Piplay 'Cabinet Edition'?

Jamesbeat

I'm most of the way through building a Pi-based arcade cabinet, and will be using the wonderful Piplay as the OS (in fact it was Pimame that gave me the idea in the first place).

I'm going to try to implement the following:

*Boot directly into Avancemenu upon powering on the cabinet. No menus or anything, just boot straight into the list of games.

*Use Mame4all as the emulator. I have no idea why this is not already the standard, as it is considerably faster than Advancemame.

*Dispense with the emulator selection menu.
I have no desire whatsoever to play Mario on arcade controls whilst standing. I use an Ouya for all of my console emulators.

*Have advancemenu's 'lock' feature set to 'on' by default, so that players cannot accidentally mess up the settings or shut down the machine.

*Assign an admin button on the back of the cabinet to deactivate the 'lock' feature when needed.

*Have another 'hidden' admin button to shut down the machine.

Most of this looks pretty straightforward, and involves editing a couple of configuration files.

Would anyone else be interested in this 'Cabinet Edition' of Piplay?
If so, I could upload copies of the appropriate configuration files once I have it all figured out.

In the meantime, I'm probably going to run into problems, so I expect I'll be asking for help here!

Conno123009

I guess that's what the older versions were...
0.6 was the last version to only include Mame, I think.
But I have to agree with you, a cabinet version would be awesome.

If I have some spare time, I'd happily help with this :D

Thanks!

ian57

Check my last raspicade edition ;) used with xin-mo module ->

Alfacentory

évolution du raspicade ian ;)

ian57

@Alfacentory : yes, remplacing pimenu with EmulationStation. Much better. But always without X... it is faster ;)

Jamesbeat

Raspicade looks pretty nice!

Three questions:
1. Can you launch directly into advmenu, and skip the emulation selection screen?

2. Can advmenu be used to launch Mame4all? (The video appears to show the standard Mame4all frontend)

3. The intro animation (in particular the music) is not to my taste.
Is it possible to remove/change it?

ian57

1 : yes, just edit the .profile file int the home
2 : I don't know advmenu. But I think it should. No it's not the standard mame4aal front end, it's emulationstation, it's a mame theme
3 : of course yes... it's a video which mask all system stuff... you'll not see the "linux starting command lines" :)

Jamesbeat

I played around with Piplay today and accomplished a few things:

Advancemenu working with Mame4all

Boot automatically into Advancemenu

Automatically shut down the Pi upon exiting Advancemenu

I couldn't get lock mode working properly. For some reason, when I pressed scroll lock to lock the menu, the screen went blank upon starting games.
I have no idea why this happened, but fortunately there is an easy workaround:

To exit Advancemenu, the default key is esc.
I changed this to another key (I happened to use f7) and have avoided the main problem that I was having, which was that the same key was used for quitting a game and for quitting the menu.

Having 'quit game' and 'quit menu and shut down' as the same key was a real problem, as it was too easy to shut down the system by accident.
Now they are assigned to different keys, it is no longer a problem, and has accomplished the same objective as the lock function would have.

I can now have a separate button hidden at the rear of the cabinet to shut down the system.

The only obstacle that I have now is to get Advancemenu to work with my joystick encoders, which are hacked gamepads.

This is non-trivial, and I may be asking for help soon...

Nitrogen_Widget

i'm actually building a vertical classics cab & was looking to do this myself.
emulationstation 2 is nice and all but it doesn't do vertical as far as I can tell without rotating the pie's display.

Which I can do.
but then.....everything is squished on the menu my mame4all scan lines are going the wrong way.

let us know when you have an .img for download.

ian57

I use emulationstatoin 1, the release 2 is still in development and needs sdl2 which is not in standard repositories.

In my case vertical and cocktail mode is done when starting the pi (configured in cmdline.txt) and you have to rotate the screen see http://youtu.be/QhclxTZ7nfk
and if you want the real vertical configuration (same image ration aspect) you need to rotate your screen (4/3 -> 3/4 and 16/9 -> 9/16).

using Xorg and xrand to do this on the pi is not good : it charges the poor pi's cpu! that's why most of software are slow on pi : they use X. Pi should be used in console mode and FB to get faster GUI

See https://sourceforge.net/projects/raspicade/ for mode details

Nitrogen_Widget

I don't want to use" display_rotate=1" .
I want to rotate the front end and the emulator only.
Advmenu and Mame4all in this case.

But, i'll check it out.
I like it's based off Moebius which was where I was going to start with mine.

Jamesbeat

Ian57, raspicade is the next thing I'm going to try out. I was playing around with Piplay because I already had it on an sd card, but raspicade is looking like the most viable option at the moment.
I'm downloading it now, and will hopefully get some time to look at it today.

I have never used Pimenu before.
I see that you have configured it to work with various usb joysticks etc, but I have a question about configuration:

I will be using hacked gamepads.
I wasn't going to bother with labeling the wires, as Mame4all doesn't care which input you assign to which function.
For example, if I want to tell Mame4a that I want to use 'joystick up' as 'fire', joystick 'down' as 'left' etc, it would happily do it.

Is there a way to configure Raspicade this way, ie get it to ask me for an input and then move the joystick to teach it?

The reason I want to do it this way is because my controllers do not have a common ground for 'up' and 'right'.

Nitrogen_Widget

ok, using this guide:
http://devtidbits.com/2012/11/26/mame-arcade-game-fun-with-a-raspberry-pi/

i'm now booting into advmenu.
and have Secure ftp enabled.
now I need to add the gpio controls.
it is not pretty but it's small. :)

ian57

@Nitrogen_Widget : I don' t understand why only rotate advmame and mame4all. If you only them, display_rotate is good? no?

I try either to start a distribution on tinycore, but boot up was longer and configuration was more tricky. Moebius is a good ditribution without X.

In your link, I saw anything about rotation. To do that, I think you'll need X and xrand

@Jamesbeat : raspicade should work, but you'll need to configure each program with your own configuration :
for mame4all just configure once with you're gamepads using the TAB key during a game (plug a real keyboard to get the tab key workin and accessing the config menu)
for all other program you must edit the config file manually. There's no automatised config too actually, sorry.
You can test you hacked gamepads with evtest or jstest to scan button number, to be able to configure the files.

Nitrogen_Widget

Ian57,
Originally i wanted to just rotate the front end & mame4all because when i enabled scanlines in a rotated display they went the wrong way.
just rotating the emulator allows them to go the same way.

The advance apps & mame4all allow you to rotate via their config files.
I'm not doing this in X either, standard framebuffer.

another thing, ADVMENU is finicky.
it takes fidling to make it show properly when you rotate the display.
when you tell the front end to rotate in the config file it just works.

ian57

@Nitrogen_Widget : ok that's cool, i understand mush better now.

fireslayer26

@ian57 I'm looking forward to trying your Raspicade software. Looks great!

thex

ian
is there a shutdown command for raspicade?

ian57

yes with emulation station menu, or pimenu

thex

Raspicade is fast!
how do you execute the rom scrapper?
Can it do NES?

ian57

Yes, there's no documentation about that actually... I need to write it... but it works ;)

Take a look at the file ~/temp/Raspicade-configuration-files/Upgrade.sh you'll see this

# launch : python ~/temp/Raspicade-configuration-files/ES-scraper/scraper.py -v -w 350
# to generate gamelists.xml file in each rom directory

so just run "python ~/temp/Raspicade-configuration-files/ES-scraper/scraper.py -v -w 350" this will do the job ;)

be careful it takes a lot of time if you have lots of roms

No nes, I need to test fceu and mess before and make them work with Xin-Mo before integrate to raspicade

thex

I cheated. Someone created a master mame gamelist.xml. I used it.

How do you change the key configuration for emulationstation? I want to define a different key other than space to access the power off menu.

thex

Nevermind - I found how to modify it...

You need to delete ~/.emulationstation/es_input.cfg and restart Emulation Station.

ian57

Yes that's esasy... I will modify my documentation to include all new stuff... but it's a long long work.

thex

ian,
is it possible to update emulationstation to the new version?
Also, how do you add fceux? I don't have the xinmo... i use arcade stick.

ian57

The v2 is still in rc. It is in the unstable git branch. It needs SDL2 libs which are not the default in raspbian. I already compiled it (+sdl of course) but not tested yet. I need time to do it. Perhaps in few weeks months.

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