Atari 800 and 5200 (add Bios Autodetect)

[marcelosofth]

Friends, I'm having problems with Bios Atari 800 and 5200, because it is not possible to save an individual Bios for each system, in this case it has to do the same thing that exists for Colecovision and MSX adding Autodetection through the System!

Guy, they use the same core and that is why there is only a single configuration for the 2, so when I choose Bios Atari 5200 it is also used for the Atari 800 and there are the big problems because it has Atari games 800 that do not accept Bios Atari 5200.

Ps: This happens also with Colecovision and MSX, but there is the option of "Auto Detect" as well so the system identifies what type of game is running and calls the corresponding bios, that is what must exist for the Atari 800 and 5200.

bluemsx_cartmapper = "Auto"

[rodw-wilkins]

I have a similar requirement. Since BIOS auto-detect does not work seamlessly, it also appears that the per-content directory config setting are not saved properly with this core (I tried to do this so that it would know whether to launch Atari 5200 vs Atari XE content). I can save it for that instance but it does not know which one to select unless I change it manually.... So if I save it for Atari 5200, those games will load but XE content crashes, and vice-versa it just loads up the Atari 5200 diagnostics instead when launching the XE content...

[Darknior]

The problem of this emulator is that is like a not real Libretro emulator. It use the old emulator menu and options, Nothing was never really ported in Libretro Core Options to help us to configure options by game and save them :(
I really wish one day it will evolve like now it's done on PC98, C64n etc .... because it's a good emulator for sure, games working fine with it, but you must trick your launcher to force options on the atari.ini file yourself.

[rodw-wilkins]

Thanks for the info. By ‘tricking the launcher to force the options in the Atari.ini file myself’ what do you mean exactly?   Can I specify a separate .ini file configuration manually somehow, without using an entirely separate copy of Retroarch?  I use Launchbox as my frontend...

[Darknior]

I'm not very sure for the moment, i don't have try. For the moment i only update some other emulators on Batocera configuen to add Emulation Station some options by games like for this Atari Emulator. I do it also for OpenBOR for exemple.
We edit the emulator INI file on the fly when launching game, and using settings stored in batocera.conf for this game by the user.
OR ... like i do also on OpenBOR, i put some options in the game name, like do some other libretro core like the THOMSON one.
I read these options on launching like if a game is [PAL] or [NTSC] and auto configure it. Users have nothing to do if games are fine named...
They have an idea like it on Retropie too, you can read it on the forum :
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/22392/lr-atari800-5200-artifacting-basic-and-other-guidance

[raphkoster]

The automapper for 5200 carts in this core, last I checked, was hardcoded to use filenames to identify carts, which means that it has terrible odds of autodetecting a cart correctly.

We could improve this with file hashes, but even the cart dumps vary, because many have been "fixed" to have the correct headers on them already. "Fixed" carts are easily made using the emulator (see the Retropie docs here for how: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Atari-800-and-5200/#booting-atari-5200-cartridges). So we would need a pretty extensive list of hashes to check against, unfortunately.