RetroPi / more plugins

[gadgetoid]

I've installed WireShark and captured a whole bunch of packets of a Pi ( B+ ) talking to Retrode 1. I haven't got a capture for context/comparison yet, but I'm seeing mostly blocks of 30 URB_SUBMIT requests of 64byes each, followed by 30 URB_COMPLETE responses of 4160 bytes each- intermingled with other cruft like submits with 77 or 95 byte responses.

A typical response block of 30 responses seems to take 1.9sec and constitutes 0.1mb data. There's a load of other noise, but if I'm not wrong that's ( Super Mario 64 ) 16MB/0.1 = 160  * 1.9 = 304. Which is about 5 minutes, or just under the amount of time it took for a straight copy. So I'm obviously getting the right data.

More when I get Wireshark running on my Mac or PC.

[Wannado]

Thanks a lot Wannado for your information.
It sounds you are working on the firmware - did you do it from scratch?

Fortunately, doing it from scratch is not necessary. And if I tried that, it would fail for lack of time. I only refactored some code that had grown heavily with all the plugins added. I hope it's now easier to understand, maintain and expand.

So far, no firmware release has been built from the refactored code, but I hope the next beta release will be.

The refactoring happened a while ago, and I mostly worked on the NES plugin since then. Recently, I'm trying simplify a few more things in the standard firmware.

I can imagine the firmware needs some fixes to work with the Pi. Maybe something isn't 100% conform?

I recently streamlined the initialization sequence a bit. But I have no Pi, so I cannot test if the change has any effect on that.


Note: I may not be able to respond to any posts in the next few weeks. In the best case, I'll manage to make some progress on the firmware.

[EvilDragon]

I'm happy to test anything you send me

Simplifying will surely help, it might fix something automatically - and if not, it'll at least make things easier to debug.

[EvilDragon]

Okay, took a look at the Joystick ports on a Linux system today. It seems to me the Retrode2 is not reporting the joystick devices properly.
Here's what happens (with current 0.18 firmware):

HID Mode 1:
"4 USB game controllers plus mouse"

The devices are NOT reporting themselves as joysticks / joypads.
Therefore, only the mouse is found - and the rest appears
as /dev/input/eventx in Linux. They should appear as /dev/input/jsx,
but apparently Linux does not recognize them as joystick.

HID Mode 2:
"2 USB game controllers. The left Sega and SNES ports are both mapped to
controller 1, the right ones to controller 2. Up to 2 players."

In that mode, the Retrode2 appears as ONE joystick (/dev/input/jsx)
with lots of buttons on a Linux system.
Both the DPad for the left and right controller ports appear as the
same axis, the left controller uses Buttons 1 - 8, the right one higher
numbers.

So the joystick setup is something that could need a fix in the
firmware to properly work with Linux.

Ideally in HID Mode 1, it should appear as 4 joysticks and a mouse. And
in HID Mode 2 as 2 joysticks.

I haven't tried the N64 sticks yet, but the analog stick should also
appear as analog stick I guess

Hopefully, it's just a small fix that's needed in the firmware - maybe
just some USB description is wrongly setup.

[datastry]

Apologies for replying to an old post, but I tried a new post and it got no response.
(http://forum.retrode.org/index.php/topic,366.0.html)

Can you tell me if there's been any development on Linux support?
I just received a new Retrode and it is performing exactly as described in the last comment of this thread.

[ssokolow]

EDIT: Oh yeah. The post I was replying to is a repost. I've moved this post to the original thread.