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

[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 ) ?

[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?

[mediamogul]

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

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

My controls in atari800.cfg are just the default settings. I have an external map running in parallel that takes advantage of the keyboard controls in Atari800 that aren't able to be mapped to a controller from the emulator itself. This approach is very flexible, but it's still far from perfect, as Atari800 just wasn't designed with a thoughtful control scheme to work with in the first place. It's really odd too considering that the software can emulate all the available control devices necessary to play every game out there, it just can't map those devices to a modern controller effectively.

[mediamogul]

@used2berx

I was reading a little bit about the OlivierP.act palette file and apparently the 'P' stands for PAL. There's an NTSC OlivierN.act alternative available here.

[Used2BeRX]

@mediamogul I'll try it out and see if there is any real difference.

I wasn't aware that the colors were any different between NTSC and PAL. I thought that just had to do with framerate and speed due to the difference in the amperage to the systems?

[mediamogul]

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

I wasn't aware that the colors were any different between NTSC and PAL.

There is indeed a difference, although here it has more to do with cosmetically adhering to the regional color encoding standards than anything else. It won't hurt anything to use the PAL palette if you are so inclined. It'll just have the subtle differences that exist between the two standards.

[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:

I wasn't aware that the colors were any different between NTSC and PAL.

There is indeed a difference, although here it has more to do with adhering to the regional color encoding standards than anything else. It won't hurt anything to use the PAL palette if you are so inclined. It'll just have the subtle differences that exist between the two standards.

I see.

Did you give it a shot yet, either way?

[mediamogul]

@used2berx

I did. The settings you have above seemed to be a bit over-saturated, so I employed a hybrid setup between my original settings and the NTSC palette. A good game to test with is 'Ms. Pac-Man', as it has a very distinctive shade of pink used in the title screen that can be referenced in many other games and locations.

[Used2BeRX]

@mediamogul Care to share your setup?