lr-dosbox-pure segfaults on every game

ssj17vegeta

Has anyone encountered this problem ?

Having an up-to-date Retropie 4.8 Buster distro installed on a Raspberry Pi 4 (2GB), I installed lr-dosbox-pure through experimental packages (first tried installing from binaries, then compiling from source) and it systematically crashes on all games. Since it's highly unlikely that the problem resides on my install, I'm looking for a bit of help :)

In /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/pc , I have, let's say a file named my-game.conf (replace my-game with any game, since I tested it with a dozen game and never got to any title screen).

Each game's data is located in a subdirectory of /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/pcdata (to avoid being listed as unnecessary sub-directories in EmulationStation).

In the config file mentioned above (copy-pasted and adapted from the default configuration), I have this as autoexec :

[autoexec]
mount c /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/pcdata
C:
CD My-Game
MY-GAME.BAT
EXIT

Problem : Dosbox crashes almost immediately. /dev/shm/runcommand.log indicates that Dosbox crashed with a segmentation fault. Since I didn't want to install gdb and debug the whole thing before being absolutely sure I wasn't missing something obvious, I'm asking you guys : am I ? (I'm not even sure debugging is a possibility here, since it's a libretro core file, not a separate program).

lr-dosbox works fine, but a few games I tested don't work at all with it (despite being listed as compatible on the official Dosbox site).

As I understood from various posts, lr-dosbox-pure seems to be the best bet in terms of RetroArch integration (and therefore the possibility to avoid using keyboard/mouse entirely), compatibility, and stability. Is it still the case in 2023 ? I'm kind of lost since we have Dosbox-SDL2, DosBox-SVN, DosBox-X, lr-dosbox, lr-dosbox-pure...

mitu

By default, dosbox-pure expects games to be zipped and conf files are loaded differently than other Dosbox forks:

(via https://github.com/schellingb/dosbox-pure#loading-a-dosboxconf-file):

If a .conf file gets selected in the frontend, DOSBox Pure will mount the directory of that file as the C: drive and then use it.

Take a look at the above link and see if using the core option helps booting the games you have, but from what it looks like, the .zip/.dosz archive of the game/program must also be present.

ssj17vegeta

Thanks a bunch mate, much appreciated. It does indeed work great when provided with a single ZIP file, and it seems to perform way better performance-wise than other alternatives.

Another, last question if you may :)

I noticed Dosbox-pure generates *.pure.zip files. Another topic mentioned it was for saving purposes, which is great.

How can I prevent EmulationStation from listing those files ?

I thought of a way but I'm not sure it's optimal :

Renaming all zip files to dosz since Dosbox recognizes them.
Defining only <extension>.dosz .DOSZ</extension>for the PC platform in es_systems.cfg.

What are your thoughts on this ?

Anyways thanks for the first answer ! It made my day :D

mitu

I think it's easier to set the savestate_directory RetroArch option so the .pure.zip saves are not created in the pc rom folder.

Modify the retroarch.cfg for the pc system (in /opt/retropie/configs/pc) and add a line at the beginning with:

savestate_directory = '/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/pcdata/saves'

and see if the .pure.zip save states are created in that folder.