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

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.

Used2BeRX

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

@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.

Oh. I didn't know that. Thanks for clearing it up. :)

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

@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.

Yeah. The same thing pops up constantly when I hear people paying over 100 bucks for a firestick with KODI on it. Anybody who would pay that obviously has no clue how to do it in the first place and since they really need to be updating it every few months they bought something severely overpriced that the won't be able to use soon after they buy it. Really burns me when people take advantage of other's ignorance like that.

RetroPie is still relatively in its infancy compared to XBox emulation. I do hope to see great things regarding this in the future like we've managed on the XBox. We've developed great things in regards to protecting settings for novice users while also not making it very hard for people who know what they're doing to make changes, or downright crippling the ability to make changes period.

One of the suggestions I came up with and was pushing hard for many years ago was a "lockdown mode" that would limit various aspects of the platform, up to locking out users from doing anything besides launching games as well as the ability to password protect these protections. I'd been gone from the scene for a very long time and when I returned I was thrilled to see that this had actually been accomplished. No more having to drop by with a laptop and fix things that were broken because people were poking into things that they shouldn't have been messing with. :)

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.

Yeah... these certainly are strange times we're living in.

I'm kind of surprised there are still enough people with that kind of spare change lying around to buy the VCS when there are so many cheaper and likely more versatile alternatives out there. Time will tell what comes of this. I can't see myself even ever having an opinion on it though since I doubt it would ever be in my budget if it were any good.

Used2BeRX

@future-child

Well.... there's some issues with kat5200 that kind of bum me out here.

The first is that without extra work external from the emulator, the controller profiles aren't of much use if you want to be able to use the emulator with just a controller and not have a keyboard and mouse always plugged in at the same time. Being able to save profiles is nice, but it doesn't recognize which game you load and match that to a specific profile, so it will always load the default profile, forcing you to have to press ESC on a keyboard and select the correct configuration for the game every time you load one that isn't going to use the default. The way that I've made use of the "general" RetroPie emulators.cfg file along with the /opt/retropie/configs/atari5200/emulators.cfg file and the various controller configs I have made for that folder, all you have to do is launch the game and it will use the correct profile and run without any need for a keyboard and a mouse.

The second one is rather strange. Specifically, I was trying to set up the controller for the 800-to-5200 conversion cart of "Up'n Down".

When starting the game it says Press E for Easy, Press M for Medium, Press H for Hard, Press K for Keyboard, Press J for Joystick. The default selections on load are Easy and Joystick.

Using the default Atari800 config that I have, where Left Bumper is #1, Right Bumper is #2, Left Trigger is #3 and Right Trigger is #4, I can select Easy with (LB), Medium with (RB), Hard with (LT), and Keyboard with (RT). Unfortunately, since #5 isn't mapped on my default if you press #4 and make the keyboard the controller then you have to exit the game and go back into it (so I need to make a new Atari800 config specifically for Up'n Down that doesn't have the #4 mapped).

Before I did that, I thought I'd use this game as the first one that I tried kat5200 on. Strangely enough, when mapping the Triggers and Bumpers to the number pad in the exact same way as they were for Atari800, they don't actually do anything, so you're stuck with the default Easy difficulty.

I can see that there are some benefits to kat5200 over atari800, but at the same time there are also quite a few drawbacks as well.

I was going to look into how to launch a different controller profile in kat5200 for any games that wouldn't use the default profile, but because I can't even seem to make the controller inputs work correctly I think I'm going to abandon that plan for now and just delete any problem games from the system I'm giving to my brother for now and hope that whenever I get back to Atari 5200 emulation that there is a better system in place.

I'm sure he won't miss them. All the games we had growing up work fine. :)

mediamogul

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

All the games we had growing up work fine.

The 5200 was a great system. It still amazes me that 'Berzerk' had the speech, albeit sampled. What games did you and your brother play mostly?

future.child

@used2berx
The first one can be solved by saving settings for each rom-crc explained here.
The second one, ~~i wouldn't know as that is not a cart i have (you did mean the Kenfuzed sega coversion cart ?), i'll see if i can find one to test with.~~

I am a bit confused as this games uses the virtual keys E, M, H, J, K to select input and difficulty but the 5200 did not have a keyboard.
In atari800 (5200 mode) actions for virtual keys E, M and H also respond to numpad 1, 2 and 3, while in kat5200 they do not.
Atari800 maps the numpad to a cx85 numpad device (this device is not emulated in kat5200), but this doesn't explain why the virtual joystick numberkey's in kat5200 do not respond in kat5200, while they do in Atari800.

I'll see if i can find some time to burn this rom to an eprom and see how a physical 5200 responds and also compare kat5200/atari800 input handling.

Used2BeRX

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

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

All the games we had growing up work fine.

The 5200 was a great system. It still amazes me that 'Berzerk' had the speech, albeit sampled. What games did you and your brother play mostly?

Well... they didn't rent out Atari games at video stores back in those days, and we were the only people we ever knew growing up that had the 5200, so we only got to play the games that my dad bought. Here's the list of games we had:

Centipede
Frogger
Galaxian
Miner 2049er
Moon Patrol
Popeye
Pac-Man
Space Invaders
Super Breakout

Pretty short list, I know. I never even knew all the games in the 5200 library until some time in my mid 20's when I was putting the roms on the XBox system I was building. Some really good ones in there that we didn't have.

It might be my own bias speaking, but to this day I don't believe I've ever seen a version of Space Invaders that I prefer on any other system that was ever made. :)

Interestingly, my mom picked up a grey cartridge 5200 game at a local gas station one day. We never got to play it though. When we got back home, that was the day we discovered that our final 5200 controller no longer worked, so all we could do was see the title screen with a marquee of robots moving around in a square pattern around the title name. Unfortunately, me and my bros don't remember what the name of the game was. Up until late last summer I was still holding out hope that the box with Atari 5200 games would pop up, but I helped my parents move down south and we went through everything and it wasn't there. :(

I was thinking it might be a prototype or something that nobody had ever seen before, but maybe it was a conversion somebody pirated. Although, I would only have been about 7 years old and that was the mid-80's so I find it hard to believe that anybody had the tech or the knowledge to be making 800 to 5200 conversion carts or anything like that back then.

I've been trying to find out what that game was for nearly 15 years, but nothing that anybody has ever posted screenshots of matches what we had in our hands. Maybe it's lost to time?

Used2BeRX

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

@used2berx
The first one can be solved by saving settings for each rom-crc explained here.

I did notice that post before I took a little nap. I will look into this further and see what the possibilities are. I'm glad there is a rom CRC solution. I was thinking about this after I posted and was going to suggest that very solution to you since it seems that you might be in contact with the emulator author.

BTW... where are all of these configuration settings saved, and how easy/hard would they be to edit from outside the emulator? The reason I ask is because I only have one USB mouse, and I have to use it on the carpet of my living room when making any changes, and I cannot catalog anything in my spreadsheet since I don't have a mouse on my computer.

On top of that, it takes about 2-3 minutes for the Pi to shut-down and reboot so I can remove the mouse to use my computer, so this is a painfully slow process to edit configurations in the emulator itself.

The second one, ~~i wouldn't know as that is not a cart i have (you did mean the Kenfuzed sega coversion cart ?), i'll see if i can find one to test with.~~

I see you crossed that out, but I do believe that is the one I'm working with. Not sure about "Kenfuzed"" but yes on the "Sega Conversion Cart" part.

I am a bit confused as this games uses the virtual keys E, M, H, J, K to select input and difficulty but the 5200 did not have a keyboard.
In atari800 (5200 mode) actions for virtual keys E, M and H also respond to numpad 1, 2 and 3, while in kat5200 they do not.
Atari800 maps the numpad to a cx85 numpad device (this device is not emulated in kat5200), but this doesn't explain why the virtual joystick numberkey's in kat5200 do not respond in kat5200, while they do in Atari800.

I'll see if i can find some time to burn this rom to an eprom and see how a physical 5200 responds and also compare kat5200/atari800 input handling.

Well it seems that although you don't currently have a solution, you have verified what the issue is. :) Love it when somebody can confirm why even though I seemingly had set up something correctly that it still doesn't work.

I've got almost the whole day free, and I'd like to spend that time trying to get all of the games that aren't 100% working in atari800 up and running on kat5200 now that you've cleared some stuff up for me. I'm still hoping there is some way I can manipulate the configuration database from my PC though and FTP the changes to the Pi so I can bypass any need to use my only mouse from the carpet floor. ;)

Assuming that it can be done this way, it probably wouldn't be too hard for me to take the info from my spreadsheet and just make the controller configurations for all of the other games I had set up for atari800 once I get into my groove.

future.child

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

BTW... where are all of these configuration settings saved, and how easy/hard would they be to edit from outside the emulator?

The configs are all saved in one sqlite database file ( usually:/home/pi/.kat5200/kat5200.db3).

Besides in the emulator itself you could edit this with a database editor (on windows you could use 'DB Browser for SQLite').
The database layout isn't the most intuitive though, (everything is cross referenced).
The 'Media' table maps rom-crc to various settings like 'InputProfile' which are found the 'Input' column in the 'Input'Table.
The 'Input' table contains your input profiles (which maps playerX input to 'Player' table (device-config).
And so on and so on.... i eventually ditched digging into the database in favor of just going trough the ui once per rom.

Used2BeRX

@future-child Yeah... I was one step ahead of you and was installing DB Browser for SQLite when I read this post.

You're right. There's no way I'm going to try making sense of that. I was hoping it was going to look more like an Excel spreadsheet, but whatever this database is is way above my paygrade.

I managed to dig up a really old mouse with a ball on the bottom. I'm unable to have wi-fi and a 2nd controller while setting up these games because now my 3 inputs are taken up by a controller, the keyboard and the mouse.

Maybe I can still salvage this. It won't be pretty.

EDIT: Crap.... well that's that. Can't do it with the tech I have available to me. I've got a mini-keyboard that doesn't have a numpad. When I try typing out 1 for Device Num for the 2nd joystick, it types a ' instead.

Impossible for me to configure the 2nd player controllers in the UI because of this, and 90% of the games I was going to try to configure in kat5200 played fine 1 player and only ran into problems with the 2nd controller.

Oh well. :(

EDIT 2: Wow. Double nope. Looks like kat5200 won't match any of my headered rom CRCs either, so I can't even save any profiles I make in the first place.

Sorry everybody. I officially wash my hands of the Atari 8 bit emulation on RetroPie.

future.child

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

EDIT 2: Wow. Double nope. Looks like kat5200 won't match any of my headered rom CRCs either, so I can't even save any profiles I make in the first place.

Did you try adding them (File -> Launcher -> Misc. -> Scan for Files ) ?

0_1529596124630_ded7bdc2-39f4-4ecf-ac74-182e2bcd3783-image.png

Used2BeRX

@future-child Tried that and it didn't work. It doesn't find a single image.

I can go to Misc and then Add Media Image and that will allow me to pick the specific image one at a time, ~~but when I try to change the input configuration for the one I made for Pole Position it doesn't even show up on the list. All I get are the default choices.~~ (Pole Position's config actually was there, but it wouldn't show up in the drop down box for some reason. I had to press the down arrow one more time and then it was selected).

A new problem seems to have come up though. I had mapped the Select and Start button combo to exit the game. That works fine, but when I have Start mapped for that, the actual Start button will not work in the game, so you can never start a game in Pole Position.

I changed the combo to Select and Home to leave a game, and then I was able to start a game in Pole Position.

Unfortunately, the #1 and #7 buttons that I mapped to the L-Bumper and R-Bumper to shift from high to low gear are completely ignored as well, so I can only race in low gear. The strange thing is that I can get it to change from LO to HI and back some of the time. It seems to randomly just respond to me pressing the L-Stick up or down while racing, but not all of the time. The bumpers are completely unresponsive. I doubled checked these settings in Atari800 and I can easily change from LO to HI with the L-Bumper and R-Bumper.

Used2BeRX

@mediamogul @future-child

Do either of you guys know if you can alter the palette in Atari800?

I've got to admit that the palette that kat5200 uses is much more vibrant than Atari800 and to me looks way better.

mediamogul

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

Do either of you guys know if you can alter the palette in Atari800?

Here's a post detailing palette settings that I use myself. I'd be curious to hear how it compares to kat5200.

Used2BeRX

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

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

Do either of you guys know if you can alter the palette in Atari800?

Here's a post detailing palette settings that I use myself. I'd be curious to hear how it compares to kat5200.

This is actually a LOT better than it was by default. It's still not as rich as the kat5200 emulator displays it though. I'm playing Pole Position on kat right now and the yellow of the car is almost verging on the slightly orange side. The sky really looks a great blue and the grass is really green.

These settings still seem a bit flushed out for the colors, but it's already such an improvement over the default colors. I didn't realize how dead everything looked until I saw the differences in the 2 emulators with Pole Position.

Now that I know the four lines that seem to control this, I'm going to play around with it a bit and see if I can come up with a closer match. Thanks man. :)

Used2BeRX

@mediamogul Here's what I've come up with. It looks great on Pole Position. I'll have to try it on other games though and see how it looks.

I have no clue how accurate it is since I haven't actually seen the Atari 5200 in action in decades, but I think the color looks great.

You'll have to get the OliverP.act palette first, then put these options in your config.

You can get it here: https://github.com/ilmenit/RastaConverter/blob/master/Palettes/OlivierP.act

Then put the palette in the same folder as the emulator: /opt/retropie/emulators/atari800/bin/

COLOURS_NTSC_SATURATION=1.1
COLOURS_NTSC_CONTRAST=0.5
COLOURS_NTSC_BRIGHTNESS=-0.2
COLOURS_NTSC_GAMMA=0.2
COLOURS_NTSC_HUE=0.1
[UNRELATED LINE HERE]
COLOURS_NTSC_EXTERNAL_PALETTE=/opt/retropie/emulators/atari800/bin/OliverP.act
COLOURS_NTSC_EXTERNAL_PALETTE_LOADED=1
COLOURS_NTSC_ADJUST_EXTERNAL_PALETTE=1

Let me know what you think if you try it out. It's about 1,000% better than the default atari800 colors were IMO.

Used2BeRX

It would be nice if the libretro-atari800 core was usable now. I've been trying to configure the controls on it for about 1 1/2 now and haven't gotten anywhere. I was hoping that I could configure both a 1st and 2nd player joystick in there since the regular atari800 core that @future.child updated does not allow the 2nd player the use of both triggers, so games like Moon Patrol will not work for the 2nd player.

I think I'm going to have to abandon fixing that issue since there doesn't seem to be a legitimate fix in any of the 3 options currently available to us on RetroPie.

Pole Position doesn't seem to run any better in kat5200 than it did with tweaking atari800 a bit. I haven't bothered trying Kaboom! in kat5200 yet.

mediamogul

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

Let me know what you think if you try it out. It's about 1,000% better than the default atari800 colors were IMO.

Nice. I'll give it a look later this evening.

the regular atari800 core that @future.child updated does not allow the 2nd player the use of both triggers, so games like Moon Patrol will not work for the 2nd player.

I've got the second action button for player two working on my setup, but the key is shared between it and the first player for some reason. Either player could sabotage the other by pressing it during game play.

Used2BeRX

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

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

Let me know what you think if you try it out. It's about 1,000% better than the default atari800 colors were IMO.

Nice. I'll give it a look later this evening.

Hope you like it.

the regular atari800 core that @future.child updated does not allow the 2nd player the use of both triggers, so games like Moon Patrol will not work for the 2nd player.

I've got the second action button for player two working on my setup, but the key is shared between it and the first player for some reason. Either player could sabotage the other by pressing it during game play.

Which emulator are you using for that? I'm assuming the atari800 that wasn't updated?

Is there a way I can download that somewhere and put it on my system without using the RetroPie menus to do it? I've got future.child's upgrade already named atari800 so it would overwrite it if I did the standard download. I just need to download it so I can make it an alternate instance of the emulator to try launching on the problem games.

I don't recall for sure, but I think I really only need future.child's upgrades for the robotron fix. It's been so long, so there might be something else I'm forgetting.

Could you provide me with an example of a configuration file you have with a working 2nd player controller?