IKEMEN, MUGEN and the RP4

[Drdave79]

Hi all. I'm running a RP4 and having a blast with the creativity behind openbor games. Now I've discovered MUGEN and have a few questions for the community that I can't seem to find answers on. I'd love some opinions/insight before I go through the trouble of trying to install this on my build.

1.IKEMEN versus MUGEN. I've read that IKEMEN is better on the pi because it's Linux based? Do both do the same job exactly? Is one "better" than the other for the pi?
2. The gameplay videos I've seen from MUGEN games seem pretty high detail. Do they run pretty smooth on the RP4?
3. Is https://github.com/Retro-Devils/Mugen-Pi-4 a good suggestion for step-by-step instructions to install?

Thank you!

[SuperFromND]

@drdave79 Hiya! I'm the fellow who wrote the original IKEMEN thread in regards to RetroPie/RasPis, so allow me to answer some of these at least partially:

• IKEMEN is an open-source clone of the MUGEN engine and aims to have backwards-compatiability on par with MUGEN 1.1, along with several additional features that the original engine lacks. Being open-source, it can be compiled to run natively on Linux, as opposed to MUGEN which requires Box86 and Wine in tandem to run on the Pis. However, there's been relatively little testing of IKEMEN (both on the Pi and in general, it's a fairly new engine), and there's no convenient step-by-step guide for installing it quite yet. (Though if you're savvy enough to know how scriptmodules work, this should be good enough!)

• Depends on the specific game, characters, stages, etc. Some full games run full speed with no problem, others not so much. In my experience though, testing with IKEMEN on a Pi 4 with 1 gig of ram, most reasonable matches should run within 40-60FPS most of the time.

• Can't say from first hand experience (I've been pretty much laser-focused on IKEMEN as you've probably gathered by now), but I've seen a few folks have success with it in the Box86 thread, so it seems like a pretty good. I'll let others chime in on this one, though.

[Drdave79]

@superfromnd I very much appreciate your response! The instructions to install IKEMEN that you posted seem relatively simple to follow. I might give that a try as your examples are quite compelling. Do you happen to know how much space the install takes up?

[SuperFromND]

@drdave79 Off the top of my head, I believe the default content and engine itself takes up about 80MB, but installing all the dependencies and stuff required to compile it takes up about 200MB. I don't really have to worry much about space since I have my ROMs folder on a USB stick, but if you're low on space this might be a concern.

The real concern starts when you look into adding full-games and lots of character, file sizes can easily swell into the gigabyte range in extreme cases.

[Drdave79]

@superfromnd Yeah, I read that. But even if I got 1 or 2 games, it might be worth it. Thanks again! I'll give it a shot.

[Drdave79]

@superfromnd I got lot of errors when I followed the instructions on that link. I saved both files in the appropriate directories. I'm running RetroPie 4.7.20.

[SuperFromND]

@drdave79 It looks like what might have happened is that the file's line endings got converted from LF to CRLF (this happens when you open and save a file on Windows using Notepad). Try running these two commands in the terminal to download the modules directly (ideally with PuTTY since you can just copy-paste):

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/18c61f1a745425f7288c28493a70fb38519a92c1/scriptmodules/supplementary/golang-1.17.sh -P $HOME/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/supplementary/
 
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/18c61f1a745425f7288c28493a70fb38519a92c1/scriptmodules/ports/ikemen-go.sh -P $HOME/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/ports/

[Drdave79]

@superfromnd Yes, that's exactly what happened. I've had trouble setting up putty, so that doesn't seem to work for me. So I typed both lines in manually and was finally able to install it. Thank you.

However, now I'm getting this error after install attempt.

[Drdave79]

@superfromnd The log is quite long, but here's the tail end:

/home/pi
/home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/ikemen-go /home/pi
cp: cannot stat 'elecbyte/LICENCE.txt': No such file or directory
'/home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/ikemen-go/Ikemen_GO' -> '/opt/retropie/ports/ikemen-go/Ikemen_GO'
'/home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/ikemen-go/License.txt' -> '/opt/retropie/ports/ikemen-go/License.txt'
Could not successfully install I.K.E.M.E.N GO - Clone of M.U.G.E.N to the Go programming language (/home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/ikemen-go/ScreenpackLicense.txt not found).
/home/pi

[Drdave79]

@superfromnd I tried to find the missing files online and was unsuccessful. Any ideas on a resolution?

[Drdave79]

@SuperFromND Did I lose ya @SuperFromND ?

[SuperFromND]

@Drdave79 No no, I've just been busy with other projects! I'll need the entire log though to see exactly what went wrong (you can post it onto something like Pastebin as an anonymous/guest pate).

Seems like either the elecbyte repository part of the script wasn't cloned, or at some point the file name got changed? Shouldn't be a very difficult fix.

[Drdave79]

@SuperFromND @SuperFromND I know you're a very busy person and I very much appreciate all of the work that you do, along with the great help and advice you give everyone here! Including me :)

I'm having problems uploading the full log. I pasted it into pastebin and created the .txt file, but this site says I don't have enough privileges to upload it. And I can't just copy and paste it because it's too long. I even tried it as a PDF.

[SuperFromND]

@Drdave79 Okay update! I found out what was going wrong.

You see, back when I wrote the script, the Makefile for IKEMEN (the part that does most of the compiling) had a parameter named elecbyte that would download the motif. Well, it turns out that was removed recently, which is why the script suddenly no longer worked.

To fix this, I just manually added the command that parameter would run (a git clone command). Inelegant, but it works! You'll have to re-download the updated script, which can be found here.

[Drdave79]

@SuperFromND I'm glad it was an easy fix! Am I just supposed to copy and paste that script into notepad and place it in the scriptmodules/ports folder? I tried that and still got some errors.

[Drdave79]

This post is deleted!

[Drdave79]

@SuperFromND said in IKEMEN, MUGEN and the RP4:

@drdave79 It looks like what might have happened is that the file's line endings got converted from LF to CRLF (this happens when you open and save a file on Windows using Notepad). Try running these two commands in the terminal to download the modules directly (ideally with PuTTY since you can just copy-paste):

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/18c61f1a745425f7288c28493a70fb38519a92c1/scriptmodules/supplementary/golang-1.17.sh -P $HOME/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/supplementary/
 
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/18c61f1a745425f7288c28493a70fb38519a92c1/scriptmodules/ports/ikemen-go.sh -P $HOME/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/ports/

@SuperFromND Should I just re-run these two commands or did your fix not include these links?

[SuperFromND]

@Drdave79 The fix doesn't apply to those links, just this one. I can't really help you out much further unless you give me specific logs of what the errors you're getting are.

[Drdave79]

@SuperFromND

II used the link you gave me for the first part. For the second one that you fixed, I used pastebin and saved the file in the ports folder

This is what I get when I launch retropie config.

[SuperFromND]

@Drdave79 Appears to be differing line ending errors, again. Linux uses LF, Windows uses CR LF, and i believe MacOS uses CR.

This can be most easily circumvented by running the wget command to download the script directly (as I can confirm the script itself uses LF only)

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/cde211c6e3c511a624a3815d5a436c55115e87b9/scriptmodules/ports/ikemen-go.sh -P $HOME/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/ports/

If you have Notepad++ installed, you can also convert the file to LF endings before copying it over: Edit -> EOL Conversion -> Unix (LF).