ARpiCADE_5 beta2 - for RPi4 or RPi5

[dee2eR]

Awesome, glad to see you are up and running. Funny it was the extension cable, I wouldn't have guessed - I have only used them with Pi3s too. Thanks for letting us all know in case it is causeing someone else the same headaches.

Pretty sure I know the bugs you've mentioned too. I think the audio bug is related to the sync speed, either the games arn't running at close enough to the original frequency or MAME isn't running them at the right speed (due to settings, not a problem with MAME), either way it will be fixed in time as I'm pretty sure I know where to start.

The video issue I'm a little more confused by as it doesn't always happen. It could be the video mode(s) in use at the time (possibly porch/pulse related) or something else... I'm still looking into it. I have wondered today if it isn't the left and right overscan settings messing with the overall video mode so I will look into that too (the settings I have made the default match my test bench PVM width as it doesn't have width pot). Most of my testing has been done on a hori monitor which often masks the issue somewhat as it is then the top of the screen...

Thanks for the feedback. Hopefully I can find the time to do some more bits to this build soon, I've been sitting on a rebuilt version of 172 that adds a couple of SHMUP games I won't be directly mentioning... on it's own it didn't seem worth making an update patch for. Also tried to recompile 251 to remove the warnings and box but hit compiler issues (not with my changes), didn't figure it out and moved on (good thing the apt-get version is pretty good and the box isn't too annoying).

[mappy24]

Hey, thanks for the beta, I've bought a Pi5 in the hope of running the Mr Driller series of games on it. The original Mr Driller seems to work great but I believe that Mr Driller 2 & Mr Driller G need MAME at least .254 to work, I see that the notes on page 1 of this thread say "may change MAME 251 for a newer release", please can you update to at least .254 if possible? Or, is there a way to update the version ourselves?!

[dee2eR]

@mappy24 both those games should be supported by 251, I just checked on the command line - didn't actually run the games so there maybe some other issue.

EDIT: tried them both in 251, no good as the emulation isn't complete.

You could try compiling newer MAME if you want to add it. 251 was installed from the apt package manager and is the current version offered still (I think). I hit issues when I tried to recompile 251 a while back, it may be harder than just typing make...

At the moment I'm knee deep in fixing the vsync and discovering new bugs introduced by the fix... turns out X11 was causing the issue - you can't res switch directly on the framebuffer on Pi5 so we're all moving to Wayland. Unfortunately Wayland can't scale the image on the x axis without scaling on the y too, so I'll have to figure that out too for the few games (and the screen saver) that need it. I've already rewrote the res switching and have good results otherwise on Wayland so far, still need to redo hotkeys (the way it was in beta2 relied on X11) but once they're done I'll upload another update. Will prob take a look at newer MAME once that's done.

[mappy24]

Yoooooooo


Changed to Debian Testing repo and installed mame, it's updated to a newer version.

No idea about any other implications going forward, but the Mr Driller games are working at least

[FrizzleFried]

Any testing done with games that don't work well with Pi4 or Pi3? Can we finally play Blitz (etc) without having to resort to Dreamcast versions?

Unfortunately I still can't exit Dreamcast/Naomi games properly with my Pi4 4-player cab...

[dee2eR]

No Blitz unfortunately but there are other games that play better on Pi5 than we have been able to run them before. Games that were nearly there on Pi4 like lots of PS1 based arcade games, late model Cave, Naomi 2 etc. are now good. Lots of games can now run in newer MAME for the improvements that brings.

Doubly unfortunately for your setup I haven't got the four player adaptor working on Pi5 yet though... still lots of work to be done...

I thought I'd fixed up the RA exit hack for 4 players... I'll have to double check that, it's a pretty simplle fix I think. Sorry if I forgot to post it up (assuming I did it).

[FrizzleFried]

If I went to Pi5 it would be to replace one of my Pi3's... the Pi4 (4 player) cab works fine for the games it plays.

[mappy24]

Any news on the next release?

[dee2eR]

@mappy24 it's still in progress. Sorry its been a while between updates. So far:

Fixed the top of screen video sync issue, although the many changes involved (moved from X11 to Wayland) have introduced a couple of new things to deal with. The sync issue is at least fixed, and as a bonus the res switching is now also a bit improved.

Updated MAME172 to support a couple of extra games.

Currently I'm attempting to get the inputs back to being treated as joystick rather than keyboard as the makeshift key based hotkeys are one of the new issues... Aiming to use the same xboxdrv based hotkey system as on older ARpiCADE versions but need the inputs to be joystick... This is the current hold up but I made great progress on it this arvo after changing tact from trying to do it with mk_arcade_joystick_rpi (the old way - sank way too much time into DKMS issues with mixed 64/32bit...).

Would be nice if I can get the 4 player board supported too. But I will likely release once the joystick driver is done, assuming it works with xboxdrv too...

Was hoping to make it (at least optionally) an update to this threads beta release but the change to the input handling will break any customised configs anyway so it may not be worth the extra stuffing about.

[cool_factor]

Patiently waiting for a non beta release, I've got 2 Pi5s waiting since January of this year. Looking forward to setting them up on the new system.