[mythtv-users] MythGame and SNES emulator woes

[Jesse Guardiani]

byron wrote:
> Jesse Guardiani wrote:
>   
>> byron wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> My recent Myth project has been to get MythGame functional.  My goal was
>>> to get MAME, NES and SNES all working through the MythGame interface.
>>> So far I've been successful in getting MAME and NES roms detected and
>>> playable through MythGame.  However SNES has proven to be a little
>>> trickier.
>>>
>>> My problem:
>>> When going into the games menu it scans for SNES games every time but
>>> never updates the UI or the database as far as I can tell.  Running the
>>> emulators from a console works in both zsnes and snes9x.  I do not see
>>> any info logged to the backend log with verbose set to all, nor do I see
>>> anything sent the console when running mythfrontend from the command
>>> line.  I have tried zipped and unzipped roms with varying permissions
>>> all to no avail.  I've also tried using both zsnes and snes9x without
>>> success.
>>>
>>> Here is my config as it appears in setup
>>>
>>> Dropdown: Zsnes
>>> binary: /usr/games/bin/zsnes -m
>>> rompath: /media/emu/snes/roms
>>> screenshots: (blank)
>>>
>>> The setup seems very simple I just don't see what I'm doing wrong.
>>> Anyone have any ideas?  Is there a way to increase logging with
>>> mythfrontend?
>>>   
>>>       
>> Yeah, wrap the snes9x binary with a shell script that logs command line
>> options as well as
>> command output.
>>
>> That's what I did. I had more trouble with xmame than snes9x though.
>> I'll try to get you
>> my command line later tonight.
>>
>> First, some questions:
>> 1.) Why zsnes? Why not snes9x? I've had better performance, features,
>> and general luck
>>    with snes9x 0.43. Just don't forget to make it suid root or DGA won't
>> work.
>> 2.) What versions are you running?
>> 3.) You're running Gentoo, right?
>> 4.) Which ROMs? Some don't pass their checksums, like Super Metroid, so
>> MythGame
>>     won't add them.
>>
>>     
>
> 1: No reason in particular.  I vaguely remember seeing that some people
> preferred zsnes.  However, snes9x exhibits the same behavior.  I have no
> real preference either way.
>
> 2: MythTV 0.18.1
>    MythGame 0.18.1
>    zsnes 1.42
>    snes9x 1.43
>    MySQL 4.1.14
>
> 3: Yes
>
> 4: Roms were retrieved from Vimm's Lair http://vimm.net (if it makes any
> difference).
>    Super Mario World
>    Super Mario Kart
>    Super Mario All-Stars
>    Super Mario RPG
>    Legend of Zelda (Link to the past)
>    Donkey Kong Country
>    Final Fantasy 3
>    Super Castlevania IV
>
>
> I'll write up a wrapper script tonight to see if I can get some more
> visibility on the matter.
>   

First: Your mythtv user is part of the games group, right?
Second: I'm running MySQL 4.0.x. Not sure if that matters.

So those roms are in:
    /media/emu/snes/roms

And when you run snes9x as your mythtv user with a rom in that dir as an 
argument it works?

In that case something is probably wrong with just the scan portion of 
MythGame.
So... when you run mythfrontend as your mythtv user from the command 
line, you don't see
any commandline output when you scan your rom dirs?

I run my mythfrontend from kdm and I think I remember seeing lots of 
stuff in
/home/mythtv/.xsession-errors when I scan my rom dir.

If you go the wrapper route, definitely look for the command line 
MythGame is using to scan
your rom dir, then try to run that exact commandline as your mythtv user 
and see if anything
odd happens.

-- 
Jesse Guardiani
Programmer/Sys Admin
jesse at wingnet.net