Uae4arm: Amiga emulator with JIT and DispmanX

[Chirone72]

Hi Chips,
I can confirm you with that with new scaling_kernel setting all the low resolution images are now sharper as I never seen before with A500 emulation @ 1280x1024 it's really shining!

A friend reported me some some issues with this setting on a 16:9 @1920x1080 LCD and it seems that It could have a negative impact also on workbench with Picasso already installed but he can't verify more now.

I'll update you in the next days.

Only some little notes regarding audio that you probably already know on the latest uae4arm version, it's a little bit lo-fi and metallic also using hdmi audio with an external dac, but thank you again for your job.

Chirone

[caitsith01]

Hi all

First up let me say a big thanks for all of your work on this great project, especially Chips. I was able to build and run the latest version on an RPi3 with minimal problems.

One comment about installation - I had issues installing in place of my existing UAE4ARM installation because the config directory was read only for the default pi user. This resulted in weird freezes in the GUI and also in me not being able to save my config settings.

Now... I have questions. Many questions. Some of them are only half addressed in this thread, I think. I hope someone will help if they can:

1. Is there a button combination to exit the emulator using a joypad? Using both an 8bitdo SNES pad and an X360 wired controller, the conventional start+select does nothing for me.

2. Custom joypad button mapping... does this actually work at all? The option in the GUI for this allow me to tick it and allocate buttons, but they never do anything. For example, I want to map mouse L-R to joypad X-Y so that when stupid "crack" screens come up before games which require a mouse click to skip, I can just hit X. But even when I set this, it doesn't stick. No matter what I do, the emulator only recognises the d-pad plus A and B on my joypad, but never lets me use X and Y or the other buttons for anything.

3. No matter what I do, the emulator still wants to use my mouse. If I completely disable the mouse, or even if I set Port0 to joypad and Port1 to mouse (via nubs) I can't use the mouse at all. Does the emulator actually work with just a joypad and no mouse? What about two joypads?

4. People are talking about hardware resolutions... where are these set? The only options I can see appear to be directed to letting you set the emulated (Amiga) res, not the screen res of your actual hardware. E.g. how do I force 1080p output (and do I want to do this anyway)?

[caitsith01]

By the way, I think a moderator disapproved a couple of other posts of mine thinking they were dupes when they were actually on different topics relevant to this thread....

One of them was to say that I have this version of uae4arm working really nicely from the emulationstation front end using Douggernaut's launch script. I just need a way to quit back out of the games once they start without needing a keyboard.

[MiDWaN]

Hi all

First up let me say a big thanks for all of your work on this great project, especially Chips. I was able to build and run the latest version on an RPi3 with minimal problems.

One comment about installation - I had issues installing in place of my existing UAE4ARM installation because the config directory was read only for the default pi user. This resulted in weird freezes in the GUI and also in me not being able to save my config settings.

Now... I have questions. Many questions. Some of them are only half addressed in this thread, I think. I hope someone will help if they can:

1. Is there a button combination to exit the emulator using a joypad? Using both an 8bitdo SNES pad and an X360 wired controller, the conventional start+select does nothing for me.

2. Custom joypad button mapping... does this actually work at all? The option in the GUI for this allow me to tick it and allocate buttons, but they never do anything. For example, I want to map mouse L-R to joypad X-Y so that when stupid "crack" screens come up before games which require a mouse click to skip, I can just hit X. But even when I set this, it doesn't stick. No matter what I do, the emulator only recognises the d-pad plus A and B on my joypad, but never lets me use X and Y or the other buttons for anything.

3. No matter what I do, the emulator still wants to use my mouse. If I completely disable the mouse, or even if I set Port0 to joypad and Port1 to mouse (via nubs) I can't use the mouse at all. Does the emulator actually work with just a joypad and no mouse? What about two joypads?

4. People are talking about hardware resolutions... where are these set? The only options I can see appear to be directed to letting you set the emulated (Amiga) res, not the screen res of your actual hardware. E.g. how do I force 1080p output (and do I want to do this anyway)?

Regarding 1 and 2, you may want to give my version a try - it has improvements in that area specifically: https://github.com/midwan/amiberry

3. I've never had to test this, but if this is a problem we should fix it of course. The best way to handle this would be to open an issue on github with a clear description...

4. The emulator will use whatever native screenmode you are running on the Pi, and scale the Amiga output to that.

[Methanoid]

Could you set the emulator to say 4x Amiga mode (320x256) scaling to 1280x1024 with the rest of a 1920x1080 screen as black border???

[MiDWaN]

In my SDL2 port, that happens "automagically"

The master branch contains the SDL1 version, as the SDL2 version (which can be found in the "sdl2" branch) is still under development. Once it's done, it will replace the older SDL1 one on the master branch.

[caitsith01]

Hi all

First up let me say a big thanks for all of your work on this great project, especially Chips. I was able to build and run the latest version on an RPi3 with minimal problems.

One comment about installation - I had issues installing in place of my existing UAE4ARM installation because the config directory was read only for the default pi user. This resulted in weird freezes in the GUI and also in me not being able to save my config settings.

Now... I have questions. Many questions. Some of them are only half addressed in this thread, I think. I hope someone will help if they can:

1. Is there a button combination to exit the emulator using a joypad? Using both an 8bitdo SNES pad and an X360 wired controller, the conventional start+select does nothing for me.

2. Custom joypad button mapping... does this actually work at all? The option in the GUI for this allow me to tick it and allocate buttons, but they never do anything. For example, I want to map mouse L-R to joypad X-Y so that when stupid "crack" screens come up before games which require a mouse click to skip, I can just hit X. But even when I set this, it doesn't stick. No matter what I do, the emulator only recognises the d-pad plus A and B on my joypad, but never lets me use X and Y or the other buttons for anything.

3. No matter what I do, the emulator still wants to use my mouse. If I completely disable the mouse, or even if I set Port0 to joypad and Port1 to mouse (via nubs) I can't use the mouse at all. Does the emulator actually work with just a joypad and no mouse? What about two joypads?

4. People are talking about hardware resolutions... where are these set? The only options I can see appear to be directed to letting you set the emulated (Amiga) res, not the screen res of your actual hardware. E.g. how do I force 1080p output (and do I want to do this anyway)?

Regarding 1 and 2, you may want to give my version a try - it has improvements in that area specifically: https://github.com/midwan/amiberry

3. I've never had to test this, but if this is a problem we should fix it of course. The best way to handle this would be to open an issue on github with a clear description...

4. The emulator will use whatever native screenmode you are running on the Pi, and scale the Amiga output to that.

Thanks - so your version is 0.5 but with some modifications?

I will give it a go and report back re 1, 2 and 3.

Re 4, I am definitely having some scaling issues, a lot of games are off the bottom of the screen for some reason. Again, I will try your version and play around with my Pi's resolution too (which seems to not quite be 1920x1080 for some reason, but slightly below that).

[Voljega]

Hi all

First up let me say a big thanks for all of your work on this great project, especially Chips. I was able to build and run the latest version on an RPi3 with minimal problems.

One comment about installation - I had issues installing in place of my existing UAE4ARM installation because the config directory was read only for the default pi user. This resulted in weird freezes in the GUI and also in me not being able to save my config settings.

Now... I have questions. Many questions. Some of them are only half addressed in this thread, I think. I hope someone will help if they can:

1. Is there a button combination to exit the emulator using a joypad? Using both an 8bitdo SNES pad and an X360 wired controller, the conventional start+select does nothing for me.

2. Custom joypad button mapping... does this actually work at all? The option in the GUI for this allow me to tick it and allocate buttons, but they never do anything. For example, I want to map mouse L-R to joypad X-Y so that when stupid "crack" screens come up before games which require a mouse click to skip, I can just hit X. But even when I set this, it doesn't stick. No matter what I do, the emulator only recognises the d-pad plus A and B on my joypad, but never lets me use X and Y or the other buttons for anything.

3. No matter what I do, the emulator still wants to use my mouse. If I completely disable the mouse, or even if I set Port0 to joypad and Port1 to mouse (via nubs) I can't use the mouse at all. Does the emulator actually work with just a joypad and no mouse? What about two joypads?

4. People are talking about hardware resolutions... where are these set? The only options I can see appear to be directed to letting you set the emulated (Amiga) res, not the screen res of your actual hardware. E.g. how do I force 1080p output (and do I want to do this anyway)?

Regarding 1 and 2, you may want to give my version a try - it has improvements in that area specifically: https://github.com/midwan/amiberry

3. I've never had to test this, but if this is a problem we should fix it of course. The best way to handle this would be to open an issue on github with a clear description...

4. The emulator will use whatever native screenmode you are running on the Pi, and scale the Amiga output to that.

Anyway to find precompiled binaries of your version for pi2 and pi3 ? I don't have an available pc nor pi for compilation at the moment

[caitsith01]

Hi all

First up let me say a big thanks for all of your work on this great project, especially Chips. I was able to build and run the latest version on an RPi3 with minimal problems.

One comment about installation - I had issues installing in place of my existing UAE4ARM installation because the config directory was read only for the default pi user. This resulted in weird freezes in the GUI and also in me not being able to save my config settings.

Now... I have questions. Many questions. Some of them are only half addressed in this thread, I think. I hope someone will help if they can:

1. Is there a button combination to exit the emulator using a joypad? Using both an 8bitdo SNES pad and an X360 wired controller, the conventional start+select does nothing for me.

2. Custom joypad button mapping... does this actually work at all? The option in the GUI for this allow me to tick it and allocate buttons, but they never do anything. For example, I want to map mouse L-R to joypad X-Y so that when stupid "crack" screens come up before games which require a mouse click to skip, I can just hit X. But even when I set this, it doesn't stick. No matter what I do, the emulator only recognises the d-pad plus A and B on my joypad, but never lets me use X and Y or the other buttons for anything.

3. No matter what I do, the emulator still wants to use my mouse. If I completely disable the mouse, or even if I set Port0 to joypad and Port1 to mouse (via nubs) I can't use the mouse at all. Does the emulator actually work with just a joypad and no mouse? What about two joypads?

4. People are talking about hardware resolutions... where are these set? The only options I can see appear to be directed to letting you set the emulated (Amiga) res, not the screen res of your actual hardware. E.g. how do I force 1080p output (and do I want to do this anyway)?

Regarding 1 and 2, you may want to give my version a try - it has improvements in that area specifically: https://github.com/midwan/amiberry

3. I've never had to test this, but if this is a problem we should fix it of course. The best way to handle this would be to open an issue on github with a clear description...

4. The emulator will use whatever native screenmode you are running on the Pi, and scale the Amiga output to that.

Hi, so I've compiled your version with no issues.

Is there any reason I can't rename the binary "uae4arm" and pass arguments to it exactly like the base 0.5 uae4arm? Ie so that existing scripts and the like don't require modification?

Also, custom button mapping is still not working, or I'm doing something wrong. E.g. If I set 'x' and 'y' to the mouse buttons this doesn't work. I want to be able to do this to skip crack screens using my joypad.

[MiDWaN]

You can rename the executable to anything you want of course, it will still work

I'll have to check and test the mapping issue you mentioned, it sounds like a bug.

[caitsith01]

Thanks, so your version takes the same arguments as the version it's based on?

[MiDWaN]

Yes, the arguments are the same. The master branch is very close to Chips' version, the SDL2 branch is currently being updated to match WinUAE (which also takes the same arguments from the command line, plus a few more).

[caitsith01]

Just to clarify on the custom buttons issue - I am using either an X360 controller or an 8bitdo SNES pad. Each of these shows up as options in uae4arm (any version). So I am selecting that specific controller from one of the drop down boxes for either port 0 or port 1, then ticking the checkbox for 'custom' and then setting various custom mappings. But the mappings appear to do nothing, even though the controller is recognised and works with what are presumably the default mappings for uae4arm.

[joyrider3774]

i know this isn't joypad related but i had problems as well with just using a keyboard (encoder from my picade)

the problem with controls is that when you use dpad as mouse or dpad as joystick for example it has some hardcoded keys linked to them (that's how it was programmed for the pandora). I had problems with this as well controling the games with only the keyboard encoder from my picade. I basically took the sources (of chips-fr) and edited the config.h file to reflect my own keys from the keyboard encoder. I also erased any mapping to an actual keyboard. so that my picad's keys don't register as being pressed on a keyboard but so that only the initial pandora key configuration works. I had to do this because for example one the buttons i had assigned (in the source) was lift shift or left ctrl can't remember which one and in one of the games well actually a few that key was also used as the fire / action key as well as pause key (if pressed on a realy keyboard) so basically because i pressed that control it saw i pressed it using the hardcoded controls from the pandora and on a keyboard and gave that button press from the keyboard to back to the emulator as well so it registered 2 button presses one from actual keyboard and one from pandora controls. Making the games unplayable because the key i had mapped to fire / action also kept pausing the games. As soon as i removed all keymaps for an actual keyboard and just used the pandora controls with keys remapped my issues went a way and i can control the complete emulator just using my picade keyboard encoder.

Also a lot of games need you to use the mouse initially in the crack / intro's that come up you even control going up / down with the mouse but the pandora controls has this incorporated if you use dpad as mouse in a port. The only problem i noticed is that default mouse speed is set at 0.25 and a lot of games don't react to it wihen using dpad as mouse actually none as far as i could tell it only started working if you set mouse speed to 0.50 i'm not sure if the joypads have the same problem but it was at least the case when controling it with a keyboard only.

i made a little tutorial showing what i changed to make it work on my picade here https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/798 ... e-controls

it works for me with keyboard only controls using only controls used by the pandora scheme but a normal attached keyboard won't register any keys anymore (unless they are hard coded in the emulator somewhere like in gui etc). won't probably work with joystick / joypads

[Haemogoblin]

I thought I'd chip in here as mapping is being mentioned. Has anyone tried mapping the joystick ports on the keyrah?

[Chirone72]

Hi Chips,
We doesn't see any activity recently, what's happened with your UAE4ARM project ?
Will it continue in the future?

Regards

Chirone

[Haemogoblin]

Giving the lack of response since I poised my question, should I assume not much has been done with mapping?

[Chirone72]

It seems that he disappeared but there isn't apparently any reason, a lot of people around the world appreciated his work.
Chips, nock If you are there...

[Haemogoblin]

Very true, it's been great to see this emulator progress.

[bloodline]

I think MiDWaN has been very busy with real life recently. But it does look like the Amiberry is still being actively developed!

I'm hoping someone will get the Num Lock and Scroll Lock LEDs working even when X isn't started... Perhaps we will get that with the SDL2 version?

[Haemogoblin]

If that is where development is leading. I guess I'll have to look in to it I hope Chips comes back.

[Chips]

I'm still there but mainly lost interest to update this

I'm hoping someone will get the Num Lock and Scroll Lock LEDs working even when X isn't started...

Isn't the opposite ? I mean it works in console (without X) but doesn't works under X ?

[Chirone72]

Hi Chips,
could I ask you why you lost interest in this project ?
Uae4arm is still giving to a lot of people the chance to try a very low cost Amiga...
There are a lot of distros that are using your emulator.
It's definitive ?

Regards

[Haemogoblin]

Hey Chips

Any plans to come back to this?

[Haemogoblin]

So is this emulator now effectively dead? Does anyone know if there is an alternative? Was hoping Chips might at least dignify us with a reply, but it would appear he's not bothered