How to start certain emulators without a ROM?

chiwaw

I got myself a RPI 400, and I'm planning on using it for retro computers only. So I install all the ones I was interested in.

But only 3 showed up: Amiga, ZX Spectrum and DOSBox.

Eventually I realized that most emulators requires to be started by selecting a ROM, and without a ROM, they don't even show up in the top level RetroPie menu (Hatari for the Atari ST is one such that's acting that way).

The 3 that works I listed above they all show up with an option in the ROM list, something like: "Start +EmulatorName".

Is there a way to setup all the other emulators to work the same? Or is it a hard-coded feature that only certain emulators support, and I'm out of luck?

LandyVlad

I'm unsure why you would need or want to start an emulator if you have no ROMs installed for it?

Of the 'default' emulators included in retropie they will only show on the menu if you have suitable roms in the associated rom folder.

chiwaw

@landyvlad All of the computer emulators can be used without ROMs and Most of the time that's what I want. Getting into the desktop of Atari ST or Amiga. Getting into the simple BASIC interpreter on C64 and TRS-80, etc.

So far only the Amiga, ZX Spectrum and DOSBox allows me to do it.

mitu

@chiwaw said in How to start certain emulators without a ROM?:

Is there a way to setup all the other emulators to work the same? Or is it a hard-coded feature that only certain emulators support, and I'm out of luck?

You can add an empty ROM file for the computer emulators you want to start, named Start <X>, with the proper extension. Not all emulators might support this, but you can try each system you'd like. Note that for some systems you might need to add some BIOS Roms in order to properly emulate a certain system (i.e. certain TRS-80 model need a certain BIOS rom present, etc.)

chiwaw

@mitu Ah! that was a simple but clever idea, worth trying. Sadly that didn't work. The emulators I tried this trick simply returned to the ROM menu.

chiwaw

I finally figured it out! I'm going to leave some notes here, in case someone in the future search for this solution.

The reason why the Amiga emulator worked is because it install a .sh script in the ROM folder (the "+Start Emulator" option in the rom list) that basically just call the emulator command line to start.

I copied the .sh script to my C64 rom folder, renamed it and edited the path to execute to the VICE (C64) emulator binary, which on my setup is located at:

/opt/retropie/emualtors/vice/bin/x64

At first the script didn't show up so I went to add it in the game list at:

/opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/gamelist/retropie/c64

It requires a bit of investigation to figure out which binary to run for each emulators, and having to setup their .sh scripts, but I think I'll be able to fix all my emulators this way!

Thanks everyone who chipped in to help out :)

soulmanpt

@chiwaw Thank you for posting this. I know this thread is old but I wanted to say thank you, and also to say this is what I am trying to set up, essentially a retropie build that lets me use old 8-bit computers with the basic interpreters.

I have a ton of 1980s programming books from when my local public library got rid of them, and wanted to type in programs and save them. It's not well documented at retropie, recalbox, or other places as to how to launch these emulators into the computer's default BASIC interpreter. If you want to write BASIC programs, this is a must. I'm hoping this comment adds some phrases and words that would increase search result hits to this post. I've been trying to figure this out and every search I've tried has come up with squat until today when I put "BASIC interpreter" in quotes into google.