[Tutorial] gpSP - Full Speed GBA Emulator with Sound and GUI

[chibcha8]

Welshy,
You're awesome.

Wish i could thank you more!

[welshy]

chibcha8
All worked ok then I take it? Glad to be of assistance, hope you enjoyed compiling your own Binary rather than just Downloading one and in turn learning a bit about computing/code!

[weeman1989]

thanks to this thread I managed to get it up and running without too much trouble.

Has anyone been able to run it remotly using vnc? All I get is a black window. I have been able to run other programs remotly but am not sure if its a problem with my connection or the emulator (or even if this is even possible) as I am quite new to this.

Any help would be much appreciated

[welshy]

weeman1989
I think you will find most of the emulators will not work remotely due to the way the screen in rendered and/or the facility is not included in the core program, sorry!

PS Did you use the original instructions by felix3008 on Page 1 or the ones I posted (welshy) for chibcha8 on Page 4? How did you find them? Because I am now going to add a 'Guide' which will be included in the SOURCE CODE - Compile Your Own Binaries section of Emulation on the Raspberry Pi (NEW) 'Sticky' thread.

[weeman1989]

thanks for the reply

I followed yours, the only additional step I took was sudo apt-get update

[welshy]

weeman1989
Thanks, yes I didn't detail that step (although bash does let you know its required). I will add it to the Guide.

[MarcusRaven]

Is it possible to adjust frameskip settings with this? I test frameskip by using The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Pumpkin King because it has the most obvious use of Sprite Flicker. I know the frameskip is off, because a shadow of Oogie Boogie is supposed to be flickering in the moon in the title screen. He's either solid or not there. Same goes with when Jack takes damage, solid or not there. This shows that there is some kind of frame skip going on.

Is there also any way to see the FPS while running a game? I'm very interested in learning more about this. It seems gpSP has been fully integrated well with RetroPie. Can't wait to see if any other leaps forward are made. ^_^

[welshy]

MarcusRaven
You can with a source built Binary, I'm not sure with RetroPie.The 'Standard' Source Build is default at Frameskip=1 but can be adjusted in the GUI.

[MarcusRaven]

MarcusRaven
You can with a source built Binary, I'm not sure with RetroPie.The 'Standard' Source Build is default at Frameskip=1 but can be adjusted in the GUI.

If there's any way to do it with the RetroPie setup, I'd love some insight. Is any other emulators' frameskip settings in a certain config file? Might be there. I'll check when I get home if I can track anything down. (Currently leaving the office.)

EDIT: So, the emulator executable that EmulationStation uses can run from the desktop. Its standard skip it 2 frames. I tried setting it down to 0, and no apparent change. Tried setting it to 1 with random skips so that the flicker should (in theory) still work, but no apparent change. It really seems like there's something hard coded somewhere. Any ideas?

[gilbdeth]

the emulator works perfect, but I have one odd thing that irratates me
when i press select+R1 i get the menu up but when you press up and down its soo sensitive it flys up and down the menu and makes selecting anything really hard, usually takes a while to actually get what you want!
is there a way of slowing this down?

[aronczegledi98]

Hi!

I made a video about setting up and playing with gpSP.
Thank you for watching.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3oQSAvYSSw

[KitchUK]

the emulator works perfect, but I have one odd thing that irratates me
when i press select+R1 i get the menu up but when you press up and down its soo sensitive it flys up and down the menu and makes selecting anything really hard, usually takes a while to actually get what you want!
is there a way of slowing this down?

I had this problem with the Xbox 360 pad. I had to add the dpad-as-button command to the rc.local file and then reconfigure gpsp. I also had to reconfigure every other emulator. It was a massive pain but worth it as now I can play advance games with the dpad as originally intended.

[welshy]

gilbdeth/KitchUK
If your using an XBox360 Pad (or the drivers) adding --dpad-only to the rc.local script forces the use of the D-Pad ONLY (ignoring both analogue sticks), without having to re configure the emulator. I haven't tested this with GpSP, but it works successfully with other emulators.

[drapacioli]

Awesome, this is just what I was looking for! One problem though, when I try to start the emulator, the menu is cut off no matter what resolution I'm on, so I can't see what I'm supposed to do! How do I reduce the window size on launch?

[welshy]

drapacioli
You probably need to change your overscan settings

See Here - http://elinux.org/RPiconfig

[drapacioli]

drapacioli
You probably need to change your overscan settings

See Here - http://elinux.org/RPiconfig

The overscan is already set properly for my desktop though? Nothing is cut off on the boot sequence or the desktop environment, only when I try to use this emulator.

[Vanfanel]

drapacioli
You probably need to change your overscan settings

See Here - http://elinux.org/RPiconfig

The overscan is already set properly for my desktop though? Nothing is cut off on the boot sequence or the desktop environment, only when I try to use this emulator.

This emulator is fantastic, but it has a funny way of calculating it's scaling area.
I fixed it some time ago. Try my gpsp binary here instead:

https://github.com/vanfanel/binaries

[forgeflow]

Is there a way to remap USB joypad buttons?

xboxdrv is the best bet. Even if you don't use an xbox controller, you can use xboxdrv to completely remap your usb stick's input for any game. It's kind of hairy trying to get reasonable information on it, but it does come with a number of example configurations and occasionally yelling search terms into google will come up with a page with some clear instructions on how to get it set up.

[forgeflow]

Hi,
can I use xboxdrv with this emulator? How? I've installed the xboxdrv but there is not joystick on the menu section.
Thanks.

Yes, here is my xboxdrv config file for this game:

Code: Select all

[xboxdrv]
silent=true
deadzone=4000
trigger-as-button=true
led=2
dpad-as-button=true

[ui-buttonmap]
dl=KEY_LEFT
dr=KEY_RIGHT
du=KEY_UP
dd=KEY_DOWN

## remap all the buttons to the keys used in the default gpsp setup
y=KEY_SPACE # note:this does nothing
b=KEY_X
a=KEY_Z
x=KEY_F10
start=KEY_ENTER
back=KEY_BACKSPACE
guide=KEY_ESC
lb=KEY_A
lt=KEY_A
rb=KEY_S
rt=KEY_S

[forgeflow]

I had this problem with the Xbox 360 pad. I had to add the dpad-as-button command to the rc.local file and then reconfigure gpsp. I also had to reconfigure every other emulator. It was a massive pain but worth it as now I can play advance games with the dpad as originally intended.

I generally create a new config file for xboxdrv for each emulator. I write a wrapper bash script that kills any currently running xboxdrv instance, and invokes a new one with the custom config. Here's an example:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
## kill any existing xboxdrv setup and startup the gpsp config
sudo killall xboxdrv 2>/dev/null
sudo xboxdrv -i 0 -c ~/.config/xbox-gba.cfg --silent --quiet & sleep 1
/usr/local/bin/gpsp/gpsp

[KitchUK]

drapacioli
You probably need to change your overscan settings

See Here - http://elinux.org/RPiconfig

The overscan is already set properly for my desktop though? Nothing is cut off on the boot sequence or the desktop environment, only when I try to use this emulator.

This emulator is fantastic, but it has a funny way of calculating it's scaling area.
I fixed it some time ago. Try my gpsp binary here instead:

https://github.com/vanfanel/binaries

Hi Vanfanel, what exactly do you mean about the scaling issue? Could you specify what you changed as the readme on your github seems to be blank. Did you perform any other tweaks?

[Vanfanel]

Hi! I don't remember well now. I think it wasn't scaling the image right when I used a 640x480 phisical resolution using tvservice, so I changed the scaling function.
I didn't perform any other tweaks.

[rymate1234]

I have a small issue when running the prebuilt binary in the post.

When running the emulator through the analog output on the raspberry pi, the sides of the emulator interface appear to be cut off, no matter what settings I use for the sdtv aspect ratio.

The standard console is fine, however the emulator interface is cut off.

A video demonstrating this bug can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G_1wjJ ... e=youtu.be (apologies for quality).

I've tried Vanfanel's version, but that cut off the top and bottom as well

[DPR]

Try to add "overscan_scale=1" line to config.txt at the boot directory.

[KitchUK]

Is it possible to add a scanlines shader (with bilinear filter) with this port?

Any shaders?