Bootable Emulators (Discussion)

[gambler172]

one simple question.

Is there an easy way,to add 2600,7800 and XL emulators?

Causevadding Windows 10 seems not to be so easy?

[Mockduck]

5 minutes ago, gambler172 said:

one simple question.

Is there an easy way,to add 2600,7800 and XL emulators?

Causevadding Windows 10 seems not to be so easy?

In general no, AtariOS is not meant to easily add things like emulators. Adding Windows 10 to the VCS is pretty easy; just plug in a speedy-enough external SSD and boot the system up. But that does mean additional expense and work. Another possible option is to find browser-based emulators or play the games on something like Archive.org, which can be done from the AtariOS. 

[leech]

Wonder how much effort would be involved in setting up a USB stick that would boot directly to a Stella interface for an activision collection.  Not that anyone could sell that without their approval.

 

[justclaws]

22 hours ago, leech said:

Wonder how much effort would be involved in setting up a USB stick that would boot directly to a Stella interface for an activision collection.  Not that anyone could sell that without their approval.

 

It's certainly an option for physical media - bootable encrypted USB sticks,
with a fingerprint reader, which lock to the owner!
https://mashtips.com/best-secure-usb-drives/
You could put whatever software you want on there, and a VCS can boot it.

[mr_me]

On 2/14/2021 at 11:09 AM, leech said:

Wonder how much effort would be involved in setting up a USB stick that would boot directly to a Stella interface for an activision collection.  Not that anyone could sell that without their approval.

 

You can try putting something like Recalbox on a thumbdrive and boot to it.  It's essentially linux that boots to emulationstation.  Or, installing ubuntu and have it autostart stella shouldn't be much more difficult.

Edited February 15, 2021 by mr_me

[leech]

42 minutes ago, mr_me said:

You can try putting something like Recalbox on a thumbdrive and boot to it.  It's essentially linux that boots to emulationstation.  Or, installing ubuntu and have it autostart stella shouldn't be much more difficult.

Well, this is missing my point.  What I was driving fir is say Activision releasing a game pack on a USB stick.  Or we just build one ourselves so to speak.  In essence having something like Atari Vault on a USB stick.

[leech]

3 hours ago, justclaws said:

It's certainly an option for physical media - bootable encrypted USB sticks,
with a fingerprint reader, which lock to the owner!
https://mashtips.com/best-secure-usb-drives/
You could put whatever software you want on there, and a VCS can boot it.

Haha, now that is some DRM there. 

[mr_me]

6 minutes ago, leech said:

Well, this is missing my point.  What I was driving fir is say Activision releasing a game pack on a USB stick.  Or we just build one ourselves so to speak.  In essence having something like Atari Vault on a USB stick.

When was the last time Activision published their atari 2600 games.  Atgames has so It's not inconceivable.  If activision was interested, it could be done through the atari store.  If you want something unofficial and stay within the atari os, someone would have to figure out how to sideload applications.

[leech]

3 hours ago, mr_me said:

When was the last time Activision published their atari 2600 games.  Atgames has so It's not inconceivable.  If activision was interested, it could be done through the atari store.  If you want something unofficial and stay within the atari os, someone would have to figure out how to sideload applications.

My idea was more like what AmiKit does.  Have a USB stick you can plug in and boot up to a Vault-style interface.  If it could be built to have various sets, then license the games from different companies, could be pretty sweet.  So some form of open source Attract Mode setup.  http://attractmode.org/

[mr_me]

41 minutes ago, leech said:

My idea was more like what AmiKit does.  Have a USB stick you can plug in and boot up to a Vault-style interface.  If it could be built to have various sets, then license the games from different companies, could be pretty sweet.  So some form of open source Attract Mode setup.  http://attractmode.org/

Emulationstation is a frontend like Attract mode.  Recalbox has everything including the emulator ready to boot, just add the game rom files.  You could make something similar with Attract Mode for sure.

[leech]

18 minutes ago, mr_me said:

Emulationstation is a frontend like Attract mode.  Recalbox has everything including the emulator ready to boot, just add the game rom files.  You could make something similar with Attract Mode for sure.

I'm aware.  Also aware of Recalbox.  We all can set up something like that, what I'm looking for is something where AtGames or Activision themselves would be able to add roms and sell it.  most of the open source type things have an issue with selling with bundled roms (like RetroArch definitely gets pissy).

[Matt_B]

2 hours ago, leech said:

I'm aware.  Also aware of Recalbox.  We all can set up something like that, what I'm looking for is something where AtGames or Activision themselves would be able to add roms and sell it.  most of the open source type things have an issue with selling with bundled roms (like RetroArch definitely gets pissy).

You should be absolutely fine with using RetroArch. It's all GPL/MIT licensed apart from a few specific cores that you don't need for any Atari console or home computer. Most of the people they're getting pissy with are either using unlicensed game images or not publishing their source.

 

It's only things like Lakka, MAME, etc. that are strictly non-commercial.

[mr_me]

3 hours ago, leech said:

I'm aware.  Also aware of Recalbox.  We all can set up something like that, what I'm looking for is something where AtGames or Activision themselves would be able to add roms and sell it.  most of the open source type things have an issue with selling with bundled roms (like RetroArch definitely gets pissy).

I haven't seen an Activision collection of atari systems games on any mainstream platform for a long time.  Activision seems okay with the atgames flashbacks so maybe they'll be okay with the new atari vcs.  Wouldn't it be easier/cheaper to install and play them like other atari vcs apps rather than usb.

 

1 hour ago, Matt_B said:

You should be absolutely fine with using RetroArch. It's all GPL/MIT licensed apart from a few specific cores that you don't need for any Atari console or home computer. Most of the people they're getting pissy with are either using unlicensed game images or not publishing their source.

 

It's only things like Lakka, MAME, etc. that are strictly non-commercial.

There's no longer any commercial restrictions with mame.

[Matt_B]

9 minutes ago, mr_me said:

There's no longer any commercial restrictions with mame.

It's a little more complicated than that, as MAME has multiple forks with different licensing and you'd have to make sure you pick the right ones for a commercial project.

 

https://docs.libretro.com/development/licenses/

[mr_me]

Retroarch uses some old forks of mame.  The main version of mame has no commercial restrictions and neither does the Stella emulator.  Regular mame would run well on the atari vcs.

[+x=usr(1536)]

9 hours ago, Matt_B said:

It's a little more complicated than that, as MAME has multiple forks with different licensing and you'd have to make sure you pick the right ones for a commercial project.

 

https://docs.libretro.com/development/licenses/

In fairness to MAME, this is really more of a Retroarch / libretro issue.  All of the forks listed are ones maintained by those projects or persons involved with them, and they're the ones maintaining 20-plus-year-old MAME builds - some with backports from newer versions - in order to run specific versions of the emulator.  Had those projects been willing to do custom builds based off of a modern MAME release, the issue could have been avoided.

[leech]

3 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

In fairness to MAME, this is really more of a Retroarch / libretro issue.  All of the forks listed are ones maintained by those projects or persons involved with them, and they're the ones maintaining 20-plus-year-old MAME builds - some with backports from newer versions - in order to run specific versions of the emulator.  Had those projects been willing to do custom builds based off of a modern MAME release, the issue could have been avoided.

Yeah, I have never understood why libretro uses such old versions of MAME.  If I recall, they are based on versions from 2003 or something.  MAME cranks out nee releases quite often these days.  Especially as they merged with MESS.

[leech]

6 hours ago, mr_me said:

Retroarch uses some old forks of mame.  The main version of mame has no commercial restrictions and neither does the Stella emulator.  Regular mame would run well on the atari vcs.

Ha, my Benchmark for MAME is Gauntlet: Legends.  The VCS can't quite do that one.  I should try Cruisin' USA.  Still a 3dfx based game but requires a but less oomph in the CPU.  First system I have had that could do that Gauntlet game was my i7-6700k though...

[+x=usr(1536)]

1 hour ago, leech said:

Yeah, I have never understood why libretro uses such old versions of MAME.  If I recall, they are based on versions from 2003 or something.  MAME cranks out nee releases quite often these days.  Especially as they merged with MESS.

I want to say that they go back as far as 2000; apparently, the rationale is that these versions perform better on low-end hardware.  Unfortunately, this eliminates 21 years of improvements to drivers, backports newer drivers into older builds (thus causing problems related to that), and in some cases breaks the licenses of the respective versions of MAME being used.  Not to mention that it means maintaining multiple ROM sets, sample sets, etc. for each of the versions in use.

 

Given that even today's low-end hardware is capable of running some reasonably demanding games, the argument in favour of doing this really doesn't hold water.  Granted, not everything may run at 60fps with 100% CPU speed - but that applies to pretty much any hardware running the emulator.

Edited February 16, 2021 by x=usr(1536)

[zzip]

1 hour ago, leech said:

Yeah, I have never understood why libretro uses such old versions of MAME.  If I recall, they are based on versions from 2003 or something.  MAME cranks out nee releases quite often these days.  Especially as they merged with MESS.

I think the reason is those old versions work well on low-end hardware and the newer versions of Mame are very bloated.   Like early Pi and Android devices could handle the old Mame builds just fine, but struggle with the newer ones.   Retroarch runs on these devices too.

[youxia]

5 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

Given that even today's low-end hardware is capable of running some reasonably demanding games, the argument in favour of doing this really doesn't hold water.  Granted, not everything is going to run at 60fps with 100% CPU speed - but that applies to pretty much any hardware running the emulator.

It does actually, because devices like Pi are extremely popular and the older versions really make a difference performance-wise on them. Besides, newer versions of MAME do not update everything across the board, so most games will perform exactly the same.

[zzip]

4 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

Not to mention that it means maintaining multiple ROM sets, sample sets, etc. for each of the versions in use.

The other issue is that upgrading Mame means breaking many of your romsets.  It's not always easy to find the correct version of the roms.   So many people hold onto old versions of Mame for many years because of the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" principle

[leech]

MAME is an interesting project in that the binary itself is almost more like an operating system, and all of the different things it supports are like drivers.  so saying MAME doesn't work well on older hardware is kind of odd to me.  They did finally add an interface to the standard one, but you can still launch things via command line. 

Still wish someone would fix Congo Bongo.  ?

[zzip]

8 minutes ago, leech said:

MAME is an interesting project in that the binary itself is almost more like an operating system, and all of the different things it supports are like drivers.  so saying MAME doesn't work well on older hardware is kind of odd to me.  They did finally add an interface to the standard one, but you can still launch things via command line. 

Still wish someone would fix Congo Bongo.  ?

The binary that the modern Mame generates is huge, even with the MESS stuff removed.    On a modern PC, most emulators load in an instant, but there is noticeable lag starting Mame.   That's not to mention the performance drops the newer versions created.

 

When Mame started, it ran fine on 486s, that was the popular CPU at the time.   Later versions of MAME would laugh at your 486.

 

Now remember what low-end hardware was like a decade ago, 15 years ago, whenever these forks happened.  They simply could not handle modern MAME.   The original Raspberry Pi was about as powerful as a PC from the late 90s.   Mobile phones were rather weak.  These devices had less than 1gb RAM.   All these were based on a fork of the old Mame because that's all they could handle. 

 

I even had a version of MAME running on my Wii.   There's no way Wii could handle MAME built from the modern codebase.

[leech]

9 minutes ago, zzip said:

The binary that the modern Mame generates is huge, even with the MESS stuff removed.    On a modern PC, most emulators load in an instant, but there is noticeable lag starting Mame.   That's not to mention the performance drops the newer versions created.

 

When Mame started, it ran fine on 486s, that was the popular CPU at the time.   Later versions of MAME would laugh at your 486.

 

Now remember what low-end hardware was like a decade ago, 15 years ago, whenever these forks happened.  They simply could not handle modern MAME.   The original Raspberry Pi was about as powerful as a PC from the late 90s.   Mobile phones were rather weak.  These devices had less than 1gb RAM.   All these were based on a fork of the old Mame because that's all they could handle. 

 

I even had a version of MAME running on my Wii.   There's no way Wii could handle MAME built from the modern codebase.

Ha, modern MAME takes a while to launch on my modern computer, but that's mostly only when it first has to cache the rom directory.  So maybe that's a large part of it.  Especially after the merge with MESS.  I think it's that part where it tries to scan the library that adds so much more work to getting it to launch than it used to.  As I don't think it tries to build a database on the older ones?