Making Headers on your Atari 5200 game images to auto-run in RetroPie
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@exarkuniv Yeah. Give it a shot man. @Maybe EvilDindon can help walk you through it as he figures it out. It's working pretty great for me now except for a few bugs on 2 player games, but I'm hoping the other emulator that future.child is working on porting over will handle those.
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Cool, I installed atari 8 bit (atari 800) computer games, and it works great too !
One thing to know is that .atr disk images work great, but .bin cartridges are a pain, because you have to tell atari800 emu to remove the cartridge each time you want to load a new .atr game.
Luckily, almost all my atari 800 games are in .atr format, I had only few .bin cartridges (donkey kong, pengo, james bond, Henry's House), but I found .atr files of these games on the net easily.
Tried first to create header cartridges with altirra from .atr files, just like the atari 5200 method, but that did'nt work.
The most simple was to find .atr files of these few games.
Two minor things :
- I have to find a scraper that can scrape atari 8 bit games properly (UXS doesn't, maybe sselph ? I'll try tonight)
- Some atari games requires a keyboard key (because atari 8 bit controllers had only one button) : I'll have to think how to map the spacebar, for example, to a joypad button... Otherwise, I'll never be able to open the aircraft hangar in raid over moscow !! ;)
Cheers,
Mike.
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@evildindon That's good info to know. I really haven't done much with the Atari 800 other than make a bunch of headers for the 100 or so that I did have in an old collection. I've only focused so far on the 5200 since I actually grew up with that system.
About scraping.....
That other "major project" I mentioned will hopefully one day make scraping a thing of the past. I was part of a group that put a ton of info and media surrounding most non-computer based consoles before the PSX about a decade ago. Early this year I got back into it after about 8 years away from this stuff.
It's amazing how much more info and good artwork is out there all these years later!
I'm focusing hard-core on the NES now because that's the system I think would generate the most interest in the project. I think that the Atari consoles would be my next projects for two reasons. 1. They're generally a LOT smaller, and 2. I don't want to go and do all the big consoles that most people would want first and wrap up with the ones that less people would be interested in.
So far this year I've easily spent 1,500 hours on this. I'm looking into avenues of crowd funding going forward since I just can't keep up this pace without working (I've been unemployed for quite a while now).
So far with the NES/Famicom Disk System, I have around 2,200 games including official releases, unlicensed, pirates, translations, hacks and prototypes. I stand by the fact that every game has the absolute highest quality Box and Cart art available online, and hundreds of them have been touched up by me personally.
Every game has a video as well, but these videos were made nearly a decade ago and intended for the XBox so they're all SD. I hope to be able to re-make all of the videos in HD. I know there are sites out there that already have most of them in HD, but there was no standard so they're all sorts of different lengths and the volumes are all over the map.
I want to make a standard format for all of the videos, and when one single person makes all of them than you can be sure that they're all standardized.
It's just a dream right now, but I'm hoping that when I get this NES stuff set up that people will see the value in the work I'm doing and put me to work for you. :)
I'll be posting a spreadsheet of the NES work so far very soon. It's almost ready, but I don't want to rush it.
Stay tuned.
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Hey, good Luck for this crazy project !
My approach on retropie/retrogaming is a bit differnnt than most of people though, as I Don't want to have full sets for each systems.
I think it's a mistake to put full sets of thousands games per system, because you spend more time browsing menus than playing.
I think a top 50/100 games max per system is far enough for a lifetime !
About scraping Atari 800 : I'll use good quality 3d boxarts from emumovies. And for game infos, I'll edit manually my own gamelist.xml game by game. I'll take m'y Time !
My set is only 60 essentiels though.
And emumovies is the most incredible collection of artworks and hd videosnaps. You should subscribe, it really worth it !
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@evildindon said in Making Headers on your Atari 5200 game images to auto-run in RetroPie:
Hey, good Luck for this crazy project !
My approach on retropie/retrogaming is a bit differnnt than most of people though, as I Don't want to have full sets for each systems.
I think it's a mistake to put full sets of thousands games per system, because you spend more time browsing menus than playing.
When they look this good though, that's a good thing. :)
Besides, space isn't really an issue anymore because we can use USB sticks and in a few years we'll probably be able to fit all of this stuff on SD cards without even needing a USB device.
What you're doing is what favorites lists are for. ;)
I think a top 50/100 games max per system is far enough for a lifetime !
About scraping Atari 800 : I'll use good quality 3d boxarts from emumovies. And for game infos, I'll edit manually my own gamelist.xml game by game. I'll take m'y Time !
I've gotten info for 10,000-12,000 games by hand myself, so I know what you're in for. Won't be too bad with the small amount of games you're considering though.
My set is only 60 essentiels though.
And emumovies is the most incredible collection of artworks and hd videosnaps. You should subscribe, it really worth it !
Yeah... I wasn't trying to insult emumovies or anything, but there is no standard to their videos and a lot of people put them all together. All the videos have volumes all over the map, so when possible I use the emulator's music instead of the preview video audio because of this. Also, the lengths of the videos can be quite different, and many of the videos you can tell that whoever made them didn't really care and were playing the game like crap while filming.
My goal would be to have a standard length, with a "normalized" volume for all titles. I'd also want about 15-20 seconds of gameplay, followed by 5-10 seconds of the title screen animation, making them all play like the demo mode on arcade machines. This wouldn't be possible for some systems like the atari 2600 which didn't have any title screens, but everything from the NES and up would have them.
Nobody has artwork like I've got for the NES now. I guaranty that I've got the best set in existence sitting on my drive right now. :)
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Yeah the favorites menu is very cool, just tried it.
So simple, to use, too.
In my case, this favorites menu will contain 15 or 20 games max ! It will be the favorites of the essentiels ;)
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Speaking of the Atari 5200.
Did you manage to load Bounty bob with altirra ?Some Say it's a 40 k cartridge (and it's the only one).
And do you know if a libretro port of kat5200 will be Out some day ?
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@evildindon Yeah. I was able to load and header Bounty Bob with altirra. It was about 3 months ago now though, so I don't remember much. I do remember it was a unique cart, so you're probably right about it being the only 40k cart. I know that when you tried to load it in the Atari800 emulator that it would have a much different launch menu when it came to picking the cart type than all of the other games.
If you're still having problems, I would suggest just keep trying to find a different version. I know that I didn't have to do anything special to get it working like all of the other games.
And do you know if a libretro port of kat5200 will be Out some day ?
You should ask future.child about that quesiton. I know he's ported it over and it's in the experimental packages now. I don't know if he knows anything about putting it under libretro though, or who's in charge of doing that.
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@Used2BeRX @EvilDindon As far as i know there is no one working on a libretro port, i also doubt someone will attempt it anytime soon as it would take a lot of rework (the original creator said there are no plans for it but welcomes anyone to try).
And me porting it over to the experimental packages, that would be too much credit for little old me as i only created a rudimentary retropie installer for it.
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@future-child It's a shame that the Atari 5200 never gets the love it deserves. The problem is that nobody had it.
It's no big deal today, but for anybody who wanted to play some of the great arcade classics at home it was the only console on the market for a few years there that could do it almost exactly. Pac-Man was freakin' awesome compared to the 2600 version especially.
I'm just barely old enough to remember it. My youngest brother doesn't even remember we had it growing up.
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Yep,
Even if the 5200 has never been released in Europe, I dreamt about having one !
And I think 5200 game library is better, overall, than 7800's.
And some aspects of the hardware too : soundchip was better !
I read that the 7800 had the same poor soundchip than the 2600 !
Fortunately I had an Atari 800 xl on which I could play most of the 5200 games and a lot of exclusive and excellent games like encounter, donkey kong, flip&flop, xybex, dropzone, etc. Etc.
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@evildindon said in Making Headers on your Atari 5200 game images to auto-run in RetroPie:
Yep,
Even if the 5200 has never been released in Europe, I dreamt about having one !
And I think 5200 game library is better, overall, than 7800's.Yeah... I never even knew how big computer systems were in Europe until the emulation scene on the internet, especially youtube videos. I had never even heard of Atari computer systems until maybe 10 years ago.
The 5200 was freakin awesome man... but the controllers sucked. Don't get me wrong, they were actually really cool and I think they were the first controllers with a pause button on them, but they broke too easy.
At one point they stopped selling controllers when they were discontinuing the system. My dad bought a new system just to get 2 more controllers. Those lasted about 5 more years or so and finally broke and then we were never able to play Miner 2049er again :(
If you've never played Space Invaders for the 5200, you should REALLY check that one out. To this day I still have yet to play a version of that game that I like better than the 5200 one. It was so unique compared to all of the other versions. I was just testing out NES games earlier this week and the space invaders released in Japan is just like the 2600 version. Even the NES couldn't get it right.
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Hey I had Space invaders on my Atari 800 xl (same as 5200)
It was unique yes, but for me, the 2600 version was the best !
Actually I even prefer the 2600 version over the original arcade ;)
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