A New Guy...


malgayne

Still Fresh
Joined
Jul 22, 2009
Messages
11
Age
41
Website
www.wowhead.com
So I've just gotten my GP2X Wiz, and I am very excited about this piece of hardware. I've been looking for something like this for a long time. I hit up http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/wiz.cgi and I downloaded a bunch of different emulators—OutcaST (Atari ST), Vice (C64), gpSP (GBA), PicoDrive (Genesis), Lemonboy (Game Boy), Gpfce (NES), PSX4WIZ (Playstation), and PocketSNES (SNES). I've gotten pretty much everything running the way it should be, but I'm still having trouble with a number of them, and I've come to humbly beg for assistance. :)

  • I found a tos.rom image for OutcaST, and fired it up. I insert a disk image into the drive just fine, and then hit the X button to "run emu". I get a black screen. The select button brings up the keyboard, but clicking that doesn't seem to do anything either. I can click the "Menu" button to bring the menu back, but even resetting the emulator doesn't seem to change anything. I've tried it with multiple disks, all of which seem to work fine in emulators on my Mac.
  • PicoDrive. I run the emulator, load a new ROM, and then...what? The only options are "load rom", "change options", "configure controls", "credits", and "exit". Exit just quits the emulator. I can't figure out how to, you know, PLAY the game. >.<
  • MAME runs great, but there are a number of ROMs that seem to work fine on the Mac version of MAME, but just don't appear in the list to choose from. This includes most of my favorite ROMs, it appears. :(
  • Gfpce. Same problem. I run it, get the menu, load a new ROM, and then there's no menu option to actually play the game.
  • PSX4WIZ. I load the emulator, go to File Options, click "Load a Game without BIOS", choose a game, and all that happens is a long string of text appears that's wider than the screen, and seems to just be the filename of the disk image.

gpSP, PocketSNES, and the MAME games that I can run all seem to work fine, but considering how many different pieces of software don't appear to be working—and that all of them seem to have the same problem—I can't help but think that it must be user error. I'm a longtime gamer, but this is the first time I've really messed around with emulators—beyond just downloading whichever one worked and trying to mess with it as little as possible, so the possibilities of the Wiz both delight and intimidate me. Please be gentle. :p
 
I've also noticed that in a number of emulators, including PocketSNES, I can't figure out if there is a command I can give the system to go to the menu. Is there a way to exit emulators like that without shutting the whole system down? Likewise, I can't figure out how to do things like save states, because once the emulator is actually running, all the buttons have some sort of in-game use. =/
 
Malgayne said:
I've also noticed that in a number of emulators, including PocketSNES, I can't figure out if there is a command I can give the system to go to the menu. Is there a way to exit emulators like that without shutting the whole system down? Likewise, I can't figure out how to do things like save states, because once the emulator is actually running, all the buttons have some sort of in-game use. =/
Have you tried things that don't normally have an in-game use, such as both volume buttons together, both shoulder buttons together, etc?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Malgayne said:
  • PicoDrive. I run the emulator, load a new ROM, and then...what? The only options are "load rom", "change options", "configure controls", "credits", and "exit". Exit just quits the emulator. I can't figure out how to, you know, PLAY the game. >.<
  • Gfpce. Same problem. I run it, get the menu, load a new ROM, and then there's no menu option to actually play the game.
Games should auto start, if they don't, you have bad ROMs or some unsupported compression like rar or 7z (you must use zip).
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I've been trying without any results. Both shoulder buttons will pause MAME, but I can't seem to do anything else with it.

The bad ROM idea occurred to me, but I've tested every one of these in emulators on my computer and never had any trouble, and it's happening on like 65% of my games so I figured it must be something else. The ROMs in question are usually standard file times, like .smc for for SNES, .smd for Genesis, etc.

Thanks so much for your help, guys. Still al ittle mystified by this whole thing.
 
Okay I got a handle on the NES problem. The ROM list had duplicates of every ROM file— one labeled ._romname.nes, and one labelled romname.nes. For some reason EVERY file has a duplicate with a ._ prefix on it. Don't know why that is. :-||

Anyway, I was running the duplicates instead of the actual ROMs. Once I ran the ROMs themselves it worked fine. Seems to have been the problem with PicoDrive too, so I'm good there. I managed to properly load Jumping Flash into the PSX emulator, but after the initial "Sony Computer Entertainment America" screen, it just stayed black (not sure how well I can play PSX ROMs on this thing anyway?).

All that's left is that, the MAME trouble, and the OutcaST problem (which is the one I'm most curious about). Thanks guys!
 
Those ._somefile files are a result of having - at one stage - lived on a Mac. OSX creates them (resource fork) for some reason, I think if you have icon previews turned on or something. Always delete ._*files whenever you encounter them on non-Mac systems, they can present all sorts of problems. . .
 
It's your Mac putting _filenames on the card this will be confusing. The Mac uses a different file system than most other computer systems. It is HFS or another variant, the Mac is able to read and write to PC formatted carts. The Mac will always put a Wastebin folder on the card and uses these _filenames for additional information on the files.
You're best of by zipping all your roms on the Mac drive and then dragging over the files to your SD card. Don't do the Zipping from the Finder on the Card itself you'll end up with _filename files next to the right files. If you have access to a PC for those file manipulations that may solve some of your filename problems.

Make sure you use a compatible Mame Romset for the Mame emulator on the gp2x. I believe the compatible romset is that of Mame 0.37 with a few additions. There are tools available to convert later Mame Romsets back to older romsets - they work on Linux or Windows though. The Windows version does work in Wine on an intel Mac though!
 
Yeah, learned my lesson on that. In retrospect I remember seeing them on CDs I burned which were then opened on PCs, I just spaced them out. :(

is there any reason why I should bother to clear them out other than them being a waste of space? Once I know what they are, I mean?

As for the MAME romset, is this a change that has to be made on the actual roms? Or on the emulator itself?
 
Back
Top