TI99sim Partially working

lavalamplighter

Hardware: raspberry pi 4b
Software: retro pie 4.8, used premade image from retro pie site on 256gb micro SD card.

Wi-Fi enabled, apple keyboard connected via usb, Logitech wireless mouse with usb dongle. Controller is a unbranded SNES style controller.

I’m having trouble getting the TI994A emulator to run. I’ve got the 4 correct files dropped into my Bios folder (do these need to be grouped in any sub folder, or are they ok to just be hanging out in there?). I made sure the .ctg file was all upper case. I’ve got a bunch of other .ctg files in the correct roms folder.

When I run emulation station, I see ti99 as a recognized system. It displays no artwork like the rest of my systems do. When I enter it, I briefly see all the games listed, but the screen is not showing theme at all, and it quickly goes all black and stops running. I am able to back out into ES, or push left/right on my controller to access adjacent emulators. If I hit the a button before the screen goes black, it will start the first game on the list, and it appears to run the game ok. Just cant figure out why it does not display like my other emulators, and goes to a blank screen.

I have tried to watch the video on instillation and read through the documents, but I am very new to this, and they make no sense. One thing that is especially confusing in the document is that it mentions an arm file from m Rousseau website. The file extension of the arm file it says to download is .tar.xz but later in the instructions it mentions an arm file with the extension .tar.tar?

What am I missing here? Again, I have practically zero experience in this arena, so I am going to need to be walked through this on the most basic level.

Folly

@lavalamplighter

Indeed all the information is scattered around.
Sha1sums of the BIOS and some extended basic ctg files would be nice to have in the docs.

There is no need for installing ti99sim from a tar.xz/tar.tar.
You can just install ti99sim from the RetroPie-Setup ( i think from the experimental packages)
The package is installed with a loader script which can only load ctg roms from emulationstation.

Placing the BIOS files in the BIOS directory is the correct way.

lavalamplighter

I should have included this in my original post. I have installed both the ti99sim packages from the experimental package list. I get the same result with both, which is why I feel like I’m missing something.

Folly

@lavalamplighter

These are the minimal set of files you need to have in the BIOS folder :
(SHA1SUM and filename from the gp2xti99-v1.1.0 file)
382292295c00dff348d7e17c5ce4da12a1d87763 spchrom.bin
3741375b026e61008fa77a2e34eafc54547b6aa7 spchrom.dat
4e764ab67dfcbee8adc5b7d98e7b2926a008b9d8 TI-994A.ctg
973723f004d8797f8b9e4871c10f240fd8402398 ti-994a.dat

I am experimenting with these BIOS files from the ti99sim12 file to get disk support so we get the whole list of roms in one post :
(not working yet)
9d5026673cae37ad879de15e0d108fdbc649a34e 994agrom.bin
780261b573f324e355580c7a6ba502956eec68b5 994arom.bin
4d26e5ef0997ed2f3a56eb8104778bfe719b38f2 cf7a+.bin
7f2685e7a3e5819ca759f48a83b8c8a8c68c3587 cf7+.dat
ed91d48c1eaa8ca37d5055bcf67127ea51c4cad5 Disk.Bin
09dd3f1cebc3027d04dbe9211c7664f8977cb1e7 Gram Kracker.dat
3e489075a2d99665fe8d1849724843ada237eadc Mini-Memory.dat
382292295c00dff348d7e17c5ce4da12a1d87763 spchrom.bin
e1a1101c49bcb020389aff0f55c89a7c4177caff spchrom.ctg
3741375b026e61008fa77a2e34eafc54547b6aa7 spchrom.dat
4e764ab67dfcbee8adc5b7d98e7b2926a008b9d8 TI-994A.ctg
17021f04d5a3d12573b70f4735b7663ff7a42089 TI-994A.dat
c78dc08668a2541e2eef43511cf3b3c582a0408e ti-disk.ctg
be0719720cb2aecb1f0fe0c6fb3b0a937e666972 tiworkshop379.dat

and non bios cartridges which are needed for disk support and these boot ok :
3722ab1f2723a79b2b64e0a72a7438b1fc4171bf xb25.ctg
868341c213738befded1641a37460497d2fc6cdf sxba.ctg

More info can be found in this "disk support help" topic :
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/34428/ti99sim-disks

Folly

@lavalamplighter said in TI99sim Partially working:

When I run emulation station, I see ti99 as a recognized system. It displays no artwork like the rest of my systems do. When I enter it, I briefly see all the games listed, but the screen is not showing theme at all, and it quickly goes all black and stops running. I am able to back out into ES, or push left/right on my controller to access adjacent emulators. If I hit the a button before the screen goes black, it will start the first game on the list, and it appears to run the game ok. Just cant figure out why it does not display like my other emulators, and goes to a blank screen.

I missed this part somehow.

Seems your emulator is working fine but emulationstation has problems because it's lacking the theme for ti99.
Correct ?

lavalamplighter

@Folly that’s what seems to be happening. Not sure if this would be why the screen goes dark and kicks me back to the ES screen where I can see all systems.

Thanks so much for the help so far!

Folly

@lavalamplighter

What theme are you using ?

lavalamplighter

@Folly not 100% sure and I’m at work currently so unable to check. I will try changing it to see if that solves the issue

Folly

@lavalamplighter

Be sure to uninstall the one that was installed and just install only one theme.
You can check this folder if there is just one theme installed :
/etc/emulationstation/themes

I would recommend this theme (supported by me and DTEAM) :
DTEAM/cygnus-blue-flames

lavalamplighter

@Folly I’ll give it a try and see if that resolved my issues. Thanks!

lavalamplighter

@Folly thanks so much!!! It was the theme that did not have support for the system. I changed themes and now it works great!

Is there a way to view what systems a theme supports? I poked around in the files for the themes which is how I saw that my current theme did not offer TI99. Or is it just going to be set up a few I like then go looking into the files?

Thanks again…so happy I can back to playing Alpiner!

Folly

@lavalamplighter

Great to hear that it has solved the issue.

Yes you can poke around in the files to see if the theme has support for ti99.
All themes are on github.
So for example our theme 'DTEAM-1 cygnus-blue-flames' can be found over here :
https://github.com/DTEAM-1/cygnus-blue-flames

This is the same for all themes.
Just look at the file esthemes.sh for themes in :
/home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/supplementary/esthemes.sh
or :
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/blob/master/scriptmodules/supplementary/esthemes.sh