atari800 emulator input problems

[procyon]

Hello. I'm having a weird problem with the atari800 emulator, and I don't know where else to turn. This problem has more to do with the environment that I'm running the emulator in than anything Atari specific. To begin with, I'm running atari800 in Ubuntu. When I'm in the emulation, I use the number pad and right Ctrl as the joystick, and this works perfectly well. The input is responsive and near-immediate. However, all other keyboard input is incredibly slow and delayed. It's as though it's going through a buffered delay. I can type really quickly, and the letters won't appear until 3 seconds later, but as fast as I originally typed it. This problem extends to the configuration menu. Even pressing F1 to enter the menu goes through this delay. Then I can, for example, tap down, down, down in rapid succession. The program will wait three seconds, and then just as quickly move the menu selection down three times. I don't really understand what could be causing this problem, as I don't have a similar issue in any other emulator. It's also odd that joystick input is not affected by this problem.

 

Can anyone shed any light on this problem? Or point me somehwere for assistance? Thanks very much.

 

UPDATE: Just discovered that it has everything to do with the fact that I have a Dualshock 4 plugged into my laptop. When I remove the joystick and restart the program, the delay disappears. So my problem is semi-solved, but it's still perplexing. Does the emulator author read this forum, or respond to bug reports? Thanks.

Edited October 3, 2016 by procyon

[Kr0tki]

Does the emulator author read this forum, or respond to bug reports? Thanks.

We do :-)

 

1. What is your emulator's version number?

2. Does the delay also affect Start/Select/Option keys (ie. F4/F3/F2)?

3. Does the issue repeat with any other USB gamepads/joysticks, or only with the DualShock?

4. Run with the -nojoystick command line parameter. Does it help?

5. With -nojoystick, go to Controller settings and set Mouse to emulate a joystick in port 1. Does this also cause the keyboard delay?

Edited October 3, 2016 by Kr0tki

[procyon]

Oh awesome, thanks for the reply. Here are my answers:

1)

procyon@MSI-GS60-6QE:~$ atari800 --version
Atari 800 Emulator, Version 3.1.0

2) F4/F3/F2 are all unaffected. F1, F5 and F9 are.

3) So unfortunately, the only other USB joystick that I had available to test besides a Dualshock 4, was a Dualshock 3, and yes, it exhibited the same behavior, but that's probably not surprising. I'll see if I can find a different type of controller to test with.

4 & 5) To my surprise, using -nojoystick caused a Segmentation fault:

procyon@MSI-GS60-6QE:~$ atari800 -nojoystick
Using Atari800 config file: /home/procyon/.atari800.cfg
Created by Atari 800 Emulator, Version 3.1.0

no joystick
Video Mode: 1920x1080x32 fullscreen, pixel format: BGR16
OpenGL initialized successfully. Version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 361.42
OpenGL Pixel Buffer Objects available.
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Please let me know what other information I can provide.

Edited October 4, 2016 by procyon

[Kr0tki]

4 & 5) To my surprise, using -nojoystick caused a Segmentation fault:

et me know what other information I can provide.

Oops.

 

I think I fixed both the segfault and the lag issue. It was occurring when a mouse or joystick was moved while using keyboard. (Apparently Atari800 interprets signals from your DualShock as being constantly moving.)

 

I commited the fix to the codebase and uploaded several binaries with the fix to Atari800's SourceForge directory, into atari800/test-builds/2016-10-08.

Edited October 8, 2016 by Kr0tki

[procyon]

I'm very grateful for all your effort to fix the issue. I pulled down the deb and installed it. Both the delay and the seg fault are gone. I did have one issue with this build, and one wish list item.

 

The issue I had was that the video on this build was extremely washed out. Like someone poured bleach on my screen. I don't have that with my normal 3.1.0 build, but I build it from source, so maybe that's the difference?

 

My wish list item, if anyone would like to tackle it, would be the have the ability to map Start, Select, Option and Reset to my joystick. I know I can get around it with a joystick to keyboard mapper, but if that functionality could be supported internally by the software, that would be awesome. I would especially love that in Colleen for Android, in order to avoid needing to tap on the screen to bring the buttons up. Again, just a wish list, I know it's a big request.

 

Thanks so much again!

[Kr0tki]

Great that it worked.

 

Regarding the colours, we changed something in colour generation routines since 3.1.0, which requires resetting the colour settings. See DOC/NEWS for details.

 

Regarding console key mapping - adding proper input mapping is on my mind for quite some time, but I won't start working on it until I fix several other issues. And adding it in Colleen is currently beyond my possibilities.

[Kr0tki]

"beyond my possibilities" - WTF does that even mean? I meant "beyond my abilities".

[sanny]

Regarding console key mapping - adding proper input mapping is on my mind for quite some time, but I won't start working on it until I fix several other issues.

 

It's already there if you enable the on-screen keyboard. But it's still kinda unfinished. The key mapping is hard coded, there is no way to dynamically assign the keys to controller buttons. I had implemented the on-screen keyboard because there was a request on the atari800 mailing list. But then I never got feedback for my changes and therefore it dropped in priority on my TODO list...

[Christopher F. Chiesa]

I'm intrigued by the comments of Kr0tki, above, which seem to imply that F2/F3/F4 are handled differently than F1/F5/F9.  I have been trying to run Atari800 on Windows in a MAME cabinet, where of course there is no keyboard.  Unfortunately, the on-screen keyboard's F2/F3/F4 don't result in Atari800 sensing Option/Select/Start.  F1 does switch to the emulator menu(s), and F5 does reset (warm and cold, I think; it may be that Shift-F5 doesn't do a cold reset). (I never previously paid any attention to F9 so don't even know what it's supposed to do.)  I found and tried a third-party virtual keyboard, which also exhibits this problem, plus does not convey arrow-key presses to the emulator configuration menu(s).  This is certainly a showstopper for many games.  Can anything be done about this?  (If it's already been fixed, I apologize for wasting your time with this post; if not, when can I/we expect a fix?)  Thanks in advance.

 

[Mclaneinc]

If you get no response then PM Krotki as the thread is 3yrs old...Just in case..

[Christopher F. Chiesa]

Thanks!  I'm brand new here, so don't yet know how to PM someone -- but I'll figure it out! :-)

 

[Mr Robot]

What version of the emulator are you running? 4.1.0 is the current version 4.2.0 is on the way

 

F9 should quit

 

There has been ongoing discussion about porting atari800 to SDL2 which has much better gamepad support and could be used to fairly easily map any key to any button on a keyboard or gamepad but it needs someone with the time and experience to do it. Everyone seems to be missing one of those two resources.

 

EDIT

It occurs to me that if you are using windows in your MAME cab, you could use the MAME Atari 8-bit emulation or better still Altirra, which has a command line interface, and all the bells and whistles you could possibly want. 

Edited August 28, 2019 by Mr Robot
Brainwave

[Christopher F. Chiesa]

Whoopsie!  I forgot I had posted here, and just now came across this by accident while searching to see if anybody else had had this problem, or it had been fixed.

I'm embarrassed to admit that for economic reasons I am still running an ancient Windows XP laptop, and for technical-limitation reasons am still using Atari800 v2.2.1...  I don't have the tools to build Atari800 from source -- but can't access SourceForge anyway, because Chrome (also ancient, has refused to update further, the past several years, on XP) displays some kind of SSL protocol error.  I might be able to download onto my phone and transfer the files, though.