Off Topic Post Of The Year 2024

[Chest Rockwell]

15 minutes ago, Lorne Malvo said:

 

[Tim Healys Chutney Spoon]

Frankie Crisp's engagement post.

[SuperBacon]

2 hours ago, FLips said:

TLDR at the bottom...

After days of faffing around the Amiga Raspberry Pi project is finally at what I would consider an acceptable end.

So firstly let me say, my WinUAE setup with Workbench 3.1 and WHDLoad on the PC is working flawlessly so other than the fact I have to play it a bit stretched on my PC monitor otherwise having to move a TV and using an adapter, no complaints there. The ease of use and the ability to sit at my desk with a proper keyboard and mouse setup and plug and play usb controllers is great.

Onto the Raspberry Pi though. God it's been a headache.

So firstly but maybe slightly out of chronological order (it's been a slog) I ordered a 3.5mm to composite cable from Amazon so my Pi could plug directly into my CRT without having to use a HDMI to Scart adapter. Even outside of the Amiga it's a useful thing to have for other emulators. It arrived and didn't work. I looked further into it and (I might be repeating myself here) it turns out they're hit and miss based on where the rings on the 3.5mm lie on the plug so your best bet is to order from an established Pi seller and you should be fine.
So off to https://thepihut.com I went. I'm deliberately promoting them by the by because this turned out to be the first of two items I got from there and (spoilers) both are brilliant.
I ordered a new cable from them for less than Amazon cost me, it came next day and I edited the Raspberry Pi's config file in notepad as suggested to program the Pi to essentially ignore the HDMI. My Pi now displays in a beautiful native 4:3 resolution with no faffing about. It's beautiful. It's perfect.

Next up was the emulators. The Raspberry Pi has the choice of four emulators, all with their own pros and cons. I won't go too much into each but I started with UAE4Arm which ran a toned down version of WinUAE so I understood it out the box and it ran floppy disks fine. Issues with it however that the GUI wasn't tied to the resolution of the Pi or the games, so it stretched in tiny HD resolution right off my screen. Useable if you knew where to look but not ideal.
Next was Amiberry which has similar results as it runs as a spin-off of UAE4Arm so I had all the same issues.
Neither of them, as far as I could figure out, would run CD32 or WHDLoad and due to the missing/stretched interface it was near impossible to change certain options. In the bin with both of them.

After that I tried a Retroarch (the emulation front end that runs all the emulators) specific one called PUAE which didn't really run anything properly when by all accounts it should have. I looked into it and for my outdated Pi I would need to use the PUAE2021 version.
So four emulators in and I'm on PUAE2021 and finally it's up and running, or so I thought.

First of all the emulator is ideal. Due to running off Retroarch directly you can access the emulator settings with the touch of a button and everything displays fine. What I did run into issues with was everything else.
So it's hard to really describe what went wrong here, because quite frankly I'm not even sure, but I will say the solution seems to be don't fucking touch anything in the settings. Let it all run on Automatic, don't change from a 500 to a 1200, don't change the RAM, don't mess around with anything because let me tell you I went to bed with nightmares two nights ago. 

For some reason my copy of GODS that ran absolutely fine on my PC and ran fine on this a couple of times suddenly displayed a blood red text-filled screen with a low humming sound that warned me it might be a virus and asked me directly, as if it was sentient "Shall I give control to it?".
I had no idea what this was and as good as ripped my Pi power cable out to stop it. I tried GODS two more times and each time got the same screen and noise, which combined with the emulated floppy sounds clicking and whirring was essentially one of those creepy youtube clickbait videos kids love. "I BOOTED UP MY AMIGA AT 3AM AND THIS HAPPENED". Except it was real and I hated it.
My wife was in the other room watching Four in a Bed so I went and told her about this creepy message I was getting (which by the way nobody at all online has spoken about, I could not find shit) and she excitedly asked if I took a picture because she loves stuff like that. I said no and went to get one and GODS just ran normally first time with no issue. I reset and reset and reset and it ran perfect every time. My wife joked that I was lying and I thought maybe sat fannying on with the Pi for 5 hours had rattled by brain and I called it a day and went to bed.

The next issue was that WHDLoad took ages to get working as I had to find different specific kickstart roms and rename them very specifically too. This took forever but eventually the games started showing up on my Pi but sadly the ones I tried ran badly. First Samurai moves in fast motion but the sound is slow and crackly, it's unplayable. James Pond 3 did the same. I searched and searched for days but nobody surprisingly has answers about WHDLoad files being emulated on a Raspberry Pi. I would have thought this was a popular subject but alas, back I go to awkwardly changing floppy disks.

Another issue (I know, this is going on forever) that arose was I had been running my Pi off a USB phone charger because my old power supply broke. After playing Turrican 3 with my mate and it having major slowdown caused by the low power (a lightning bolt appears on screen to coincide with it lagging) and the Sega CD games I added (this is a whole other thing) running a bit slow too, I went back to the Pi Hut today and got a new power supply for a tenner and can confirm it arrived today and I can play Terminator CD no bother and nothing seems to be lagging due to the power any more (I retried WHDLoad games and sadly it wasn't that).

But back to yesterday. After Turrican 3 give us bother we tried Alien Breed and somewhat to my relief got that awful red screen of death with a slightly different error message and my mate (who also joked I was lying) was also freaked out by it but finally I had evidence and took a picture!

We turned the Amiga off and went on to my Mega Drive to restart/carry on Turrican 3 in the form of Mega Turrican. Hate to say it but the Mega Drive version is better, and in sort of a fall from grace the MD version is the original and the Amiga was the port. Imagine that, the Amiga version of a Turrican game being the port. Wild.

So today after many more hours faffing, getting random error warnings, having software fail left and right, I uninstalled and reinstalled PUAE and things started running smoother. I'm not touching the settings anymore. It's actually as well the perfect emulator for games like Monkey Island, Cannon Fodder and such because you have a perfectly smooth mouse control using the analogue sticks and triggers, it runs them and handles like an actual dream. Select also gives you a working virtual keyboard and some of the more popular keys like Space are mapped to buttons on the controller. Chuffed with it.
Some games still fail but I've put this down to a dodgy rom file and some of them which I've replaced do work again, so that's my full situation. Floppy disks work fine as long as the ROM is good, WHDLoad is a no-go and the CD32 is as far as I'm aware set up to go but I haven't tested it.

TLDR:
Setting up my Raspberry Pi to successfully run Amiga
Tried four emulators before I got one that worked decent
Was getting a scary boot screen message like a creepypasta you'd see online
Uninstalled the whole thing and reinstalled it, replaced the power supply and 3.5mm to Composite cable to display on CRT
Floppies work fine now but need good roms, CD32 unknown, WHDLoad (multiple floppies compressed into one file ran from a harddrive) don't work.

 

 

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This shows what a great poster Flips is. I have absolutely zero idea what any of this means and I still love it.