ARpiCADE 4.3 (for RPi4)

Latest on ARpiCADE new releases, release notes, and history of previous versions.

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petkorazzi
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Re: ARpiCADE 4.3 (for RPi4)

Post by petkorazzi » Fri Oct 01, 2021 9:58 pm

Oof...real life happened there in a very hard way. I'm sorry I've been OOTL/not contributing for the last 4 months or so.

Anyway, I'm back home and I've been wanting to get down to some major games testing with 4.3. I figure one of the better ways to do this would be to live-stream my cabinet on Twitch while I go through the roms list one-by-one while taking notes in a Google Doc on how each one does. It'd be more fun for me to have a bit of interaction.

However, there's a problem with this: trying to do video capture in-line using my HDMI capture card doesn't work so well. Behold these fine examples of OBS captures from SSF2T:

https://imgur.com/hW0AMnJ
https://imgur.com/wndN50a

Yeah, it sort of vertically quad-ifies? I think this is because the capture floor of the HMDI capture card is 640x360 and it just freaks out, but I'm honestly not sure. I don't seem to be able to find much data on HDMI capture devices capturing as such low resolutions since that's not normally a thing? I know an ideal solution here would be a dedicated JAMMA-to-VGA splitter and then using a separate VGA capture device, but that's a significant equipment investment and we've already got an unused video port on the Pi 4.

So as I think I'd mentioned in 4.x discussions before, I'm interested in getting the second (normally unused) HDMI port going as a mirror of the main HDMI that outputs to the DAC, for a couple of reasons:

1. I could theoretically change the resolution of this output independent of the cab monitor resolution as a dedicated capture output
2. This could easily enable dual-cab setups for 2-player games (like the linked fighting game cabs you used to see everywhere)
3. You could have a "spectator feed" for in-person tournaments

I know in the 4.0 thread there was some mention of utilizing the second HDMI output of the Pi 4, but it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere just yet:
dee2eR wrote:
Sun Jun 07, 2020 11:49 am
From my experimentation with two monitors so far it's promising but not there yet. I was running two unique displays (arcade Punchout style) and was forced to run X11 to make it all work. Hopefully when the video drivers are more mature it will be possible without X as the performance hit is huge. I wasn't able to get MAME to display to 2 monitors at once without X when I tried.

For just screen mirroring it may be different than when running two unique displays, I haven't tried it. You can set the two outputs to different resolutions, I have no idea how that may or may not effect screen mirroring though. I was running two 240p outputs when I did it.
Just on a whim I ordered another HDMI adapter to be able to feed "big" HDMI out of the 2nd port and started playing around with the 2nd port plugged into a 720p Smart TV. So far, here's what I've found out:

1. The ARpiCADE splash screen mirrors on startup, but once it disappears no more mirroring happens natively.
2. The 2nd display is getting some kind of signal but it's blank (i.e., the TV doesn't display a "no signal" warning or blue screen; it's just black).
3. Uncommenting the "experimental" lines already in config.txt that allude to enabling dual displays causes both display ports to go/stay blank.
4. Running the 1st port to the TV works just fine; either the TV is successfully upscaling better than my capture device or the RPi is adjusting to the detected device resolution?

So that's where I'm currently at with that; I don't really know much about this sort of display stuff or RPi 4 display configs to go much further.

On the plus side, the Naomi stuff seems to be working pretty great in 4.3 so far. Virtua Tennis 2 has some jittering/slowdowns during the "replay" segments but the gameplay is just fine. The only thing in the Naomi catalogue I've found so far that doesn't work is Triggerheart Excelia but this is apparently a known issue with Flycast.

One last thing I've discovered (to my minor annoyance) is that there seems to be very large volume disparities between game platforms - Flycast/Naomi games in particular tend to be MUCH LOUDER than, say, .172 CPS2 games. I haven't looked into this closely enough to determine for a fact it's based on the emulator/backend and not just the game roms themselves, but I think it's worth examining to make life a bit more pleasant for those of us who like to switch games frequently.

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Re: ARpiCADE 4.3 (for RPi4)

Post by Macs » Thu Nov 11, 2021 11:02 am

I would like to give my first contribution to this distro and that could be useful to others.
Running some Naomi/Atomiswave games when they start they try to connect to other machine in network and wait with a countdown and repeat this process
blocking you from actually play the game.

Going in the test menu of the game ( if you have associated the key buttons test and service to L3 and another ) you are able to disable
this networking in the game rom test part..... but this setting will not be saved when the rom restart and so everything is back to default and
the countdown is still there.
This happens because by default the emulator tries to save the the settings ( nvmem, eeprom, state file ) on the rom folder of the game, and
that folder in on the fat32 that is mounted as root and is not write enable by the "pi" user that is running the emulator, so nothing gets written
of the settings you do.
There are multiple solutions to this, but I chose to modify the fstab entry of the /boot partition to mount it as user and give permission to write there
so now my settings are saved and I can finally disable this request to connect to other machine that are not existing and play the game.
I imagine it could also be done configuring to save in another folder where the "pi" has permission to write, but I'm not familiar with the options of the emulator
and fixed the issue I did not have the need to search for it.

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Re: ARpiCADE 4.3 (for RPi4)

Post by Macs » Tue Nov 16, 2021 1:53 pm

dee2eR wrote:
Sun May 02, 2021 3:18 am
Use 172, 203 and 230 first, it's easiest to start with 172 as it runs the most at full speed. 230 is obviosly the newest so may have some emulation improvements. If you wanted to be sure you had the best possible emulation start testing with 230, then 203, then 172 - in practice 172 is the most likely of the 3 to run any particular game at fullspeed so it's not unsensible (if that is a word...lol) to start with 172.

174 and 215 are both Retroarch based. I may remove 215 in a future release as it's not very useful now we have 230. 174 can run a couple of things not supported in 172 but 174 isn't useful for much really.

To give you some idea my testing build currently has the following numbers (these numbers are subject to change as I test):
FBA: 17 roms
MAME 078: 1 roms (+ 1 CHD)
MAME 106 (AdvMAME): 50 roms (+ 1 CHD)
MAME 172: 1606 roms
MAME 203: 7 roms
MAME 230: 58 roms
Naomi/Atomiswave: 54 roms (+11 CHDs)

139 & 174 I only use as last resort (zero games at stock speeds), and at the moment don't have anything in there outside of overclocking... 139 runs Playstation based arcade boards pretty well when OC'd, it's possible some of them also run well at stock speed but I need to look into that. 215 I no longer see a point in having.
Having a read of the whole thread, to apply the small fixes not present yet in a new release.
I confirm the issue with Daphne only the first time works, the second you get a black screen, and does not work at 240p as it says the resolution does not exist. (1920x240) tried to play a pit with it pushing something but got only a compressed vertical image, not a full screen stretched one.
Regarding your rom/emulator organisation would you post a list to see what you put where? Could be useful and save some time.

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Re: ARpiCADE 4.3 (for RPi4)

Post by cool_factor » Fri Dec 10, 2021 6:44 pm

dee2eR wrote:
Wed May 12, 2021 3:41 am
Discovered a new bug today. Seems to be some combo of ARpiCADE 4.3, Daphne and Attract-Mode... doesn't happen on ARpiCADE 3.X or from the command line on 4.3 or with any other emulator as far as I've seen.

From Attract-Mode if you launch Daphne (I was using Dragons Lair, haven't tested others yet) it will work fine, then exit and relaunch and the game runs and you can hear it but not see it - just black screen. Seems to need a reboot to fix Daphne, everything except Daphne continues to work fine. Oddly if you run the Daphne launcher from the command line it works fine to exit and relaunch it so I'm really not sure whats going on there.
Any fix yet? Thanks!

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Re: ARpiCADE 4.3 (for RPi4)

Post by dee2eR » Tue Dec 14, 2021 12:34 am

Yes and no... it's an SDL1.2 bug, which I have fixed on my dev build - however the updates required broke some other things so I've been chasing my tail lately. It will be fixed in the next release, but I keep hitting RPi4 video driver surprises. In this case it wasn't until testing different boot resolutions that I found the new bug, I thought I'd have 4.4 out by now.

Sorry development has been slow lately, been a crazy year.

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Re: ARpiCADE 4.3 (for RPi4)

Post by FrizzleFried » Tue Dec 14, 2021 3:25 pm

We're patient.

;)

BTW... anyone know of a Sega Model 2 emulator that works with the Pi?
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Re: ARpiCADE 4.3 (for RPi4)

Post by lobdale » Wed Dec 15, 2021 3:49 pm

So I got a hold of an RPi4 and was planning on building out an image that has some of the Naomi and DC games my 3 won't run. Is there a guide as to what ROMs/CHDs that I need from which set and actually how to add these to the image?

Also: seconding the above poster---anyone attempt to run model 2 games on here like Virtua Fighter? I saw mentioned original PSX based hardware works, anyone tried Tekken?

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Re: ARpiCADE 4.3 (for RPi4)

Post by lobdale » Tue Dec 21, 2021 6:57 am

I'm not sure I could possibly be the first one to stumble on this, but it seems the download of the 4.3 image file is corrupt somehow. I tried several times to download and burn it but it just creates the BOOT partition and a 4-5 GB second partition which should be ArPicade, but it is called "Other" in Win32DiskImager and can be neither moved nor resized and neither can BOOT as a result.

I downloaded the 4.2 img instead and it burned perfectly... am I missing something or is the 4.3 download indeed malfunctional?

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Re: ARpiCADE 4.3 (for RPi4)

Post by dee2eR » Wed Dec 22, 2021 1:15 am

It's the first I've heard of the download being broken. I'll have to look into the download, it's possible the file has become corrupt through bitrot or something.

It's definately worth using 4.3 over 4.2 if it's possible.

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Re: ARpiCADE 4.3 (for RPi4)

Post by FrizzleFried » Mon Jan 24, 2022 4:40 am

...any updates on what we might expect from the next update? Have you found a solution for exiting NAOMI/DC games by chance?

:)

Not being impatient. Just being impatient.

;)

EDIT: Changed "and" to "any"... "and updates..." didn't make "any" sense.

:)
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