[mcarni]

guys,

i did some testing then I had to run to the office (so no log for the moment, but I will upload it tonight ;-) )

I noticed I had a bit of an erratic behaviour, so I decided to uninstall all game related addons (including controllers and libretro api) shutdown and restarted the system

Games source is on an nfs shared mounted by systemd
Controller is a Gasia wireless PS3 clone

I started with MAME (mame 2003 specifically)
I tried 3 roms (pang, some bomber clone, bubble bobble)
Bomber and bubble bobble worked fine, (navigated to games/files/mame/roms, pressed “x” or “y” to get the “play with” menu, selected mame 2003 and games started
Pang seemed to start, I get a “play pang.zip” notification on the top right window and then a crash (log will follow)
I have not had a chance to test savestates (not even sure if available…)

Hope this helps

M

[garbear]

MrBoom:
I can't get a picture. The sound is working, but no picture. I played MrBoom with LE before version 0202 (the one before game.libretro was incompatible)

 

MAME2003:
"In the hunt", Kodi crashed: http://ix.io/QeX

 

For MAME and FBA, I had to start the games with the Filemanager -> play using ...
From "Games" it didn't work, "play using ..." didn't work also

Full debug-log: http://ix.io/QeM

I've added these to my list of RetroPlayer issues.

Test: LE 0225:
played "In the Hunt" with 128%CPU on the RPi3. Don't know, if the game-emulation is CPU-hungry :~

MAME is a documentation project, it just happens to play the games as a side effect The focus is on correction, not speed, so high CPU in most games is expected.

"Streetfighter 2" left shoulder button is not working, couldn't test with MAME2010 -> I have no such ROM

I've added this to my list of controller bugs.

Keep the bug reports coming! I prefer to track issues with individual cores using GitHub issues, but forum posts are OK too.

[mcarni]

guys,

i did some testing then I had to run to the office (so no log for the moment, but I will upload it tonight ;-) )

I noticed I had a bit of an erratic behaviour, so I decided to uninstall all game related addons (including controllers and libretro api) shutdown and restarted the system

Games source is on an nfs shared mounted by systemd
Controller is a Gasia wireless PS3 clone

I started with MAME (mame 2003 specifically)
I tried 3 roms (pang, some bomber clone, bubble bobble)
Bomber and bubble bobble worked fine, (navigated to games/files/mame/roms, pressed “x” or “y” to get the “play with” menu, selected mame 2003 and games started
Pang seemed to start, I get a “play pang.zip” notification on the top right window and then a crash (log will follow)
I have not had a chance to test savestates (not even sure if available…)

Hope this helps

M

  
added crashlog [url]https://pastebin.com/Zra14rUk[/url]

I tested also some more roms, which worked fine with no issue, after these i tried again pang and still had a crash
It maybe absolutely irrelevant, but I think that during one of the crashes i got a window complaining about invalid savestate (but this didn't happen today or yesterday, so my memory might be wrong...)

[mcarni]

tested also 

DOOM (PrBoom)
it works (i get screen, sound, i can walk around and play)
but there is probably something wrong with how doom sees my controller
doomguys is switching frantically between pistol and bare hand

ATARI 2600 (stella)
i get a black screen, no crash and I can hear sounds, so I assuem taht something works, but nothing come sto teh screen
(I am quite sure that this emulator previously used to work)



--edit added @ 2120 --

GAMEBOY and GAMEBOY COLOR
(gambatte)
games load but I cannot get the start button to be recognised
(TGBdual)
everything works


log only stella: http://ix.io/QIV
log for gameboy: http://ix.io/QJL

hope this helps
...off to do some more testing....
;-)

[mcarni]

I tried also

QUAKE (TyrQuake)
it kept crashing
log: http://ix.io/QKz

SNES (snes9x-2010)
everything works

NEOGEO (fbalpha)
mixed results
some roms make it crash (should be a sign of the destiny that i should not play pang)
others work with no issue
log:http://ix.io/QKG


hope this helps

M

[Solo0815]

I can confirm the bug with Stella. Opened issue on github for this
Also added issues on MAME2003 ("Insert Coin" crash sometimes) and Snes9x (Kodi-crash)

[KOPRajs]

Hi,
what is the current status of the savestates? I know there is a kind of autosave feature (which creates savestates in the ROM directory) but it requires write access to the ROM directory. Is it possible to disable this in menu? As not everyone is going to like files created in his ROM collection. Also is it possible to use in-game saves (like e.g. storing the SD card in PSX etc.)? I believe that in-game saves are the most needed as that would make it possible to play the games as they were originally meant to be played.

[garbear]

Thanks for all the testing!

@lrusak is working on RetroPlayer's renderer to support GPU-accelerated buffers. The goal is "zero-copy", which means that emulators render pixels directly to a GPU buffer. (Currently we have two-copy: emulators render to system memory on the game thread, we copy to another region of system memory on the rendering thread (copy 1), and finally upload to the GPU (copy 2)). This should drastically improve performance on lower-powered systems.

This requires some architectural changes to RetroPlayer, so I'm going to focus on that for the next few days-ish to allow him to continue forward progress. After that I'll return to bug squashing.
 

what is the current status of the savestates? I know there is a kind of autosave feature (which creates savestates in the ROM directory) but it requires write access to the ROM directory. Is it possible to disable this in menu? As not everyone is going to like files created in his ROM collection.

Very poor savestate support currently. The problem is that we need a database to store this info, and Kodi's database code is in *very* bad shape. Much progress has been made on replacing this with a new database system, but more work needs to be done.

Once upon a time I created a savestate manager, and got so fed up with the database system that I made my own. It was super-slow (which is OK for a few savestates) but not Kodi-quality material so I dropped it.



What do you think of that? Would you make any changes or improvements?

Also is it possible to use in-game saves (like e.g. storing the SD card in PSX etc.)? I believe that in-game saves are the most needed as that would make it possible to play the games as they were originally meant to be played.

  
In-game saves are fully supported. They should be placed in the emulator's save directory <userdata>/addon_data/game.libretro.snes9x/save. 2048 is known to work. Other emulators may not. Would you be interested in testing to see if in-game saves work in any other emulators?

[KOPRajs]

In-game saves are fully supported. They should be placed in the emulator's save directory <userdata>/addon_data/game.libretro.snes9x/save. 2048 is known to work. Other emulators may not. Would you be interested in testing to see if in-game saves work in any other emulators?

Yes, I'll make some tests and let you know. This is actually exactly what I've had on my mind: to save in-game saves to <userdata>/addon_data/<emulator>/save/, great!

Please consider adding a toggle for the "autosave" feature. Probably should be in the same place as the "rewind" support.

[malte]

Once upon a time I created a savestate manager, and got so fed up with the database system that I made my own. It was super-slow (which is OK for a few savestates) but not Kodi-quality material so I dropped it.

Maybe you do not need to store anything in the database? Everything I see in the screenshot should be available in filenames or modify timestamps. Just a thought. No idea if this fits your current implementation.

[garbear]

Please consider adding a toggle for the "autosave" feature. Probably should be in the same place as the "rewind" support. 

  
K, I can add this setting for now. However, this leads to "settings fatigue", so in the long term once the Saved Game Manager is ready, we'll have to make it smart enough to know what to save and what not to.
 

Maybe you do not need to store anything in the database? Everything I see in the screenshot should be available in filenames or modify timestamps. Just a thought. No idea if this fits your current implementation. 

 
We do need a "database", at least conceptually. A savestate is a block of data. Without context, data is meaningless.

With PC emulators, this context comes from the file name, extension, and possibly several timestamps. However, coupling filesystem paradigms to RetroPlayer makes savestates inaccessible across the technical divide. Therefore, we need additional context in the form of metadata. This metadata has to be stored somewhere, which is the definition of a database.

Currently, Kodi has a saved game database that consists of two lines of code and a helper function. One line writes an XML file alongside the game, the other reads it.

For reference, this is what the XML metadata looks like:
 

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<savestate>
<path>smb://server/Media/Software/ROMs (Unorganized)/Chrono Trigger (U) [!].sav</path>
<type>auto</type>
<label>07/06/2017 6:03:32 PM</label>
<size>430181</size>
<gameclient>game.libretro.snes9x</gameclient>
<gamepath>smb://server/Media/Software/ROMs (Unorganized)/Chrono Trigger (U) [!].smc</gamepath>
<gamecrc></gamecrc>
<frames>6217</frames>
<wallclock>103.575615</wallclock>
<timestamp>2017-07-06 18:03:32</timestamp>
<thumbnail></thumbnail>
</savestate>

So we technically have a saved game database now, we just need a more efficient and scalable database Tapping into Kodi's database code is the best solution, but my attempt to do this was slow and unwieldy.

[trihy]

Hi. Been a Long time since didnt tried leia.

Xbox 360 controller back button is still bad mapped.

It should get you to home. And does nothing. Also start button does some weird stuff. Not sure to which or what is maped.

[mcarni]

Guys,

i have been testing playing with roms in order to understand better why pang could not work. (my post above No1923   https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid...pid2708806 )
after some experiment I came to the point that if I delete the pang.sav and pang. xml, reboot and launch one of the other mame roms afterward I can play pang.
it doesn't work if I just remove the .sav/.xml file and it doesn't work if I just start any of the other mame roms that always work (goldenaxe, or the one just above pang, which I think it is called Pandora... for instance)

I am not sure I this helps in any way, I am just trying (yep porting a core is quite difficult ;-)

Thanks

m

[Julipo]

The RetroPlayer description in the Kodi article is...  curious: https://kodi.tv/article/kodi-v18-leia-alpha-1
 

Retroplayer and input manager
Retroplayer together with input manager makes controlling Kodi using various remotes or controllers much better and a plug and play experience. Not having to thinker finding the correct configurations is something that we all would like and hopefully this achieves this.

It seems that RetroPlayer is something to use remotes or controllers easily

[linkinsoldier]

Well the question is: are they not allowed to advertise it or are the saving the big bang for the last official release note