Hi there, hoping someone can give me a bit of guidance as have been banging my head against a wall for the last couple of days…
I owned a Vero 4k from early on in their release and love it for media playback. I have an arcade cabinet based on RetroPie and love that for gaming so decided to buy a Pi4b to try and create a single device that’s easy to transport that fulfils both rolls. As I will be using it primarily as a media player I have stuck with OSMC as the OS so that it can be fully operated with an IR remote (something that can’t be done running RetroPie and installing Kodi). Now on to the problem…
I’ve never used OSMC/Kodi fro games before but thought it would be worth trying the inbuilt functionality before resorting to Retrosmcmk2. I enabled the libretro cores plugin and installed the controller add-ons. I have also paired a SN30 Pro bluetoth controller and have that working in OSMC. I then created a ‘Games’ folder under /home/osmc/ and subfolders for each of the emulators that I have roms for. The issue that I’m having is that when I add the Games directory as I source I can’t see any of the roms in any of the folders to be able to launch them. I’m sure there must be something simple I’ve missed but numerous Google searches have failed me and I am at my wits end now…
Not sure how but it looks like I’m missing the Emulators, there is no Emulators Category under My Addons > Game add-ons just Controllers Profiles, Standalone Games & Support add-ons and they don’t appear under the Repo Game add-ons either…
Beginning to think I should just install Retrosmcmk2 but really liked the idea of it all being under Kodi
Ok hope that solution works As I type I’m compiling all the emulators the previously ran on Vero4k, but it a few releases old. I just updated and started a compile of my fork of osmc, which contains like 80-ish emulators. But it’s almost not tested, at all. Just working compile, i don’t have enough free time to test 80-ish emulators. At the same time, i think there is like 4 emus for NES.
Ps. Just to remove any possible disappointed. N64, didn’t compile last time I tried.
Now I’m unsure which osmc-hardware platform you are going to try to run on, but here instructions that used to work:
haven’t tested em in a while. Most of the emulators need bios files, and other need other rom files. None of them are distributed, but with some google-fu you should find what you need. Is archive.org is a good starting place to look for old files?
just a quick update on zach-morris repo. I was trying to use Amiga PUAE emulator, but I don’t think it works with OSMC. I was able to install the core, but then when I feed it with kickstart rom (tried couple different versions) core never picked it up. I check the logs to see what path it is trying to initialize the rom from, but never picked that up or didn’t even fail back to the build in rom. there’s not much to configure in the PUAE, so I would say it has never been tested under OSMC.
Once I gave up I took winuae emulator (on my windows laptop) and was able to run it with the roms that amiga PUAE never accepted on osmc. but this is just a feedback for an amiga emulator. I haven’t tested other.
@ctyrka I’ve said it in another thread, that just because a core is compile, it’s not a guarantee that it works with “our” environment.
And I’ve been playing around a bit with this on a 4k, once I got PUAE to boot into select ADF-menu. But that time I had no keyboard/mouse or controller attached so I couldn’t do anything. This was on a clean install of a the “internal testing”-version of Nexus. A few tries later and it didn’t work. And a lot of other cores need BIOS or Firmware files, and I haven’t found a clear indication where store them for the core to find em, seems to differ from core to core. Next step would be to read the code or something like that to identify and perhaps document, where to store them. ZachMorris has some “Bios-handler” addon too, but I’m haven’t had time to really investigate what it does…
I agree with you, but this is why I confirmed that initiating kickstart most probably doesn’t work for OSMC. I tried Zach’s “Retro BIOS tool” that should put the rom into the right destination, but with the same result.
Yes, I also managed to launch virtual machine, but only without the bios file. You could pause/resume emulation or map your keys on a remote or any connected peripheral device, but without kickstart, I would say it’s useless.
The config file for the whole core is puae_libretro.ua in /home/osmc/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/game.libretro.puae_libretro_buildbot/save
There you can see kickstart_rom_file needs to be placed into /home/osmc/.kodi/addons/game.libretro.puae_libretro_buildbot/resources/system/ and couple more variables.
Once I placed bios into desired destination (I confirmed it works in different amiga emulator and also adjusted permissions so they are in fact wider than needed) I could see bunch of following errors. I tried to google for them, they looks serious to me rather than a misconfig issue.
NFO : AddOnLog: game.libretro.puae_libretro_buildbot: Illegal instruction: 4e7a at 00F8042C → 00F804BC
INFO : AddOnLog: game.libretro.puae_libretro_buildbot: B-Trap f280 at f80410 (0xb3053450)
INFO : AddOnLog: game.libretro.puae_libretro_buildbot: B-Trap ff05 at fe5630 (0xb30b8670)
If you browse through the directory structure it might hint that the emulator is ported from different platform. There are directories created twice on different places. One that belongs to kodi under OSMC and different that were probably tied with the other architecture outside of kodi standard destinations.
After short discussion with Zach, he also thinks it’s not happy on OSMC.
edit: not sure whether I have mentioned, but from the logging it was visible that core also failed to fail back to the built in basic rom that should work by default if you don’t provide your own kickstart.
Thank you for the detailed reply, as you say there is two places for “our system” to store some addon-data, which I think can be a contributor to the problem.
This is just a messed up idea, but for stuff that comes with system install, like osmc-skin, retroplayer (libretro) and other binary addons, they are stored with in /usr/share/kodi/*, where OSMC has been having issues writing, my guess that could impact somehow.
No problem. Yeah, I think so. I can’t remember from top of my head, by I think for me the emulator didn’t work after the fresh install. I browsed through the structure to see multiple locations pointing to the different architecture approach. I think I had to manually “touch” (or maybe copy over?) savestate file into one of the directory so that I could launch emulator itself. Then I could pause/resume or even map the keys using my remote controller. But as there was nothing emulating, there was only a black screen. After checking the logs and understanding where the core is looking for the rom, I placed it there and also on the other “more OSMC” spot, but it didn’t help. Then I tried to reach out to Zach, who didn’t have OSMC image to test this. As it took me only 5min to make this working under windows, comparing co couple hours spent on OSMC, I quit. I don’t have writing skills to alter the code, so there is not much I can do anyway, leaving this to others who can or want : )
Well, there in lays the problem, those that can often don’t have time or doesn’t bother with emulation(lack of time?). Which makes it hard to get traction, and I do see how this isn’t a major issue for OSMC dev-team, since their focus is bringing the best Mediacenter experience on dedicated hardware, while Kodi has emulator support it has always a second hand role in OSMC. I’m hoping to get some spare time to continue my “entertainment” package for OSMC, eg a mediacenter.deb with all the core that can be compiled on OSMC hardware.
Still have to learn the locations of bios/firmware files and stuff, but at my last try with Kodi 19.2 source (I think) i managed to compile about 80 cores, but that doesn’t mean i’ve got em running, rather have to test em out which is more time consuming then compiling the package(70-ish hours of constant build)
Will resume the project when Sam is happy enough with v.20, to release it as a test (soonish). Since I read somewhere that better EGL support in retroplayer was on the agenda for Nexus, haven’t confirmed it though.