Macintosh (Basilisk II) 8-bit Color

guitarmandp

@edmaul69 do you have a .cfg file I can paste or can you tell me where I need to put the code if [ "$2" = "basilisk" ]
fbset -depth 8
fi

And what the name of the file and the location is to get the 8 bit color working on my Mac emulator? Thanks

edmaul69

@guitarmandp So that goes in

/opt/retropie/configs/all/runcommand-onstart.sh

And you put the same thing but with a 32 instead of 8 in

/opt/retropie/configs/all/runcommand-onend.sh

Now you need to put basilisk in 16 color, then b&w. Now exit. Go into the retropie menu, go into retropie setup. In there go into, Configuration / tools, then go into dispmanx -.... choose Enable for basilisk so it is enabled. Now exit and restart. Go into basilisk and change the display to 256 colors. Now anytime you go in it is not guaranteed to work. You might get a black screen. You need to repeatedly press ctrl and esc together to get out. You might need to reboot the pi. Now you have to reset the pi to try again. It will never work a second time. If you want to go back to higher quality display you need to set it to 16 color b&w again. Then go into retropie setup again and disable dispmanx. In 256 color mode it can take you several tries resetting before it works.

Meneer Jansen

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

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

is dispmanx supposed to be on or off?

I have mine turned on.

What are your runcommand options on boot? Are you using a buffer size or a specific display size?

Nothing was changed for any of these. Basically, after I got a working disk image on my desktop computer last May, I transferred it and the ROM, as well as the configuration file over to the Pi. It remained that way until I tried changing the color depth a few days ago.

How does one turn dispmanx on? I've got a lot of troubles getting BasiliskII to work with 8 bit (256) colors too.

[edit] Sorry guys, didn't read tje post above this one. I cannot delete this post any more, mods may delete it.

Meneer Jansen

I had to do a complete clean re-install of Retropie. I chose this time to not use the BasiliskII executable that I compiled myself for the Pi but to use the methods described here to get it working. This is what I did to play Prince of Persia 2 The shadow and the flame.

Install BasiliskII via the Retropie script.
Hattrick: enable 'dispmanx' in Emulationstation/Retropie. Go into the Retropie Menu (in Emulationstation), go into retropie setup. In there go into Configuration / tools, then go into dispmanx choose Enable for basilisk so it is enabled.
Download the "PoP Macintosh Total Pack" for Windows from [Removed]. It includes he Mac version of PoP2. Install this "Pack" in Windows (or Wine). Go to: "C:/Program Files/Oldgames/Prince of Persia 2 Mac".
From that Windows dir copy the files "emulation.rom", "Starterdisk.hfv" and "Oldgames.HFV" to: /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh. Rename those files to "mac.rom", "disk.img" and "disk02.img".
Add the following line to: /opt/retropie/configs/macintosh/emulators.cfg:

--disk /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/macintosh/disk02.img
Set the Mac to 256 colors (8 bit color).
For some reason it's not needed on my Pi to set the framebuffer to 8 bit (fbset -depth 8). Even stranger: it makes BasiliskII and the Pi crash.
Do NOT disable overscan in /boot/config.txt. That is: do not uncomment the line "#disable_overscan=1". See this topic by me.

Maybe the Wiki has to be updated a bit...

mediamogul

@meneer-jansen

I must have missed your last post. Glad to see the game working. Unfortunately, I had to remove your link to the game files. I know that at some point the original 'Prince of Persia' was open sourced, but I don't think that ever happened with PoP2. Also, the disk image that contained it also had a few other installed titles, such as 'Lemmings' and a few of it's expansions, which I don't believe are intended to be freely distributed either. If you can find a notice from the copyright holders regarding open source or public domain status, or even a news article to the same effect, re-posting the link won't be an issue.

Edit: Looking at it a little closer, the linked disk image was built on MacOS 8 and only 7.5.5 is free to distribute.

For some reason it's not needed on my Pi to set the framebuffer to 8 bit (fbset -depth 8). Even stranger: it makes BasiliskII and the Pi crash.

I believe it ended up crashing on occasion for me as well. However, every time I would set the emulated Mac to 256 colors, it would result in a black screen otherwise. Perhaps something has changed. I'll look at it a little later today and see.

Do NOT disable overscan in /boot/config.txt. That is: do not uncomment the line "#disable_overscan=1".

This is very interesting. I haven't noticed overscan having an effect on other emulators, but then again I haven't really tested anything with it on verses without it either.

Meneer Jansen

@mediamogul My apologies for posting a link to software/os-es that are copyrighted! You were right to remove these links. The site I got it from is so old that I thought is was a "legit" place on the internet (I was wrong).

mediamogul

@meneer-jansen

There are a lot of misconceptions about old computer software and the legality of propagating it. ROMs are generally cut and dry, but there's a lot of gray areas to get lost in here. Unfortunately, the link in question was indeed infringing copyright.

I tried setting the emulated Mac to 256 colors again through BasilliskII and the screen went black as it did before. This must be a pretty serious crash, because I couldn't even kill the software through the command line. I plan on trying it again with the overscan enabled as you mentioned earlier, but I've got some people coming over tonight to game and I don't want to start making universal changes that I don't have time to troubleshoot if they go south.

edmaul69

@mediamogul so do i need to have overscan enabled or not? I get a black screen all the time. More than 50% of the time i try to go into it. I dont have overscan disabled. I have overscan settings set for top, bottom, left and right

mediamogul

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

so do i need to have overscan enabled or not? I get a black screen all the time. More than 50% of the time i try to go into it.

I haven't had a chance to test overscan yet, but I think I might know why you're getting a black screen so often. Something that I wasn't really aware of at the time was that in changing the framebuffer's color depth from runcommand-onstart.sh, it creates a race condition to where if jzintv loads at the wrong time, the script could potentially have no effect.

I've only just thought of this due to another runcommand-onstart.sh problem I ran into lately with something else, but it might explain things. I'll test it out on mine, but if this is indeed the case, one solution would be to prevent jzintv from loading for a second or two to give the script time to change the framebuffer. Adding a two second sleep like the launch command below might do the job.

basilisk = "sleep 2; /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"

edmaul69

@mediamogul i get it when baselisk is the only thing loading since boot. I have seperate emulators.cfg settings for two different images. My black and white one which i cant change video settings on but appears to be 256 b&w boots every time but my 256 color one is a pain been trying to boot for the last half hour and not once have i gotten in to that one. Just black screen

edmaul69

@mediamogul ok i added that and it started to boot but then crashed

edmaul69

Of course it boots every time with images not 256 colors.

edmaul69

@mediamogul yeah first time i try 256 with wait it starts loading and when it is going to load the desktop it crashes. Then the program wont work at all until i reboot.

mediamogul

@edmaul69

Have you tried enabling overscan yet. I'm about to.

edmaul69

@mediamogul i have the disable overscan hashtagged out. Is there something else? So even setting it to black and white with dispmanx on it immedietly crashes which it didnt used to do. Thats how i believed i go the 256 colors to work. But yeah even b&w 256 crashes

edmaul69

@mediamogul the way this is acting now is like dispmanx doesn’t work at all

mediamogul

@edmaul69

I read and reread @Meneer-Jansen's workaround here and it seems he believes it all boils down to leaving #disable_overscan=1 commented out. Mine's uncommented, but was set to disable_overscan=0. I've restored it back to it's default and am rebooting now.

mediamogul

Black screen and a crash. Now I'm going to try it with the framebuffer at 8-bit. After that, I'm going to try disabling dispmanx all together.

edmaul69

@mediamogul ok let me know. Im having no luck getting it to switch to 256 colors from b&w with dispmanx on and off. Makes no sense why it is acting like dispmanx doesnt exist.

edmaul69

@mediamogul here is my runcommand log when trying to boot 256 color image

https://pastebin.com/ZuyxBTEY