Development of module-script generator for lr-mess, lr-mame and mame standalone

JimmyFromTheBay

Tape-based MESS systems which support savestates to skip loading:

Acorn Archimedes
Acorn Atom
Aquarius
BBC Micro
Camputers Lynx
CoCo 3
Colour Genie
Fujitsu FM-7*
Memotech MTX 512
Orao
Sharp MZ-700
Sharp MZ-80A**
Exidy Sorcerer
Spectravideo SV318/328
Tandy TRS-80
Phillips VG-5000

(*) Has issues with some games, eg missing music in New Rally-X
(**) It's complicated

Systems which do NOT support savestates:

NEC PC-xx0x

JimmyFromTheBay

@dmmarti said in Development of module-script generator for lr-mess and mame standalone:

I've slowly been working on getting some of the MESS systems up and running using the scripts from @valerino, @Folly, @DTEAM, and others as a guide.

I've created an online Google sheets document of my efforts along with usage notes, etc for them.

It's a WIP document still so things will change as time goes on. But hopefully it proves useful to some.

Can you help me out with the TRS-80 entry? It says this:

"MultiDOS is loaded into floppy 0
type DIR 1 and hit <enter> to see list of games
type the gamename and hit <enter> to launch it"

But when I try to use lr-mess-system-trs80m3-flop2 it just dumps me on the normal "Cass?" prompt, and doesn't recognise the disk commands - DIR 1 gives me an ?SN Error.

This is the line I have in EMULATORS.CFG

lr-mess-system-trs80m3-flop2 = "/home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/run_mess.sh /opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-mess/mess_libretro.so /opt/retropie/configs/trs80m3/retroarch.cfg \trs80m3 /home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/mame -autoframeskip -ui_active -flop1 /home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/multidos.dmk -flop2 %ROM%"

It's loading the Model III version of MULTIDOS.DMK that I got from trs80.com, which is in my BIOS folder. If I check in the MESS File Manager it shows up as being loaded as flop1 with my game disk in flop2. But I have no DOS. So what am I getting wrong?

(When I tried changing -flop1 to -flop0 in the commandline it crashed with an unknown-option error.)

dmmarti

@jimmyfromthebay ...one thing to check....

Once Retroarch has loaded up, press SCROLL LOCK to enable partial keyboard support.

Next, press TAB > MACHINE CONFIGURATION. In there, check to see if floppy support is ON (it might default to OFF).

If it's OFF, change it to ON ... then press TAB to exit the MESS GUI. Press SCROLL LOCK again to go back to full keyboard emulation.

Then Hotkey+X to exit the game back to ES. Then relaunch the game again.

It should then load the multidos.DMK file you have. I use MULTIDOS.DSK (not *.DMK) and when I boot up, I'm asked to enter the date.

Once that's done, I can type "DIR 1 <enter>" to swap to flop2 and see the games list.

JimmyFromTheBay

@dmmarti Oh, excellent, thanks - it hadn't occurred to me that a floppy-specific instance of the emulator would have floppies disabled :D

Annoyingly, while that gets me into MULTIDOS, when I type DIR 1 I now get

"Granule allocation table read error.
Data record not found during read."

I'll try some other disks, though.

dmmarti

@jimmyfromthebay
if you type :

DIR <enter>

(with no number specified) ... what do you see? You should see the contents of your DOS disk. If that works, that'll let you know you're ok and just need a good second games disk. Or if it shows your game disk, that's even better! I'm not sure, but the various DOS disks may behave differently when it comes to typing DIR and what drive it uses by default.

JimmyFromTheBay

@dmmarti Yeah, DIR just gets me what appears to be the MULTIDOS disk contents. Have tried a bunch of other disks, both DSK and DMK, but so far they all give me the granule-allocation error.

JimmyFromTheBay

PS you may want to add "-ramsize 32k" to the advised commandline for the Colour Genie, as some games require the extra memory.

EDIT: Oh, you did :D Got to learn to scroll horizontally :D

DTEAM

@hhtien1408 said in Development of module-script generator for lr-mess and mame standalone:

@DTEAM @dmmarti @Folly @valerino
Great news for Super Acan Funtech
The lastest official MAME 0.233 can emulate sound already.
Check the youtube video

MAME 0.233 is now available

For Super A'Can:

-Super A'Can: DMA sample support and corrected sample length (#8160) [Ryan Holtz, Ian Karlsson]

-schick.cpp - fix sound hookup, note some protection checks, attempt to improve graphics (#8153) [David Haywood]

schick.cpp - fix sound hookup
force a different default palette so that we can see the details on the letter tiles (should make finding the banking easier)
protection reads are probably here
further protection notes
other protection(?) observations
remove no longer needed hack
more nonsense checks

Folly

@dteam

Can we already compile it on the rpi ?

DTEAM

@folly
Yes, but from source

Folly

@dteam said in Development of module-script generator for lr-mess and mame standalone:

@folly
Yes, but from source

Checked the module-script for mame.
Indeed, it will check for the latest something like the next line and outputs 0.233 :

curl https://api.github.com/repos/mamedev/mame/releases/latest | grep -m 1 tag_name | cut -d\" -f4

NICE !

I will try it tomorrow, if I have time.

Folly

@dteam

Are you able to compile mame on the rpi4 ?
I managed on an x86 but my pi seems to fail.

DTEAM

@folly
Yesterday I had downloading issues with MAME. I deleted my /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/mame folder and restarted the process. Now I cross my fingers.

Folly

@dteam

I had 3 crashes already.

Now I am trying to complete the build with the retropie_packages.sh.
So it will skip the parts that are already done.
Hopefully it will work.

On the *x86 I had sound with supracan but it wasn't running very fast and had some hick-ups.
*(2,66Ghz x quad core + 8Gb ram with 32bit debian)
Compiling on this computer takes about 2 hours.

There is still an issue with extracting all data from mame.
It still gives : drc_cache: Error allocating virtual memory

On a 64bit install this issue wasn't there with mame0231.
I had that running on my old Imac27`` (2x3GHz core + 4Gb ram).
Trouble is, compiling took more than 14 hours, back then :-(

DTEAM

@folly
This time, It doesn't work for me from source. I'm gonna wait for the binary one. Is It a script problem?

Folly

@dteam

Don't know.

It should work as it also works on my quad core.
Btw I am compiling on a RPI4 with 8Gb.
I think that should work.

Basically we could increase the swap memory, but I don't know if that is a solution.

Mine is still busy.
So perhaps it will work.

Edit :
Still busy after 14 hours, I lost hope :-(

DTEAM

@folly @mitu
Recurrent problem when I download and install MAME 0.233 from source.I still have these error messages. Am I the only one. It's the first time I have problem to update MAME.

mitu

@dteam Not enough memory - MAME releases have varying requirements for compilation, see also https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/30898.

Folly

@mitu

Thanks.

Looking at your link we will need even more than 8gb swap.
Because I tried on RPI4 32 bit OS with 8Gb ram + 8GB swap which failed.

Will try again later.

dmmarti

I've been testing some more MESS based systems and I've updated the online Google sheet.

One of the new systems I've been testing are the older Macintosh Classic games.

Using the following system from the script generator:

maclc-flop

I found several *.dsk games for the old Macintosh computers and so far I've been having some success.

The MacOS boots up -- then autoloads the game *.dsk file. From there, just follow the onscreen prompts (make sure you have mouse enabled).

Been having some fun playing Centipede and Star Wars on this system. I have never used an older Macintosh computer and it's been fun finding some games for it.

I'm still testing the various different Mac systems to see which games require which system. For instance the game Thexder. The *.dsk I found doesn't work with maclc-flop so I need to test the other Macintosh variants to see which one supports the game.