I tested some games from "samcoupe_flop" in mame.
They work very good on the pi4.
Just typing boot and they will run.
(edit : I added the possibility to install autoboot in systems with extras -> full / semi automatic boot)

Only one thing, the used cursor keys for playing games are :

for many games a,s,o,p,space. for some games q,w,space. other games use the normal cursor keys.

So it's advisable to use the game specific runcommand loaders for mame or lr-mess.
That way you can customize the keys used per game.

Here are some pictures of manic and ppersia :
2021-11-26-214220_800x600_scrot_resized.png 2021-11-26-214344_800x600_scrot_resized.png

Seems I added Mattel to early, discussing it further over here :

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/29682/development-of-module-script-generator-for-lr-mess-and-mame-standalone/657

Edit : removed it again see post 9

@csl

No problem but I think we see things from a much different angle.

I don't know the exact answer, you should ask a "global moderator".
But, I think, it basically comes down to how much time the developers can or want to spend and what they think what should be added or not.

And when something isn't there, some people become developers themselves.
Perhaps you can contribute to the open source community too.

I think you can just add gameandwatch in line 50 of /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/libretrocores/lr-mess.sh
I haven't tested though !
Let me know if it works for you, perhaps we can learn from this.

@folly said in Has anyone managed to get sound from the TRS-80?:

@jimmyfromthebay

I found this info on a blog :

Many games did not include sound effects, as audio output was not an intentional feature of the TRS-80's design, but many games used a trick to produce sound effects.

The trick was :
Back in the day, we had to hook a little speaker up to the cassette out line to pick up the audio

So that could be the reason why you don't have sound.

No, these are definitely games with programmed sound and speech, because I've seen YouTube videos of them (and MESS does refer to the machine's sound hardware, as seen in the above pics). It's very strange that the maximum sound output level in MESS is set to 0dB.

I've no idea what the technical machine differences are. There were a whole bunch of systems around at the same time that appear to use extremely similar hardware/OSes, and run identical-looking ports of the same games (I think the Genie is another) but I don't think they're compatible.

I'll investigate adding memory. It was a massive faff to get games working across all three formats, and lots of stuff that seemed like it SHOULD work didn't work because the files were in some sort of different formats despite having the same file extension. If I can get sound working I'll do a little tutorial.

(Planning one for the Dragon 32/CoCo2 as well, but so many things to do and so little time. Currently having an absolutely brutal fistfight with a couple of incomprehensible ZX Spectrum Next emulators.)

@jimmyfromthebay

They say that rats are intelligent.
So you have to train them, not to bite the cables.;-)

@folly IWill do. I've spent the last couple of days mostly wading through over 1000 Atom files just called 1, 2, 3, 4 etc, which actually turned out to be Retropie-compatible DSK files, just figuring out what they all were. (I'm about 30% done.) Once I've identified the games and got their controls configured I'll upload the configs.

@dteam Dammit, I spent four hours updating the damn thing yesterday :D

@jimmyfromthebay said in The bewildering case of the Enterprise 64:

@folly Interesting, cheers. Of course, there still aren't actually any DSK files anywhere :D

I had a second look.

Indeed it's very strange.
I found .tap(cass) and .img(flop) in the mame0.202 softwarelist.
These extensions aren't supported.

Perhaps we are missing something here.

@dmmarti The MAME softlist only has about six games on cart (the other carts are utilities), and 35 on tape.

@dmmarti That did the trick (and should come in handy in future too). Thanks! :)

@JimmyFromTheBay The phrasing could be better, indeed. What it tries to tell you is just that you should format your text using only this syntax which is also used by this forum.

What I heard: GRNXFLB JDYFJHVD KHDD JDKUIHEN DLIHDKLJ ODODID WWYTFQWD.

🤣
This reminded me of an episode from THE IT CROWD:

@jimmyfromthebay

Ok, I understand.

Something for the future perhaps ;-)

@shift I don't have dedicated threads for each individual lr-mess system I run, but the short answer is "more-or-less all of them".

Just to rattle off some of the ones I've tried on my Pi, with decent-to-perfect performance:

Phillips CD-i Epoch Super Cassette Vision V.tech V.Smile Various plug-and-play systems (both "official" and bootlegs) Tiger Game.com Fujitsu FM Towns

Once you get down how the core works (which admittedly is a bit of a nightmare), it's insanely versatile since it runs all the same systems as modern standalone MAME (according to the current docs, that's roughly 32,000; that link at the top is a good few years out of date). Arguably the most powerful core in all of RetroPie.

THANK YOU @dankcushions !

Your pointer was half of the solution so let me write the other half in case anyone else searches for this answer.

Setting the resolution in the retroarch Options menu did not have any effect until I also turned on "Alternate render method" in the same menu. At that point all resolution changes took immediate effect (upon leaving the retroarch UI) and now this all works perfectly.

I will write up the rest of my method to launch rom-less system soon!

Thanks again.

I am going to answer this one myself in case anyone else needs this info in the future. After looking through the run_mess.sh script itself, I was able to see that the message "hn613128pc64.bin NOT FOUND (tried in pv2000)" was trying to tell me that lr-mess was looking for the BIOS file in a pv2000 subdirectory of the main BIOS directory. Once it was placed there the logic to skip the software list/hash started working properly and I was able to launch roms that did not match the official hashes.

Nobody?

@VictimRLSH That's interesting, but a totally different category of thing.