Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color

mediamogul

Mine's still launching every time so far, but I still feel like we're all going to be spinning our wheels on shaky ground without an upstream fix. The author of the displaycolordepth8 fix even said that his addition was a hack and almost didn't submit it officially.

I'm not around my setup at the moment, but I'm curious to see what affect removing the onstart/end has for me. I'm betting that, as you say, having the Mac environment previously set to 256 will make all the difference. Did I understand you correctly in that you can potentially stave off a crash by first selecting 'Black & White' before switching to 256? If so, will this also work in reverse as an intermediate step between 256 and a higher setting?

edmaul69

@mediamogul i was mentioning it needing to be changed before enabling dispmanx. I might not have said that correctly.

edmaul69

@mediamogul edited the original post

edmaul69

@mediamogul @Meneer-Jansen can you post youremulators.cfg files?

mediamogul

@edmaul69

Sure...

basilisk = "/opt/retropie/emulators/basilisk/bin/BasiliskII --rom /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/mac.rom --disk /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/disk.img --extfs /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh --config /opt/retropie/configs/macintosh/basiliskii.cfg"
default="basilisk"

edmaul69

@mediamogul i found my issue of it not booting every time. i had a typo in the basiliskii.cfg. i have the on start and on end set how @Meneer-Jansen posted it. it works all the time now. thank you both.

mediamogul

@edmaul69, @Meneer-Jansen

I just tested mine without the onstart/end scripts, and while it never crashed for me with them on, everything is running fine without them. @Meneer-Jansen, I think it's probably safe if you want to remove those particulars in your guide above for posterity. While still not a perfect solution, I'm satisfied with what we now have as-is. If you guys ever experiment with streamlining the process, or learn anything new I'd always be interested to hear it.

spud11

Hi. There was some reference to lxde earlier in this thread, but I'm assuming we don't need this - that we can just install BasiliskII following items 1 to 9 of Meneer Jansen's guide in this thread from a day ago (and pray it works!)

edmaul69

@spud11 yes just use his latest guide except ignore the runcommand stuff. If the img file isnt already in 16 color b&w or 256 color, do not add the “displaycolordepth 8” to the basiliskii.cfg or set the dispmanx to “enabled” in retropie-setup.

edmaul69

@spud11 so if it isnt in 256 color, set it to 16 color b&w. Then add the other stuff in the guide above. After that boot the img thats set to b&w then change to 256 colors. You cant set it to 256 colors when it is in thousands or millions of colors. It crashes the program if you do.

spud11

@edmaul69 Okay, thanks so much for your help on this. I'll have a crack at it this evening after work and let you know. I haven't played around with BasiliskII on Linux or Retropie yet, but have on Windoze and, sadly, it hasn't been a happy experience so far.

Meneer Jansen

@edmaul69 said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

@mediamogul @Meneer-Jansen can you post your emulators.cfg files?

basilisk = "/opt/retropie/emulators/basilisk/bin/BasiliskII --rom /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/mac.rom --disk /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/disk.img --disk /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/disk02.img --extfs /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh --config /opt/retropie/configs/macintosh/basiliskii.cfg"
default = "basilisk"

Meneer Jansen

@mediamogul said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

streamlining the process, or learn anything new I'd always be interest

Did that, see: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/1049/macintosh-basilisk-ii-8-bit-color/137 (i.e. post No. 137 in this here topic). :-)

Meneer Jansen

@spud11 said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

Hi. There was some reference to lxde earlier in this thread, but I'm assuming we don't need this - that we can just install BasiliskII following items 1 to 9 of Meneer Jansen's guide in this thread from a day ago (and pray it works!)

You're right: I do not need LXDE anymore. The procedure from a day ago that you referred too is in post 137 here.

Meneer Jansen

@edmaul69 said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

@spud11 so if it isnt in 256 color, set it to 16 color b&w. Then add the other stuff in the guide above. After that boot the img thats set to b&w then change to 256 colors. You cant set it to 256 colors when it is in thousands or millions of colors. It crashes the program if you do.

What exactly do you mean? Must one set BII to "16 gray shades, B&W" before activating dispmanx and setting the "displaycolordepth 8" option in /opt/retropie/configs/macintosh/basiliskii.cfg? So do you mean that the correct procedure must be:

Start BasiliskII and set the color mode to 16 gray shades by clicking on the Apple logo at the upper left hand side and choosing:
Control panels --> Monitors --> tick "Gays" and "16".
Activate dispmanx for BII and set displaycolordepth 8 in BII's config file.

Does BII crash if you don't do it this way?

P.S. Proof reading of the procedure in post 137 is needed.

edmaul69

@meneer-jansen yes if it isn't already in 256 color, it crashes if you dont change it to 16 color gray/b&w before adding the dispmanx and displaycolordepth 8 and try to change it to 256 color first. In fact it can even trash the image so that it’s unusable. Just from my issues i had with dispmanx, 2 images i had in b&w and kept trying to change to 256 colors are now unusable with or without dispmanx. I might be able to stick them on pc and fix them but i havent tried that yet. So your guide looks correct, i was just making sure he was well aware of needing to do that first.

Meneer Jansen

@edmaul69 said in Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color:

@meneer-jansen yes if it isn't already in 256 color, it crashes if you dont change it to 16 color gray/b&w before adding the dispmanx and displaycolordepth 8 and try to change it to 256 color first. In fact it can even trash the image so that it’s unusable. Just from my issues i had with dispmanx, 2 images i had in b&w and kept trying to change to 256 colors are now unusable with or without dispmanx. I might be able to stick them on pc and fix them but i havent tried that yet. So your guide looks correct, i was just making sure he was well aware of needing to do that first.

That's unfortunate. Maybe (in the future) you can try the following. I've noticed that BasiliskII creates hidden files in the home directory. Maybe they contain settings that mess your image up. Maybe deleting them helps. They are:

/home/pi/.basilisk_ii_prefs
/home/pi/.basilisk_ii_xpram

edmaul69

@meneer-jansen i will look into those files. I had extra images preserving my good image that was already in 256 color. So luckily my good one is working now.

spud11

Well, I managed to get Prince of Persia 1 to work for a short time following the guide in post 137.

I followed that guide strictly and I was very impressed by the full colour version of POP1 which seemed to work very well, albeit I couldn't figure out what the default controls are. (Are there keyboard controls?)

The reason I was using POP1 and not POP2 was because I have not been able to find the files meneer-jansen mentioned. I wasn't able to find the correct "Starterdisk.hfv" (the only one I found was for POP1) and I couldn't find "Oldgames.hfv" at all. (And no, I'm not asking for them here either.)

More interestingly, I ran into the "Black Screen of Death" as well.

As POP1 was working well, I thought I would set up my system so that I could play multiple Mac games fairly easily.

I'm using Attract Mode so I changed my Apple Macintosh.cfg file in \attractmode\emulators\ to read:

 # Generated by Attract-Mode v2.2.1
#
executable           /opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh
args                 0 _SYS_ macintosh "[romfilename]"
rompath              /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh
romext               .sh;.SH
system               Apple Macintosh
info_source          thegamesdb.net
artwork    flyer           /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/flyer
artwork    marquee         /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/marquee
artwork    snap            /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/snap
artwork    wheel           /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/wheel

I changed my emulators.cfg to:

default = "basilisk"
basilisk = "bash %ROM%"

And I added a bash script to my /roms/macintosh folder called POP.sh (and made it executable) as follows:

#!/bin/bash
sudo /opt/retropie/emulators/basilisk/bin/BasiliskII --rom /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/mac.rom --disk /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/disk.img --disk /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/disk02.img --extfs /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh --config /opt/retropie/configs/macintosh/basiliskii.cfg

I did this on the basis that it would allow me to set up separate bash scripts for each game (eg one for POP1 and one for POP2) just by changing disk02.img in the above script to whatever Mac game I wanted to run. (This kind of script has worked in the past for several other "fiddly" systems I've installed.)

Unfortunately, it didn't work and POP1 stopped working altogether with the dreaded black screen. I've had to switch the Pi off then on as I couldn't do anything else with it.

I've tried deleting the basiliskii.cfg and the basilisk_ii.prefs, but doing that doesn't make it work again. Next I'll probably try uninstalling and reinstalling basilisk2 from scratch and see whether I can get POP1 to work again and to figure out the controls. (By the way, I couldn't delete the basilisk_ii_xpram file because it didn't exist on my system .)

edmaul69

@spud11 you should just reinstall basilisk so it refixes the emulators.cfg. First of all pop 1 & 2 can be installed in the same os. Why need seperate scripts? Second you can just create a basilisk2 in the emulators.cfg if you need to boot a different image and create info there. The files in the roms folder can be blank inside. Just name them how you want. Then when you boot the blank file press a button to configure and select emulator + rom and choose which basilisk you want to run for that particular file. You seem to have just made things more difficult for yourself. Using 1 image file you can have as many games in it as it runs just like any other operating system with a gui.