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Messages - pecosdave

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1
Announcements / Re: Version 2.6.1 bugfix release
« on: June 08, 2021, 11:31:39 AM »
I just upgraded from 2.6.0 to 2.6.1 this weekend.  I actually noticed a new font issue.  Some of the fonts have some stray pixels like they were made in a photo editor and someone didn't quite clean up the last the of the deleted background at the top of the screen before hitting save.

Not a deal breaker for me and I'm not huge hurry for a fix.  I only upgraded because I finally got around to updating the distro on that system because I had some DRM-free native Linux games to add and I was hoping the OS had some other bug fixes, the update broke my old install.

Long story short, everything is great.  I built a macro where we can hit the "home page" navigation button on the keyboard and it should kill the program with focus in X no matter what it is so the kids can exit the games as easily as they do when emulated.  It works when it wants to, but sometimes it doesn't.  X is a picky beast....

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General / Re: Help Installing on Ubuntu 19.04
« on: June 20, 2019, 12:11:14 PM »
Favdeacon gives good advice.

When something is missing when trying to compile you need to install it.  If you've got a full GUI going on load up your package manager (I like synaptic) and just look for the name of the missing package.  If you don't have a full blown GUI you can type:

apt list |grep -i missing-item

You should find the name of the package that has the missing item - probably.  Then you can apt install the missing item.

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General / Re: Help Installing on Ubuntu 19.04
« on: June 13, 2019, 01:24:15 PM »
First i try to install the repository  by typing the following in a terminal: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:daveg/attract

Yeah, I've always had a break-down at that point.  I've never once successfully installed AttractMode via repository/.deb files.  There's a version mismatch of something or another every time I've ever tried.

It compiles from source a lot easier than figuring out the repository issues.  I've compiled it from source on at least four occasions now, I've tried it from packages at least three times.

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General / Re: Help Installing on Ubuntu 19.04
« on: June 06, 2019, 10:38:32 AM »
There's really not enough info to go on.  We need more context to know when and where that error pops up so we even have a clue as to what part of the system we're trouble-shooting.

I made a video walk-through on how to do this and something else on a Debian/Ubuntu drerived system.  It has lots of links and written documentation.  The opening part of the video/documentation has to do with installing Attractmode.  It moves on to other things from there.

Take a look, this might answer your question.  If it doesn't be very specific about what part of the process the break-down happens in.

https://davetech.asuscomm.com/attract/

5
General / Re: Acquiring arcade ROMs ?
« on: April 13, 2019, 08:50:26 AM »
There's a handful of free, legal ROMs right here. (I've done this, but most of them suck - Super Tank is cool)
If you buy an X-Arcade joystick it usually comes with a CD or DVD that has a few licensed ROMs. (I've done this)
If you like NeoGeo you can buy the ROMs with an emulator wrapped around them already right here - (I bought it when it was a bundle)
If you want some Sega classics, Sega is pretty good about making their ROMs available - the ROMs are placed in a very well labeled folder as of recent updates specifically for this purpose if you get the Classics Collections - it's so well done you can just point Attract Mode at that folder if you like.

I've got some PS2 and XBOX (classic) disks with arcade originals on there, apparently there's ways to get them off I've yet to try.

If you do enough digging there's plenty out there while staying on the right side of the law, they're just not all conveniently in one place.

6
General / Re: Attract-Mode for Android
« on: April 13, 2019, 08:08:26 AM »
I compiled AttractMode from source (on video even) - if you want to compile it on Android go right ahead, no one is stopping you.

It might be a bit difficult if you want to stick with touch-screen.....

7
General / Re: 2 player games - 2 controllers
« on: March 05, 2019, 06:59:15 AM »
The above info is correct.

If it means a lot to you and you don't want to screw up your entire config you can hit Tab and adjust your "per game" settings so that the controls are duplicated in just that game.  Then you gotta trust your buddy not to sabotage you while you're playing.

8
General / Re: Attract Mode on TV CRT
« on: March 02, 2019, 11:42:10 AM »
What interface are you using?  If it's RCA or S-Video it should pretty much be set at a fixed frequency and resolution. If you have the options in the card settings be sure to specify NTSC in North America, PAL in Europe or look up what your TV is l elsewhere.  If you are using component or possibly VGA if your TV was really awesome for the era, your going to have closer to VGA limitations.

You shouldn't have anything in the Khz range

See if there above mentioned settings are an option in your driver.

9
General / Re: help switching to linux
« on: February 23, 2019, 05:52:29 PM »
When building a dedicated system I usually use Lubuntu because it's light-weight, I'm sure not to install much more than I need to keep it thin.  The first time I built I I simply set TinyWM as the Window manager and it worked fine.  Something has changed in the code since then however, it loses focus when you do that and it doesn't recover.  I use OpenBox - after stripping out all the gestures/shortcuts that are called up by using the joystick that's really a keyboard while playing.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-desktop-74/x-server-issues-focus-loss-4175618240/

10
General / Re: changing front end
« on: February 23, 2019, 05:45:09 PM »
I'm not 100% sure I follow what you're asking for, but I think I do.

Well, you can try using a multi-emulator like Mednafen or Mess, put all your ROMs in one place, use ";" to specify more than one extension qualifies as a ROM.  AttractMode won't be able to tell the difference and Mednafen will start up just fine.  The difficulty here will be in making sure you have your emulator configured to handle this just fine.

I think there's themes that do what you're asking, I haven't tried too many themes out, but I've seen videos of ones that clump them all together.  You might ask in the themes category which themes throw all the emulators in one bucket.

You can use Retroarch as your back-end.  It completely sucks to configure, but it's a viable option.

11
General / Re: Scraping
« on: February 23, 2019, 01:24:48 PM »

12
The webcast is done.  I'm currently working on uploading the video.  The document should usable as is.  If you find a gap or need help, please ask.  The video should have links to it from the page I linked to above soon enough.

The video site is limited to 3 hours so I'm splitting the file and I have to re-render it, so it's re compressing now.  I'm using KDENLive since that's where the video is, and that one takes a while.

Maybe next time I'll have OBS do that for me.

13
General / I have finished the Atrractmode part.
« on: February 23, 2019, 08:31:17 AM »
I am now moving on to the meat of this livestream - I'm going to make Skyscraper, then make it work, and it's not straight forward.

14
I mentioned I was going to do this:  http://forum.attractmode.org/index.php?topic=2793.0

As you can see I have a pretty fresh system, which is a good thing, it will keep things from magically working that actually requires me to download stuff I need.  In fact this morning and last night I was struggling getting NFS mounts to work only to realize I didn't have the utils installed yet, duh!

Well, I've compiled attract mode four times at least and only done Sky Scraper once, I'm doing this for the rest of you.  I actually lowered my resolution so the webcast would work better.

I'm going to be in Attract Mode general channel on Discord.

This is the page I'm going to be operating off of, this is my own web server and where the how-to will be live written.  Also it's going to have the link to the live stream, it will be easier for me to manager that stuff there while I'm doing this.

https://davetech.asuscomm.com/attract/

My live stream has started, it's here - remember I'm coordinating off of my site and Discord.
https://bit.tube/play?hash=BRUtDsAMn2uahqac7BlB&channel=25555



15
General / Re: The best choice of emulator machine
« on: February 21, 2019, 07:52:33 AM »
The actual "in an arcade cabinet" build I built for someone else was an old Athlon x2 HP that was a company leftover.  It had built in Nvidia graphics on the chipset - that apparently doesn't work for crap with Linux so I had to put in an Nvidia card that was somewhere around 12 years old just like the host system.  It runs like a dream.

My kids build is an old Core 2 Duo iMac, I think it's 24" or so square, it was the big one of the era.  It has a built in Radeon.  It runs smooth as glass.

My old boss duplicated my arcade cabinet build - literally, he ran dd on the drive and stuck it into an identical desktop for his cabinet.

I can't give exactly numbers off the top of my head, but they all had around 4GB of RAM, one of them may have had 6GB, one of them may have had 2GB, not sure.

My point - the builds I've put together that are proven great aren't new stuff, it's all more than a decade old.  Unless you're really after the electricity savings or you want to run modern stuff too, look at the scrap-heap instead of the money pit.  If you want to leave it always-on maybe buy new just for the power/heat consumption.  If you want to turn it on only when you use it and want to show off for guest, look at the scrap-heap, you're likely to get more powerful equipment, for free, under $50, depends on what sort of resources you have, but I guarantee there's something aged out and collecting dust that SOMEONE locally has they'll just hand it over to you that would be great.

Aside from the iMac that already has an awesome, big squareish format screen, the arcade cabinet builds were great for monitors as well.  Since so many classic arcade games have vertical monitors, yet newer (1990s) arcade games were more of a "full screen" format from CRT TVs I found that closer to square monitors worked better for me than modern ones.  I built the arcade systems with left-over IBM graphics monitors from before everything went 16:9.  I tried a modern 16:9 monitor first, but I found that almost everything looked better overall with an old monitor that did something like 1600x1200 than anything wide.

Check out this chart and get something that supports a "red box" resolution.  You might even be happy with a Trinitron CRT off a scrap heap for a more authentic CRT feel.  I found a 1:1 monitor that I would love to have, but they're super expensive......

http://helpwiki.evergreen.edu/wiki/images/2/28/Resolutionchart.jpg

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