Atari 5200/800 Emulation Really RetroPie main quality?

BadOPCode

I know some people might get very emotional on this and i'm not saying this to troll anyone. But it really seems like the Atari 5200/800 emulation should be pulled from the main packages and be put back into experimental.
I did get it to work but it was a lot more than just drop the bios and roms in the right path. Just seems there is a lot of integration issues with Retro happening with this emulator. Putting it back in the experimental category would eliminate a lot of the expectations from users of it working like the rest of the main emulation packages IMHO.

mitu

@BadOPCode said in Atari 5200/800 Emulation Really RetroPie main quality?:

I know some people might get very emotional on this and i'm not saying this to troll anyone. But it really seems like the Atari 5200/800 emulation should be pulled from the main packages and be put back into experimental.

Based on a 2 year old topic, I don't think that is warranted.

I did get it to work but it was a lot more than just drop the bios and roms in the right path.

So, what exactly is missing and which emulator have you had troubles to set up ? The docs page has a pretty good coverage for the emulation options.

rkoster

lr-atari800 issues are almost always challenges with quirks of the original hardware, especially the fact that there are many versions. This is where all the things like cart autodetect for 5200, dealing with alternate versions of the OS, dealing with BASIC or not, etc, all come from. You actually run into many of these on the actual original hardware too (the infamous "Translator disk" for example).

Basic stuff like controls is now pretty sorted, as of last year, except for the 5200's analog stick in a small handful of games.

This isn't to say that there aren't some emu issues -- there definitely are, especially with the slightly older version of the mu that Retroarch uses.

Things like Atari 5200 cart autodetect don't work reliably because the person who coded it originally tied the autodetect table to filename, for example. But given that there are many alternate dumps of ROMs with and without headers, even a checksoum solution would need to be pretty extensive.

I strongly suggest people who are interested in Atari 8 bit emulation take a look at the guides in my signature, and in particular use the script I wrote. It makes most everything pretty seamless on the computers, and walks you through building a 5200 library that just loads without fiddling with anything.