Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons

Used2BeRX

Just an FYI bud...

2 Players works fine. I just started up Ballblazer with both controllers in there and there weren't any problems. I was thinking that was the case, but it's been so long since I did all of this that I couldn't remember how everything worked.

I'm going through alphabetically and setting up every game with the configs that I had made and testing out all the functions (for 2 players if the game was more than 1 player too).

Not sure if I'll get to Space Dungeon or Robotron to verify that the 1 controller fix you put in works, but I'll let you know as soon as I do.

Thanks again. :)

Used2BeRX

I only got a chance to try Robotron out with 2 joysticks, but it seems to work fine. As per the spreadsheet, you have to share the 1st player controller. The 2nd player joystick will only fire with the left stick and you can't move it. Still haven't tried out Space Shadow yet.

I might be asking a few questions about kat5200 while I'm setting this up. I noticed that we never got around to fixing those two bugs in the atari800 setup. Bug 1: using the D-Pad in some games interferes with firing, and Bug 2: only one button works for the 2nd controller in 2 player games, so any 2 player game with 2 different functions for buttons will not work for the 2nd player.

I won't have time to configure everything to kat5200 before I get this to my brother, but maybe I can figure out how to get all the games with bugs working on it. There's about a dozen of these.

Oh, and does Kaboom work in kat5200? We never got that one to control right in atari800.

EDIT: Tested all the US Lincensed, as well as all protoypes and homebrew I had on the spreadsheet from before, and everything works (good and bad) exactly as I had it in there now. I have yet to get around to all of the 800 to 5200 conversions I had done, as well as possibly add new game configurations for games I have in my collection but never got around to yet.

I will look into kat5200 for launching any games that have bugs/issues with Atari800. I've decided not to use kat5200 for any games that are working as designed with Atari800 since it would just be redundant at this point.

Thanks again for fixing this emu for us. :)

Used2BeRX

@hansolo77 said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

Wasn't 4.4 designed around the Stretch OS? Maybe hthat's where the compatibility lies. Regardless, I'm eager to set those systems up because it's what I grew up with. But I'll still delay going through all the troubles. I'm on vacation right now, and would really hate to have to go through all of the heartache and waste it.

Good luck though. I'll keep watching this thread to see if you make any positive progress!

Hey man,

I was wondering if after I get these configs up and running again if you'd like to test things out on your end?

It would be a little bit of work on your end, but really not all that much (assuming everything will work as good as I think it should). It turns out that at least since RetroPie 4.3, the emulators.cfg did a MUCH better job handling individual game configurations. Before, there was a super long random hash value that accounted for your exact rom and the location of it on your file structure. Now it just looks for the game system / game name match, so the fact that you likely wouldn't have the same roms I have will not be an issue, and you don't have to worry about having the exact same file structure as me to get these things to work.

Things you would need:

Atari 5200 roms with headers. These may or may not be available anywhere online. I made them all myself with a 5200/800 emulator I believe was called Alterria. I made a guide on these forums on how to do this. If you can't find that guide, I can dig it up for you.
You'd need to follow the latest instructions to install @future-child's latest atari800 beta that works with 4.4
You would need to make sure your rom names are the exact match to those I have in my setup.

I do believe that is all you'd need to start.

We could work together to make sure you have all the configs in the proper place after that, and everything should work for you at that point.

I'll still be working at some point to try to get everything configured for kat5200... at least any of the games that don't seem to work right with future.child's updates, such as Pole Position and Kaboom!, as well as about a dozen games that work great for 1 player but have buggy controls for the 2nd player.

Let me know if you're interested and we can start doing this whenever you're ready and I have the time to reply. I'd love to do this because I could write up a short and simple guide to help other people do this after verifying that everything works on your end as well. :)

Used2BeRX

This offer extends to anybody who does the above steps. For a limited time only. :)

hansolo77

I probably can't be much help in this case then, as I don't match any of your criteria. #1 would be the killer, as I only have whatever is available through No-Intro, which is probably headerless. #2 would probably also be a problem because I'm not running the new Pi hardware, and not that version of RetroPie. #3, again, would depend on if you're using a No-Intro romset. If you've renamed anything, they won't match. Unless you provided a dat that we could use against our romset to have them name up exactly (or maybe you could rename YOURS to match theirs?).

I would be happy to help though otherwise!

Used2BeRX

@hansolo77

Well...

You're going to need headerless roms at some point, one way or another. The headerless ones are garbage and would require you to re-configure every game, every time you launched them. Sadly, as far as I know, this is the state of Atari 5200 emulation. The system never got much love.

I had to put headers on every rom using an emulator on my PC. It took a few hours. Like I said, you might be able to find these somewhere, but short of that, you're going to have to pay the piper one day if you ever want Atari 5200 emulation. I'd give them to you myself, but that's against the rules here.

I'm using a Pi Zero. No issues on the hardware you're using I'm sure. You're going to want to upgrade to 4.4, or at least 4.3 if you want Atari 5200 emulation on it (unless @future-child says the Kat5200 is easy to setup and doesn't require them). The reason being that this is the system I will be configuring games on going forward, and this will be useless to you or anybody using 4.2 or before. The emulators.cfg I had for 4.1/4.2 would have been useless to you as well unless you had the exact roms I had, as well as had them in the exact folders.

Again, you can do this yourself without upgrading to 4.3 or 4.4, but unless you want to re-setup every single game every time you launch them, you would need my configurations. And even then, you wouldn't have the controller configurations, so you probably still wouldn't be able to play the games properly without a lot more work on your end.

You'd have to rename your own roms. I will not be renaming back to a no-intro format as their filenames are garbage. My names are the exact titles without any ugly characters in them, so they display properly on the XBox, the Pi, and PC emulators, with or without any XML renaming. They also match all extra artwork/video/other media I have for them. A datfile wouldn't help you anyhow though, since any of the roms you have wouldn't match if they don't have the proper headers.

It's really not that big a deal here since there is a very small library of 5200 games. If you can't handle this part of the equation, which is by far the easiest, then I'm sorry to say that you might not ever be able to play those Atari 5200 games you love.

I'm busy doing many other things, but I happen to be focusing on Atari 5200 at the moment. Once I'm done though, I'll be moving on to other things and chances are I won't be coming back to it for a very long time. I tend to forget about how to setup all of this stuff when I'm away from it a while. Even with my very detailed spreadsheet, it took me a while to dive back into it. I'm only offering this right now because it wouldn't be extra work for me if somebody were interested at this point in time.

I'd be saving you seriously about 100 hours of work if you do those things.

Up to you man.

hansolo77

It's no biggie. I plan on tackling it some day. For the moment, I'm not feeling rushed to do so. I know the 5200 library is pretty small. It's actually the 800 computer I'm more interested in. I wan't aware, from an emulation standpoint how much work would actually involved. From my point of view, it was a matter of plugging in a cartridge, or a 5.25 floppy. I didn't really know how it all worked, being just a kid. I just figured if you could get the 800 emulated, a cartridge game should just work on the fly automatically.

I don't mind going through the process of rebuilding my romset with headers. It's all of love of passion. Only people who are willing to take extra steps deserve to have it working. My only concern with any of this was realization that a working process hasn't been fully matured yet, and I've been leery of devoting time to setting it up.

The new Atari VCS might solve all this anyway. I've already made my $360 "Day One All In" contribution to the project. I doubt they'll have EVERY game, especially 800 games that required a keyboard (Infocoms, etc).

mediamogul

@hansolo77 said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

The new Atari VCS might solve all this anyway. I've already made my $360 "Day One All In" contribution to the project.

I've been interested in hearing more about the new VCS. As a contributer, do you know anything about the hardware specs or the games that will be included?

hansolo77

I don't know anything more than what they have on their webpage. Indiegogo has some updated content that lists the specs:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/atari-vcs-game-stream-connect-like-never-before-computers-pc#/

mediamogul

@hansolo77

Looks like it could be pretty versatile. It's arguably a bit pricey for the specs on paper, but I imagine the true value will depend on how nice the user experience is. Also, a unique, eye-catching design like that is rarely brought to market inexpensively. All in all, it kind of reminds me of something Apple would put together. I didn't see much in the way of games outside of 'Tempest 4000', but as it's running Ubuntu, I guess you could install just about any emulator or Linux-based game that the specs allow. Very interesting.

hansolo77

Yeah I'll probably put RetroPie on it lol.

mediamogul

@hansolo77

Done in one! I like it.

youxia

So far the VCS looks like trainwreck. Already overpriced but underpowered, with no system-selling software, vague promises and nothing real shown (instead lying about Tempest running on VCS). Above all, Atari SA is a company with an abysmal track record and no connection to the old Atari whatsoever.

Anybody who believes in it probably should avoid this thread: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/266480-new-atari-console-that-ataribox/page-391

mediamogul

@youxia

That seems to be the growing consensus and I'm inclined to agree, but history has shown time and time again that if a product delivers a user experience that people are happy with, it can be successful despite almost any shortcomings. Apple computers have been consistent proof of that since the original iMac. I figure at worst it'll have a similar life to the OUYA, which was much more palatable once the price point dropped.

youxia

@mediamogul It certainly is an interesting quirk of human nature...problem here however is that these guys are nowhere near Apple level . It's just a few post-bankrupt people who live off licensing the few remaining assets, with no expertise in launching a hardware product whatsoever and whose recent history makes for a grim reading.

To be fair I don't think it's a total scam like the Coleco thing, perhaps they will actually release it one day. But I also don't think that OUYA fate is something that people who bought in - for 3 times the price - want to hear about ;)
Though, probably fair chunk of them are just "collectors" speculating on future value.

Overall, for me it's all pretty sad, an example of yet another videogame nostalgia cash-in. If they wanted to do it right they could've gone the ZX Spectrum Next route, but that would require doing some actual work. Something Atari SA is not fond of.

mediamogul

@youxia said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

But I also don't think that OUYA fate is something that people who bought in - for 3 times the price - want to hear about ;)

For the sake of early adopters, let's hope the VCS fares better. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing this go the way of the OUYA. After the smoke cleared and the price was reduced, it turned out to be a pretty capable emulation machine that people had a lot of fun with. For the right price, I'd love to have the VCS sitting in my living room to mess around with. Heck, for an even better price, I'd buy it just for the shell. If the quality of the pre-renders are any indication, it'll at least be a head turner.

Used2BeRX

I grew up with Atari. I'd love to see them become a viable competitor in the market again. I just don't see it happening, at least with this device.

For me, the price point is the biggest issue. I haven't watched any love/hate videos about it at all because the price puts an end to all interest I have in it. Right now, I'm rocking a PS3 and an XBox 360, both of them with all of their games are hand-me-downs from my brothers. I never even bought anything from the previous generation, let alone the current one.

I'm an old school gamer, and for the most part, that's virtually free these days. Everything I've done so far in the last 14 months on the RetroPie was done on a caseless Pi Zero that my brother picked up for $5 bucks. Kudos to anyone making enough money to pay $300 for virtually the same experience that a Pi 3 can give you if the presentation is slick. This just isn't going to be the thing that makes Atari a household name again.

Used2BeRX

@ anybody who has an idea. :)

I just went back to trying to set up the Atari800 again yesterday, and I've run into a very strange bug that wasn't there the first few days I was tackling it.

Whenever I load up any game now, the 2nd player controller will automatically exit the game and go back to the romlist just by pressing the Dpad or the left joystick in any direction.

I've reloaded emulation station. I've rebooted the device. I've unplugged it and plugged it back in. I've also taken out the controllers and put them back in as well. Nothing seems to fix this.

Any ideas what configuration files I might take a look at to figure out what's going on here?

It can't be any of my configs in /opt/retropie/configs/atari5200/, unless somehow this magically changed all of them overnight. While most of the games use either my atari5200.cfg or my alternate.cfg, even the one-off games that use a config made specifically for it all exhibit this behavior now.

All I can say is that this definitely wasn't happening before. I've been playing every 2 player game with both controllers up to this point to verify both players work. Now just by touching a simple direction it kicks back to the romlist.

Oh... and I just loaded up a few NES games and this problem doesn't happen there.

EDIT: This is getting really weird now.

I just loaded up Super Breakout. The game launched, I was changing to two players and going through the different boards to start on and then it froze. All of the sudden it went back to the launch screen that says Launching Super Breakout (SuperBreakout)... Press a button to configure Errors are logged to /dev/shm/runcommand.log Then you can't do anything but unplug the device.

Interestingly, when I pulled the plug and put it back in, I FTPd to that directory and it's empty, so there is no current runcommand.log after that failure.

EDIT 2: I then ran 1942 on the NES, shut it down, and refreshed /dev/shm/ and now I have runcommand.log, runcommand.info and retroarch.cfg inside of it.

EDIT 3: Annnnnnnnnnnd.... now it's fixed??? Now I can load games on Atari800 again without any problems with the 2nd joystick booting you back to the romlist. This is after 2 days of not being able to do so.

I hate it when things start working for no reason when you never knew why they were broke in the first place. Doesn't really give me the warm and fuzzies. Hope it doesn't just break again when I give it to my bro.

mitu

@used2berx said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

Interestingly, when I pulled the plug and put it back in, I FTPd to that directory and it's empty, so there is no current runcommand.log after that failure.
[...]

The /dev/shm folder exists only in RAM, once you reboot the device the contents are lost.

mediamogul

@used2berx said in Atari 5200: New version of Atari800 (Beta): two triggers (Moon Patrol!!!), hat start and exit buttons:

Hope it doesn't just break again when I give it to my bro.

One thing I've had to make peace with from making a wide range of devices for family and friends is that anything even reasonably complex is bound to eventually stop working in an unpredictable environment. You can never fully consider how other people or their relations will use a device and the more complicated it is, the more there is to go wrong. You're doing right by your brother in trying to give him a hassle-free experience, but I wouldn't worry too deeply about these types of issues, as they're almost inevitable. RetroPie isn't really a "set and forget" system, which is why we get so many support requests from people who bought a premade setup on E-Bay and have no idea how to maintain it. Fortunately, for your brother, he has you to walk him through any problems that might arise.

I grew up with Atari. I'd love to see them become a viable competitor in the market again.
This just isn't going to be the thing that makes Atari a household name again.

This actually isn't the Atari that any of us grew up with, which is where many valid concerns over this system come from. Atari SA is really just holding company who bought the rights to the brand. Since that time they've licensed out the Atari name for quite a few questionable endeavors. The strangest probably being a series of breakfast plates/mobile games to promote Denny's. This being the case, there's unfortunately a lot of evidence to believe that the VCS isn't really an attempt to make the Atari brand a household name again, but rather to simply take advantage of the current popularity of retro video game nostalgia.