Daphne - Removing Fullscreen Parameters to Avoid Errors

LN_RC

Yesterday, I was having difficulty getting Cliff Hanger to work on Retropie's Daphne emulator, even though the game ran just fine on my PC's Daphne emulator. In Retropie, the game would automatically launch into service mode, and I could not escape to regular game mode.

After doing some research, I discovered that some users had trouble running Cliff Hanger due to their video resolution settings. The Cliff Hanger files I own use a 640x480 resolution. Then I checked the shell script for launching Daphne.sh and noticed that the Retropie code forces the games to run in fullscreen:

dir="$1"
name="${dir##*/}"
name="${name%.*}"

if [[ -f "$dir/$name.commands" ]]; then
    params=$(<"$dir/$name.commands")
fi

"/opt/retropie/emulators/daphne/daphne.bin" "$name" vldp -nohwaccel -framefile "$dir/$name.txt" -homedir "/opt/retropie/emulators/daphne" -fullscreen $params

When I removed -fullscreen $params, Cliff Hanger worked instantly, and none of my other games were affected (Dragon's Lair and Super Don-Quixote ran just fine).

I'm not sure if there's a proper place to share this information, but I wanted to put it out there in case other users have had these same difficulties. Since removing the fullscreen param from the shellscript didn't harm the other games, perhaps it's worth removing from the script entirely? I'm pretty new to Linux though so I'm open to learn more!

johnodon

I'm not sure if it will help with your situation but maybe you want to try the new Hypsues package that is being developed. You will need to manually add the package to experimental. See this post for instructions and the rest of the thread (or the github source) for more information: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/post/265501

John

DirtBagXon

@ln_rc said in Daphne - Removing Fullscreen Parameters to Avoid Errors:

When I removed -fullscreen $params, Cliff Hanger worked instantly, and none of my other games were affected (Dragon's Lair and Super Don-Quixote ran just fine).

Hi @LN_RC

As you removed the$params argument, it seems more likely that you have a /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/daphne/cliff.daphne/cliff.commands file that has a -bank argument to enable the Service Mode on switch 12:

http://www.dragons-lair-project.com/tech/dips/ch.asp

This would have been included by the $params variable.

The -fullscreen argument is used by SDL to determine the best method to display the window contents, at the correct resolution, to screen. Especially in SDL2. Removing this argument will cause far more issues than it would alleviate, especially on non-arm systems.

If removing -fullscreen works for you, no problem. But not really something that should be considered as standard.

Note: -fullscreen and $params are not related in any way except they are next to each other in the argument list.

LN_RC

@DirtBagXon @johnodon Thank you for the information! I added back the full screen, it definity the $params and not the -fullscreen. This is the commands file that I used based on a tutorial on this webpage:

-nocrc -noissues -noserversend -latency 950 -x 640 -y 480 -bank 1 00110111 -bank 0 10011000

Is there a better version of a general .commands file to use?

I'll take a look at the hypseus emulator as well. The Daphne emulator has been working pretty well for me, but it doesn't hurt to see all the options.

DirtBagXon

@ln_rc said in Daphne - Removing Fullscreen Parameters to Avoid Errors:

@DirtBagXon @johnodon Thank you for the information! I added back the full screen, it definity the $params and not the -fullscreen. This is the commands file that I used based on a tutorial on this webpage:
-nocrc -noissues -noserversend -latency 950 -x 640 -y 480 -bank 1 00110111 -bank 0 10011000
Is there a better version of a general .commands file to use?

I'll take a look at the hypseus emulator as well. The Daphne emulator has been working pretty well for me, but it doesn't hurt to see all the options.

There isn't really a one size fits all .commands file, as these files are game specific. i.e. each game has a different version in its own folder:

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Daphne/#command-parametres

Alter arguments and get it to do what you want it to do. If you are including -bank switches then you need to start reading, and understanding, the arcade dip switch setting configurations. These are at the more complex end of config.

Dip switches are documented on the excellent DLP site: http://www.dragons-lair-project.com/tech/
General options for Daphne are documented here: http://www.daphne-emu.com/mediawiki/index.php/CmdLine
Hypseus has a few more: https://github.com/DirtBagXon/hypseus-singe#extended-arguments-and-keys

Feeling overwhelmed :) Daphne is notoriously tricky to configure, so just spend some time with it.

Remember, you don't have to include any options. Defaults (empty .commands file) work fine most of the time.

If you did remove $params as the last argument from the daphne.sh script, you should add it back and fix the commands files. This option allows you to customise all games individually.

Note: These same arguments in $params (i.e. <game>.commands files) are also used by the hypseus.sh script, so any issues you address in Daphne will be ported to Hypseus Singe automatically.

There are some options that are now deprecated in Hypseus, -nohwaccel being one. These don't work well in the port to SDL2, especially on the Pi.