Hi, herbfargus!

Daphne does not seem to have a public source repository. Instead they offer a [url=http://www.daphne-emu.com/download/daphne-1.0-src.tar.bz2] GPL’ed tarball [/url] of the most recent official release source.

Yes, I’ve chatted with “Matt_O|zn” in their IRC channel and I have their blessing to publicly patch the source for Raspberry Pi. Their private source isn’t in a state right now to share or patch.

The original laserdisc images can be large, yes! But daphne only expects an ogg file for audio and a m2v for video. Both could be compressed down to a smaller size, if desired. I haven’t tried this – I’m assuming.

I can also find exact laserdisc rips on YouTube right now.

Probably worth mentioning – there are also easily google-able ways to produce a Daphne video from a matching PC-CDROM or DVD game disc. :)

[quote=116926]May be worth putting up a github repo just for convenience in building a module for the retropie setup script (if that’s at all possible)
[/quote]

I like that idea – since a git repo would also welcome anyone to improve it.

[quote=116926]
out of curiosity did you implement this?

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=57721
[/quote]

No, nothing so bold…

I was mucking with the code to fix errors as they came up for a little bit. Until I realized that I was only fixing treat-warnings-as-errors errors.

What’s really needed to build Daphne is installing a few atypical libraries and creating some makefiles with the right defines and build flags. Then it just worked.

Still looking into how to assign emulationstation button mappings. And oddly, a BASH script that I lazily threw into roms/ports/ runs and quits fine at the command line; but from ES will lock the Pi up when I quit. I’m not overclocking. Does that issue sound familiar?

Here it is. Intended to run on Raspbian Jesse. Tested on RetroPie 4.5 for Raspberry Pi 2.

https://github.com/Shmoopty/daphne-pi

The commits are commented. First commit produces the original source, verbatim.

So far, I’ve left out all my source code changes, as they don’t likely affect the end result.

I threw a quick and dirty but readable build script together, so these commands alone SHOULD produce a runnable binary on your RPi.

$ git clone https://github.com/Shmoopty/daphne-pi.git
$ cd daphne-pi
$ ./build-daphne.sh

Takes about 15 minutes.

Then with no games available, you should be able to run the minimal GUI with the “no laser disc” command line option:

$ cd daphne
$ ./daphne lair noldp -nohwaccel

You’ll see an error message that the tiny lair ROM file is missing (not the same as the big laserdisc asset files). ‘Q’ to quit.

[quote=116972]Possible its leaving the framebuffer in an unusable state upon exit. It’s pretty common when launching some things from emulationstation. Generally we pipe things through the runcommand script which helps with that. I’d have to test it myself though to verify.
[/quote]

That sounds likely. Completely black screen, but I can SSH in and see that emulationstation is running, while daphne is not.

That all sounds good. Enjoy your holiday.

I’m happy to make that repo a downstream of Matt’s when he and his code are in the right state. I don’t have the chat window open anymore, but he said to the effect that he has done work since the last release, but at this time sharing what I’ve done would be better than trying to rein in what he has.

He was very pleasant to talk to. And yes, he was eager to talk Dexter. :)

What difficulty setting are your dip switches set to? I suppose I could look that up, but I’m all over the place right now.

Anyway, YES – I can confirm that I was able to run the game with your settings. I’m eager for feedback – currently the file system arrangement tells Retropie how to treat your laserdisc games.

Here’s what your game setup looked like, file-wise

roms
|-- daphne
|    |   (The folder below holds a laserdisc...".daphne"
|    |   tells emulationstation to add this to the menu,
|    |   and "dle21" tells daphne to use that game engine)
|    |
|    |-- dle21.daphne     
|    |    |-- dle21.command  (Optional extra command-
|    |    |                   line params!)
|    |    |-- dle21.txt      (Framefile must have same
|    |    |                   basename, like "dle21")
|    |    |-- lair.m2v
|    |    |-- lair.ogg
|    |
|    |                (All roms go into this roms folder)
|    +-- roms
|         +-- dle21

If you or anyone wants to be running Daphne in 15 minutes, here are the directions.

Keep in mind that you do this at your own risk, of course. And herbfargus might have some interesting insight when he’s back from holiday. But if you’re willing to stick your neck out and try something new, I appreciate any feedback you can offer.

Get a prompt up and enter these four lines.

$ git clone https://github.com/Shmoopty/daphne-pi.git
$ cd daphne-pi
$ ./build-daphne.sh
$ sudo ./install-daphne.sh

Then restart RetroPie.

That last line will clobber any changes you’ve made to es_systems.cfg, if you’ve made changes to it. Because I’m not editing your XML in my bash script. :)

More details will appear in a README in the new roms/daphne dir.

Also, if you install either clean_canela theme from retropie-setup, InsecureSpike has already made the Daphne menu look all pretty!

Tell me what you think! I’m curious how earlier model Pi’s do. I also feel like I’m close to getting daphne to match your preferred joystick config from emulationstation, but I’ll save that for after the feedback…

[quote=117103]I pinged Rookervik and he’ll be updating his themes as well to add Daphne.[/quote]

Sweet! This is coming together much faster than I had imagined.

I may beat Dragon’s Lair yet. Gonna try again now.

Hi, buzz. I’m glad I could contribute!

If this helps – those hard-coded optimizations were in the raspberry pi makefiles to match the style of the other makefiles that were already present. I never tried building without specifying march, mcpu, etc.

If I discovered that those flags were unnecessary and removed them from the repo, would that help you?

Cool. I’ll do a pull request with the controller setup when I have the time to do it up properly.

The “.daphne” naming convention is a little strange, but it’s a side-effect of daphne wanting to have a monolithic “home directory”, where roms, log files, config files, and other things go. A frame file (“.txt”) might be more intuitive at representing a game, but daphne also dumps “.txt” files of its own at that location.

Buzz, what is your take on discrete and non-breaking code changes to the repository? Some changes I’ve considered are:

– I would like to fix all joysticks going dead if joystick 0 disconnects. Detecting and reinitializing a replugged joystick would better match the rest of the RetroPie ecosystem. (This is an issue when bluetooth controllers go to sleep)

– Optional command-line parameters to break up the monolithic home directory so logs can go one place, while config files go a different place, etc. (Again, better matching the rest of RetroPie)

– My 10 button limit fix isn’t currently in your repo…

If pull requests like these would be considered, I’d start sending them over. But if the goal is to keep the codebase as-is, I won’t spin my wheels.

Cheers

Ha – no, I overlooked that. Thanks for the direction.