sure you have a exit stragegy beforehand, if you get lost on this limb. Tested on a RPI4 with RetroPie-Setup commit 9569e17 started from a Amiberry 3.3 install and using WHDLoad ROMs only.

The steps are also outlined here [1] but I will provide you a step-by-step guide:

Make backup of /opt/retropie/emulators/amiberry and /opt/retropie/emulators/amiberry/conf
Change version in ~/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/emulators/amiberry.sh scriptmodule from v3.3 to v4.1.6
Move current Kickstart roms from ~/RetroPie/BIOS to ~/RetroPie/BIOS/amiga
Remove any *.uae file from /opt/retropie/emulators/amiberry/conf
cd ~/RetroPie-Setup (corrected, thanks @ecto )

Run these commands:

sudo ./retropie_packages.sh amiberry sources
sudo ./retropie_packages.sh amiberry build
sudo ./retropie_packages.sh amiberry install
sudo ./retropie_packages.sh amiberry configure

Copy AROS ROMs from ~/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/amiberry/kickstarts/*.bin to ~/RetroPie/BIOS/amiga
Copy abr/ folder and content from ~/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/amiberry/ to /opt/retropie/emulators/amiberry/
Copy ~/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/amiberry/conf/amiberry.conf to /opt/retropie/emulators/amiberry/conf

Verify/set these settings in the copied amiberry.conf:

default_horizontal_centering=yes
default_vertical_centering=yes
default_fullscreen_mode=1
rom_path=/opt/retropie/emulators/amiberry/kickstarts/amiga/

Then you should be able run/use your new installation.

HTH

[1] https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/3313#issuecomment-932320038

ecto

@lolonois Thanks for there instructions! I was able to get Amiberry to work this way.
There is just one litte typo in your instructions: cd ~/RetroPie should be cd ~/RetroPie-Setup.

Here is a little question that I have, though: Is it possible to use the autoheight function? I only get a black screen, when I enable it. If I start amiberry with XINIT:in the /opt/retropie/configs/amiga/emulators.cfgit works but the joystick input doesn't work anymore. I probably have to mention that I'm using the KMS driver with my raspberry pi 4 so I guess Amiberry is compiled with SDL2 support.

If autoheight does in fact not work, do you have a hint what the best resolution settings for Amiberry would be?

EDIT ok, according to the Amiberry Github page you have to set use_drawing_thread=no with KMSDRM if you want to use autoheight.
I'll try this out later... :)

EDIT2
Nope, didn't work. Hmm.

George Spiggott

@ecto It depends, most games are a little over 200p (216p?) but some use the full PAL screen and are approximately 256p.

Lolonois

@ecto I have pasted my amiberry.conf as a reference: http://ix.io/3QMt

I am using kernel Linux rpi4 4.19.97-v7l+ and the fake KMS (dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d in /boot/config.txt and I stick to this eeprom and firmware:

pi@rpi4:~$ sudo rpi-eeprom-update 
BCM2711 detected
BOOTLOADER: up-to-date
CURRENT: Thu 16 Apr 17:11:26 UTC 2020 (1587057086)
 LATEST: Thu 16 Apr 17:11:26 UTC 2020 (1587057086)
 FW DIR: /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/stable
VL805: up-to-date
CURRENT: 000137ad
 LATEST: 000137ad
pi@rpi4:~$ sudo vcgencmd version
Feb 12 2020 12:36:21 
Copyright (c) 2012 Broadcom
version c3c8dbdf147686fb0c3f32aece709d0653368810 (clean) (release) (start)

With these parameters I can switch use_drawing_thread to yes or no. With no I have no glitches, the games I tested are working as with Amiberry 3.3. With yes I have e.g. on game Pang a glitch in the intro, but still the screen does not get/stay black completely and the gameplay shows no further glitches.

I have not touched the emulators.cfg it still reads:

amiberry = "/opt/retropie/emulators/amiberry/amiberry.sh auto %ROM%"
default = "amiberry"

If you align your amiberry.conf with the provided one above, does it make a difference?

PS: And thanks for spotting and reporting my mistypo in my previous post. Corrected it.

A Former User

Hi,

thanks for the tutorial, worked for me.

Please note that on some old Pi3B hardware one will see a black screen with the dmx-32 versions when switching from emulation to Amiberry config panel with F12. Could track down the error with help of Midwan (author of Amiberry) to two code lines removed in v4.1.5-RC2. If you want to get any version above v4.1.4 working on some old Pi3b hardware, you may need to re-add the removed codelines first and recompile from source.
https://github.com/midwan/amiberry/commit/9432242dac32414c8526a303e3f85b05cd99632c

Reported issue: https://github.com/midwan/amiberry/issues/904

Workaround: If you don‘t want to mess up with C yourself, you can still use later versions. If you see a black screen when switching via F12, just move the mouse or hold down SHIFT key on your keyboard to fire up some events. This way the config panel would show up. Bug is reported and hopefully gets implemented with v4.2.0 final release.

Cheers

ecto

@lolonois Thanks for your effort to help me! So far I was not able to get it to work as intended.
I've looked at your setup and there are quite some differences to mine. Mainly I'm using the KMSDRM backend any I try running amiberry with the auto_height option on.
These are my results:

When I turn on auto_height I have two possibilities:

running amiberry without x11 leads to a blackscreen. I have to enter the gui (F12) and exit it again to see the game.
running amiberry in an x11 window displays everything correctly, but I can't use my (Xbox 360) pad. I don't know yet why, but it has something to do with the amiberry startup script and the auto option that is used by /opt/retropie/configs/amiga/emulators.cfg.