Reply To: configuring controllers in Reicast

[free5ty1e]

[quote=99712]Okay, first off – thank you! It is incredible being able to play Dreamcast games in Retropie.

I am having a problem though … I’ve followed the instructions, and I believe I have the newest version of everything. I have Marvel vs Capcom 2 running successfully (yay!) and I was able to edit the controls to my liking with emu.cfg.

However, I’m having an issue with the VMU. The first time I run the emulator, it makes all the virtual VMU files (I can see them in then /.reicast directory), but when I launch the game again, it says that no VMU is inserted/not enough blocks available. If I delete the VMU files, the game “finds” the VMU and is able to save again, but when I close and re-open the game, the same problem happens (no VMU/not enough blocks).

**EDIT** After playing around with this some more, it seems that the games can “see” the VMUs, as I can access them from the games’ VMU options, but after I’ve saved to one of the virtual VMUs once, the next time I load the game, they are now “full” but nothing can be loaded from them either.

It’s probably also worth noting that I had to manually change the permission for the /.reicast directory to “pi:pi” in order to be able to put the bios files into the “data” directory.

Any idea what could be happening here or how I could fix it? Thanks again for all the hard work to help make playing this stuff possible at all!

[/quote]

No problem! This is an issue I’ve run into before as well — sometimes, the VMU files don’t get formatted correctly upon creation. Fortunately, just requires the Dreamcast OS to reformat the VMU and you’re good to go!

You just got me thinking how to make this easy for everyone, and I’ve come up with a solution! Need to launch the Dreamcast as if there were no CD inserted. Here’s a trick to do that from EmulationStation’s Dreamcast menu…

Go to a terminal on the Pi (or remotely, whatever) and type in:

ln -sv fileThatDoesNotExist ~/RetroPie/roms/dreamcast/systemManager.cdi

Then restart EmulationStation. You should notice a SYSTEMMANAGER entry in the Dreamcast menu now, select it and you will get to the menu you need. Select File and you can manage your VMUs here… “Erase All” will reformat a VMU. This should sort your issue… and I’ve put in a pull request to RetroPie to get this added to the installation procedure.