- If I have two RetroPies running Wipeout, can I get them to simulate a link cable for head-to-head play on two separate screens, rather than side-by-side on one screen?
- Update: The answer seems to be no. Nothing running on a Pi simulates the link cable. Maybe it works in some other Windows-only emulator, but probably not. ("Sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I'll never know.")
- If that works... since the Pi4 has two HDMI outputs, can I just run two copies of the emulator on the same Pi?
- How do I rip a physical PS2 disc to a file that RetroPie will run? I've tried "dd if=/dev/disk8s0", "disk8", and a couple things in Disk Utility, and I don't get something that works.
- Failing that, where do I find a working iso of Rez for PS2?
- Update: The answer seems to be, "RetroPie doesn't emulate PS2 at all." You would think that "here is a list of the systems that we emulate" is something that they would publish prominently, but you'd be wrong. You would think that "This game is for a PS2 and we don't emulate those" is something that would pop up in an error dialog, but you'd be wrong again.
- I tried to get it to use vintage PS1 and PS2 controllers using one of these and one of these and it didn't work. It kind of flickered the controller name and would never let me enter the configuration page. What's up with that?
- So I got one of these, and it works, but when I configure it, it seems to be saying that the left analog stick and the right analog stick are sending the same codes. That seems wrong?
- Update: I wiped the card and started over from scratch for other reasons, and having done that it now believes that this controller has two analog sticks, so this problem magically solved itself? Still no luck with the vintage controllers, though.
RetroPie questions
When we do Cyberdelia, we set up head-to-head Wipeout on PS1s, but the PS1s are getting finicky in their old age, so I figured I'd give emulation a shot. I have questions:
Tags: computers, dnalounge, firstperson, lazyweb, retrocomputing, rez, toys, tron
26 Responses:
even if there were no issues with two copies of retroarch stepping on each other's feet, the pi is not strong enough to run two ps1 emulators at the same time. i think this is DOA on more than one front.
for controllers at least, the backing project libretro has previously pointed to bliss-box as a supported way to use vintage controllers. this should be well supported. https://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/bliss-box/
and for #4, literally just google "rez ps2 iso"
Yes, I have tried this, the most obvious of obvious things. I've downloaded like 10 of them from increasingly dodgy-looking sites. Now if someone could point me to one that actually works -- or tell me how to rip the copy I own -- that would be helpful.
"back in the day", I found eMule/eDonkey better for finding console ROMs or ISOs, not the web or BT
I don't want to cause extra copyright problems for them, but archive.org is great for abandoned software. There's a Playstation USA Redump archive dated 2019-05-27 which has an edition of WipEouT playable on PCSXr. Tomb Raider has fussy controller inputs but WipEouT was flawless and needed to be locked down below 60fps.
(I've not tried link cable play on PCSXr, it's there in the menu.)
K3n.
P.S. regarding 4: Is this adequate?
K3n.
That is a 0 byte .bin file.
Someone sent me a link to this, with sum 27753 92900, and it also doesn't work.
Maybe RetroPie just can't run Rez. (Or lots of other things that I tried.) I think it's the latest. EmulationStation 2.9.6RP.
So PCSXr is some completely-other emulator that I would need to figure out how to install on a Pi? Which does not sound promising, as no installation instructions from this decade come up with any of the obvious searches?
PCSXr (PCSX-Reloaded) is the parent of the emulator you are currently using. The RetroPie uses PCSX-ReARMed, which is PCSX-r forked and further optimised for the ARM. There wouldn't be anything to gain by trying PCSXr.
Do you have a PS1 BIOS image installed? Both PCSXr and PCSX-ReARMed attempt to do high-level emulation of the BIOS, but the real thing is a lot more compatible.
For example,
SCPH1001.BIN
, the NTSC/USA Playstation's BIOS and has a SHA1 sum of10155d8d6e6e832d6ea66db9bc098321fb5e8ebf
. Obviously you would get the BIOS by running a program to rip it from your PS1 hardware. You wouldn't go looking on the internet for it.Since I haven't done that explicitly, I'm guessing the answer is no. And also my searches have failed to answer the question, "How do I install one of these BIOS files into RetroPie?"
Also Rez is a PS2 game, not PS1.
BIOS installation is described here.
Borked up the link somehow:
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Playstation-2/
And now I see it says for x86 only. Sorry!
OK, that's me getting confused. You don't want a more-PS1-compatible RetroPie.
You want to run a link cable for the PS1 game Wipeout. The answer is no; you need the bladesio1 plugin, which is not available for the PS1 emulator you are using, PCSX-ReARMed. it is also not supported by the other RetroPie PS1 emulator, Beetle PSX.
You also want to run Rez. The answer is no, the RetroPie PS2 emulator (PCSX2) is x86-only and won't run on a Raspberry Pi
But what if all of these answers make me sad
Well you can try Rez for the Dreamcast as an alternative... there’s some emulators that do run on Raspberry Pi (Redream is the name I think).
On a side note I didn’t have much luck with controllers when I tried RetroPie some time ago, so I tried Lakka and had no problems at all, using a Pi2. (It also requires BIOS dumps, in case you’re wondering)
Ok, I guess it goes here...
it also looks like the only psx emus that have link cable support are for windows only, PCSXR and no$psx. so no dice on the retropie there.
3. This is secondhand:
diskutil unmountDisk disk8; dd if=/dev/disk ...
https://pandorawiki.org/Creating_images_of_PSX_games_using_Linux
You don't need all the script garbage. The business end of the task is running cdrdao and then running that output through toc2cue. I have performed these steps on an actual physical set FFVII discs successfully and used the resulting files with RetroPi (i.e., copying them in to the RetroPi-will-figure-it-out directory tree of romz). toc2cue comes with cdrdao, from what I remember. I performed the rip on my Linux workstation with whatever unremarkable optical drive Dell provided.
This archive contains Rez in a format (.mdf) that Retropie claims to support. I verified that it works on PCXS2 on Windows by playing the first level.
Link no worky (it's bound to your IP) and when I go to the parent it says "only 1 concurrent connections allowed". This is about par for course with these ROM sites.
Sorry. https://www.romulation.org/rom/PS2/Rez-(U) is where I started.
An alternative to emulation on Pis:
If the optical drives on those physical PlayStation units are getting finicky, there are now optical drive emulators available. These replace the entire CD-ROM assembly with hardware and logic to read ISO images off an SD card. If you're comfortable with soldering and have a compatible model of PSX, I'd go with an XStation.
https://castlemaniagames.com/products/xstation
Keep in mind that production quantities are small and pre-orders are being taken for the next run of boards.
The real question is, does RetroPi support the Rez Trance Vibrator?
Since it doesn't support PS2 at all, the answer is sadly no.