New Hypseus and lr-Daphne to add on Retropie-Setup

G30FF

@dirtbagxon That's great news! Hypseus is so much nicer to work with than the basic Daphne, and I was eager to swap them out!

I had previously used the manual installation method to get Hypseus Singe installed, but I have a question regarding the new version. I installed from binary in the experimental modules section. In the previous build, I could hit Start+Select to quit Hypseus, but now that I've installed from the scriptmodule that no longer works. How do I get that functionality back?

DirtBagXon

@g30ff said in New Hypseus and lr-Daphne to add on Retropie-Setup:

I had previously used the manual installation method to get Hypseus Singe installed, but I have a question regarding the new version. I installed from binary in the experimental modules section. In the previous build, I could hit Start+Select to quit Hypseus, but now that I've installed from the scriptmodule that no longer works. How do I get that functionality back?

The joystick hotkey combo is still there, It's hold SELECT then hit START (just in case your description above was in fact correct).

The package should not have overwritten your existing hypinput.ini file, but obviously check the joystick button assignment for KEY_COIN1 (select) and KEY_START1.

G30FF

@dirtbagxon You are absolutely correct. I pressed both at once, but once I held Select and hit Start, it worked correctly. Thanks for the quick response! I'm looking forward to trying some of the Singe games now!

pjft

@dirtbagxon Well done, congratulations on hitting this milestone! It's been awesome to see the effort, dedication and care you put into Hypseus for the last year - thank you for that!

Have an awesome new year, and looking forward to seeing what new things come out of this :)

roslof

@DirtBagXon great accomplishment and so nice that many people can take advantage of all the UI improvements you've made to their favorite laserDisc games. Congratulations!

DirtBagXon

Thanks guys.

Get your ffmpeg ready.

I have an upcoming release that will enable all these:

alt text

G30FF

@dirtbagxon I tried testing out a bunch of Singe games on my Pi 4, and most of them worked. Chantze's Stone HD and Dragon's Lair 2 Enhanced both crash when I try to put a coin in, but otherwise things work just fine.

DirtBagXon

@g30ff said in New Hypseus and lr-Daphne to add on Retropie-Setup:

@dirtbagxon I tried testing out a bunch of Singe games on my Pi 4, and most of them worked. Chantze's Stone HD and Dragon's Lair 2 Enhanced both crash when I try to put a coin in, but otherwise things work just fine.

Heya,

~~Ok, those two specific games require the latest version of Hypseus: v2.6.21 due to some LUA module that was included in the v3.31c Singe 2 game code.~~

Ok, seems to be an issue with the -retropath remapping for this version of Singe code, in that LUA module, I didn't catch.

I will investigate, hopefully a fix in next release....

Thanks for spotting ;)

DirtBagXon

@G30FF

If you build from source, via RetroPie-Setup, there is a fix in for this now.

It only affected the 2 latest games (chantze-hd, dl2e ), which run the Singe 2 v3.31c codebase, when run with the -retropath argument.

Let me know, thanks.

G30FF

@dirtbagxon I rebuilt from source, and now it works fine! Thanks!

Currently the only game I'm having issues with is Freedom Fighter, because it seems like I get shot before any targets appear on screen. I'm not sure if that's how the game is or whether it's a bug.

DirtBagXon

@g30ff said in New Hypseus and lr-Daphne to add on Retropie-Setup:

@dirtbagxon I rebuilt from source, and now it works fine! Thanks!

Currently the only game I'm having issues with is Freedom Fighter, because it seems like I get shot before any targets appear on screen. I'm not sure if that's how the game is or whether it's a bug.

Yeah, that game is pretty buggy (starblazers also). I attempted to fix some of the issues but gave up.
Happy to receive any updates /improvements from any budding LUA game developers.

Make sure you are using the latest LUA files from my repo here.

You could also try setting the game to easy via pressing '9 ' in-game. But even using that menu is a challenge :)

You should be able to play it, and it's quite fun....

Edit: The other obvious issue could be that the video frames are not matching the framefile timings.
It could be your video source, this is one of the more obscure titles....

G30FF

@dirtbagxon Thanks for the info! I tried updating the LUA files from your repo, but it's still not great. I think the issue is that the longer it plays, the more out of sync the input cues and the video become. Like if I skip the intro, the first tank that appears has basically no reaction time, and the more you do it, the less and less time you get to respond. Even if you don't skip at all and let it play normally, the windows become shorter and shorter, to the point that the tank won't even appear on screen before you get shot. I think at this point I'm just gonna give up on this game as not playable, but thanks for the help!

DirtBagXon

@g30ff said in New Hypseus and lr-Daphne to add on Retropie-Setup:

@dirtbagxon Thanks for the info! I tried updating the LUA files from your repo, but it's still not great. I think the issue is that the longer it plays, the more out of sync the input cues and the video become. Like if I skip the intro, the first tank that appears has basically no reaction time, and the more you do it, the less and less time you get to respond. Even if you don't skip at all and let it play normally, the windows become shorter and shorter, to the point that the tank won't even appear on screen before you get shot. I think at this point I'm just gonna give up on this game as not playable, but thanks for the help!

That does sound like the pi is struggling top keep the audio/video in sync. i.e. the video is getting behind.

Only option I can offer is to recode the video files and lower the bittrate using ffmpeg.

Also delete the .dat files, let hypseus reindex the video. It may have old Daphne indexing files ?

What pi is this, is it overclocked etc? If it's managing the Chantze video it seems strange it can't cope with a lower resolution SD video....

As I say it's not a bug free game in any case...

G30FF

@dirtbagxon It's a Pi 4 4 GB, no overclock. Chantze's Stone seems to work fine for me.

DirtBagXon

@g30ff said in New Hypseus and lr-Daphne to add on Retropie-Setup:

@dirtbagxon It's a Pi 4 4 GB, no overclock. Chantze's Stone seems to work fine for me.

Not really sure why that game is causing you issues then. Unless it's just a bad video encode.

You could grab the hypseus windows binary and see if you see the same issues there, just to rule out issues with the Pi.......

G30FF

@dirtbagxon If I can get access to a Windows PC I might give it a shot. But thank you for your support up to this point!

I'm using what I believe are your distributions of the games and video files (I won't say where they were found for obvious reasons), FYI. Something else I noticed, most of the HD versions of the games have some strange things happening with audio. Some of them at the very start, the music speeds up for a short while, as if the video ran ahead and the audio is quickly trying to catch up with it. The video plays at normal speed when this happens.

DirtBagXon

@g30ff said in New Hypseus and lr-Daphne to add on Retropie-Setup:

FYI. Something else I noticed, most of the HD versions of the games have some strange things happening with audio. Some of them at the very start, the music speeds up for a short while, as if the video ran ahead and the audio is quickly trying to catch up with it. The video plays at normal speed when this happens.

Singe 2 has an audio bug.

Try playing any of the MP4 files from a Singe 2 game in VLC. You will see that video and audio are completely out of sync by approx 9-10 video frames (0.333s on a 29.97 FPS game, more on 24FPS titles.). This 'out-of-sync' is put deliberately in the MP4 by the game devs to work-a-round the bug.

The speedup you hear is Hypseus correcting that sync, the audio bug obviously doesn't exist in Hypseus. The ffmpeg recode tries to correct it but not completely. It is more obvious on the HD games for reasons I can only put down to more CPU cycles being used on the HD video. Haven't been able to completely track it down why you hear it more on some than others. On my desktop it's usually only a blip for a ms or so, so if on the Pi if it is more notable, it could well be down to CPU cycles.

It only happens on startup of the game (VLDP init) then plays fine throughout gameplay. It is sometimes more obvious on one startup than another.

If anyone can figure out an ffmpeg command to get the audio more accurately out of the MP4 I would be grateful....

I did consider reducing the volume on the ogg for the first few seconds and fading in on the VLDP init sequence (game boot up, the time you cannot input any key commands), but decided against it. But that is one solution if it really bugs you:

http://underpop.online.fr/f/ffmpeg/help/afade.htm.gz

Some of the MP4 are a real mess and ffmpeg just complains madly about corrupt timing frames, maddog-hd in particular throws out many warnings. The Singe 2 game devs found various ways to work-a-round the bug initially, so earlier games have more problematic MP4's.

I have to work with what I have :)

G30FF

@dirtbagxon That makes sense. This is my first time trying to use Singe games, so I was unaware of a lot of these details regarding how the games/engine work. Thank you again for taking the time to explain these things! It's very much appreciated!

DirtBagXon

@g30ff said in New Hypseus and lr-Daphne to add on Retropie-Setup:

@dirtbagxon That makes sense. This is my first time trying to use Singe games, so I was unaware of a lot of these details regarding how the games/engine work. Thank you again for taking the time to explain these things! It's very much appreciated!

I think I have a better solution.

There are a couple of intros I would rather not hear in any case, as are overbearingly loud. This post gave me an idea.

In the next release there will be a new argument for Singe called '-bootsilent`.

This will attempt to mute the sound during the VLDP boot process, it covers this issue nicely. It's also then configurable per game.

The next release will have the following changelog.

Allow a 32bit Pi OS to fseeko64() in files over 2Gb in size. FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 is ignored in fseek() on the Pi!!
This will become important as some of the new releases will have extended video and require larger m2v files.
See below (dltv is 4hrs in length).
Add the -bootsilent option to alleviate the audio correction heard in certain Singe 2 game ports, or disable for the hell of it.
This is game code dependant: Works on all except "Gun Games", which use an antiquated LUA code base.
Upgrade the Daphne VLDP from 16bit to 32bit - and remove the 65535 video frame limit that has always been present in Daphne.

This enables me to port all the outstanding Singe 2 games that were previously over this frame limit:

You will need to grab the new version from source in RetroPie-Setup (v2.8.0).

jamrom2

@dirtbagxon

Hi, thanks for making this an easy Retro-Pie install... however.. I have no idea what I am doing and I can't seem to get any of this working.

I've had Daphne running for years and upgraded many of my videos to the latest HD's on the emuline forum. I have all the usual Daphne games running, except Badlands. So I'm fluent in working with Daphne.

I started with the instructions on https://github.com/DirtBagXon/hypseus-singe/blob/master/src/3rdparty/retropie/RETROPIE.md

...and what looks like a simple adding a simple file "xxx.singe" but where do these files come from?

So I pulled down Dragon's Lair II from the above location and it has a ton of additional folders in it. What do I need? I copied over the DL2e.mp4, created a new framefile and pointed it at DL2e.mp4 at mark 0. Then I added in the DL2e.singe file. Selected Singe as my emulator to run it, dumps back to menu.

I then just copied over the DLE2.singe file to my original lair2 folder, and renamed it lair2.singe, it fails back to menu. However I switch back to Daphne, it works fine.

Not sure what I'm doing wrong here... but this is my runcommand.log and it says it can't compile a
Singe script?

https://pastebin.com/Pa9rVsCX

Thanks for your help, and of course, all the hard work you've done to get all of this working. I know it's something I'm doing wrong, I just don't know what it is.

JamR