Snes9x and Flycast Primary Montior Position error

[fusil17]

Hi Everyone,
So, I've been able to get MAME to work no problem as an emulator to launch via Attract Mode. HOWEVER, when I tried setting up Snes9x and Flycast as separate emulators I keep getting the same error in the attract mode readout:
"Failed to get output info for.primary monitor position"

I've not found anything really in the forums that can account for what is going on and I've messed around with attract.cfg to see if there is anything that would help but to no avail. I've tested the CLI commands directly in the terminal and both work as expected, so it seems like the issue is somewhere in attractmode.

For environment information, I'm running on a Ubuntu Mate (LTS 20.04.4) and am getting readouts via CLI.

Any insight/help would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks!

[fusil17]

Hey all, I figured it out! Was user error as is often the case. Figured I'd reply to my post to help any other wayward arcade builder.

So, for Flycast and Snes9x, they both use flatpak to install and run. They typical command is like ' flatpak run com.snes9x.Snes9x "[rom path and filename]" '.


What I (incorrectly) did in AttractMode was setup the executable to be 'flatpack run com.snes9x.Snes9x' and then the command argument to be ' "[romfilename]" '. THIS IS WRONG AND WILL GIVE THE NOTES MONITOR ERROR AND A STRAIGHT RUN ERROR.

The *CORRECT* way to set this up is:
executable: flatpak
command argument: run com.snes9x.Snes9x "[romfilename]"


It's a "well duh" moment in retrospect, but the actual executable in this instances is just 'flatpak' so the rest need to be command arguments. It seems that the way that AttractMode pieces it together is really important in this sense even though the log in the terminal will look exactly the same as the erroneous way I had it.

Hope this helps someone down the line!

[spilinek]

Any time an emulator fails to run I will look at the console output for attract. I’ll copy the command that was executed by attract and run it manually from command prompt. Some emulators have verbose logging that can be helpful in diagnosing problems