MiSTer Super Attract Mode (SAM) is now available - the first game screensaver for your MiSTer!

[Reg]

Thank you very much for the update here. Loving what you have done and I must call out the swap on the text positions, brilliant.

10/10

This is perfect for my system.

[Mellified]

I just uploaded an update to Super Attract Mode which requires the latest tty2oled. With that you'll get the standard tty2oled core graphics for 10 seconds, a transition, then the game and system name are displayed. Open to suggestions for further features!

To update SAM simply run MiSTer_SAM_on.sh and let it auto-update.

[PixelPeZ]

So for some reason the script glitched out for me and started switching cores and games every 2 minutes even if I was playing them... and it was super fun! Could this be an official feature with an adjustable timer like or a would it be possible to map a button or mister physical input for next random game?

[Mellified]

So for some reason the script glitched out for me and started switching cores and games every 2 minutes even if I was playing them... and it was super fun! Could this be an official feature with an adjustable timer like or a would it be possible to map a button or mister physical input for next random game?

You can disable input detection in the INI and SAM will work that way always. You can also run a command via ssh to trigger the next game automatically:

Code: Select all

/media/fat/Scripts/MiSTer_SAM_on.sh next

If you want to specify a system you can do that as well:

Code: Select all

/media/fat/Scripts/MiSTer_SAM_on.sh next arcade

The list of keywords for each system are only in the script at the moment, but you can scroll down a few pages to see them all.

[rhester72]

Over the past maybe week to two weeks, something's changed - the Mega CD BIOS is the same as it was, but it's no longer automatically booting into the game within a few seconds, it just sits at the BIOS screen indefinitely. Anyone else see this?

[pbsk8]

how do I configure this script to run cps and neogeo games only?

All the games are already inside the microsd in mister.

[CartoonDonkey]

This is brilliant.

[SmaMan]

2. Check to see if you have a leftover MBC file in the directory for that core. If you do - delete it. That's a temp copy used during the loading process. If the MiSTer can't overwrite it for some reason then you get the same game for that core every time.

I seem to get that a lot for SegaCD. If I delete the !MBC directory, it'll be random for a little while, but eventually get stuck on the same one or two games whenever the SegaCD core comes up, and sure enough the !MBC directory will have reappeared. My ISOs are on an external SSD and are in .CHD format. Any idea what's causing this?

EDIT: Oooohkay, as I was typing that comment it picked a totally different one after picking Time Gal three times in a row. Keeping an eye on the !MBC directory, and it looks like it has four copies of some CHDs in there right now, one of which is Time Gal.

[rhester72]

Issue reported here:

https://github.com/mrchrisster/MiSTer_SAM/issues/84

and here:

https://github.com/pocomane/MiSTer_Batc ... /issues/16

[venice]

Hi mrchrisster and Mellified,
you got an PM from me.

We released an new Version of tty2oled which has a few changed related to text output.

CU

[UScr00ge]

MiSTer_SAM has been working fantasticaly for months until I performed a recent update of the script and an update of MiSTer. Now it seems like it the selection process of a ROM bugs out on any system other than MAME. You can actually see the script fail to make it all the way through the directory structure ... it stops midway through the menu during the process of selecting a rom. I've seen it do it for PCE, NES and several other systems. Nothing with my ROM structure has changed.

Thinking about starting troubleshooting by deleting my MiSTer_SAM.ini file and see if it goes a way. If it works I'll just migrate my exclusions to the new INI file. Anyone else having any issues like this?

edit: Deleting the ini made no difference

[UScr00ge]

I made a video showing what happens when the SAM script fails to load a game ...

9jThyY5.mp4

(2.62 MiB) Downloaded 191 times

I kicked off SAM from an SSH window on my PC to show the issue. In the terminal window, this is the log that appeared at the time of the failed load:

Code: Select all

/media/fat/Scripts#  Removing other instances of S93mistersam... Done!
 Stopping activity monitoring... Done!
 Quickstarting SAM... Done!
 Let Mortal Kombat begin!
 Removing other instances of MiSTer_SAM_MCP... Done!
 Stopping activity monitoring...find: paths must precede expression: `Update_MiSTerBIOS.sh'
find: possible unquoted pattern after predicate `-iname'?
kill: usage: kill [-s sigspec | -n signum | -sigspec] pid | jobspec ... or kill -l [sigspec]
 Done!
 Starting MiSTer Super Attract Mode...
 Monitoring controller /dev/input/js0...
 Monitoring controller /dev/input/js1...
 Monitoring controller /dev/input/js2...
 Monitoring mouse activity...
 Monitoring keyboard hidraw1...
 Monitoring keyboard hidraw4...
 Monitoring keyboard hidraw5...
 Done!
 Starting now on the SNK NeoGeo: Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 (Korean) (rbff2k)

[LamerDeluxe]

I made a video showing what happens when the SAM script fails to load a game ...

I kicked off SAM from an SSH window on my PC to show the issue. In the terminal window, this is the log that appeared at the time of the failed load:

Code: Select all

/media/fat/Scripts#  Removing other instances of S93mistersam... Done!
 Stopping activity monitoring... Done!
 Quickstarting SAM... Done!
 Let Mortal Kombat begin!
 Removing other instances of MiSTer_SAM_MCP... Done!
 Stopping activity monitoring...find: paths must precede expression: `Update_MiSTerBIOS.sh'
find: possible unquoted pattern after predicate `-iname'?
kill: usage: kill [-s sigspec | -n signum | -sigspec] pid | jobspec ... or kill -l [sigspec]
 Done!
 Starting MiSTer Super Attract Mode...
 Monitoring controller /dev/input/js0...
 Monitoring controller /dev/input/js1...
 Monitoring controller /dev/input/js2...
 Monitoring mouse activity...
 Monitoring keyboard hidraw1...
 Monitoring keyboard hidraw4...
 Monitoring keyboard hidraw5...
 Done!
 Starting now on the SNK NeoGeo: Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 (Korean) (rbff2k)

I'm having a similar problem. I've just converted my MegaCD images to chd and they work when loaded by hand. They are located in media/fat/games/MegaCD on the SD Card. MiSTer SAM tries to open the game but it ends with the file selector opened.
It also doesn't like it when games are individually zipped and it will fail in a similar way then. I noticed this with the Genesis and SNES cores.
EDIT: Already tried fixing things by deleting all SAM-related files and copying the latest MiSTer_SAM_on script.
EDIT2: When the MegaCD core fails to load with the file selector open, the file selector is inside the games/ZXNext directory, which is the last sub-directory in games.
EDIT3: If I select MegaCD only from the SAM menu, the first game will work and the ones after that fail with the file selector open.

[barfood]

Just curious... why print "Let Mortal Kombat begin!" to the screen at every execution? I find that confusing since the game launched is never actually Mortal Kombat

[LamerDeluxe]

Just finished building my TTY2OLED, which I mainly wanted to get because of super attract mode. I'm getting Error CMDTEXT and Error CMDGEO on the display when using the latest MiSTer SAM, which I installed manually.

[Mr. Encyclopedia]

What SAM really needs is support to load both cores and game files from the command line. I wonder how much work it would be to add that support, and if it's something that could be done just in Main or if it would require changes to each core as well.

[LamerDeluxe]

Yeah, loading games seems to cause the most problems. SAM has to use tricks to do so, MiSTer might be able to do that better, though I guess it is quite a bit of work to create that functionality.

I get error messages about my NES everdrive archive being corrupted, even though it isn't. I had Neo Geo working fine, but now it hardly works. Core or MiSter updates can easily break the script. One thing is if you have multiple copies of the same core, like test builds for instance, that the script seems to have problems with that.

Like I was expecting it tried to run readme.md on the Megadrive core yesterday, which seems to stop the script functioning. I'll add that one to the blacklist, that should solve it.

I fixed the TTY2OLED part of the script and added the information to the ticket that Venice, the creator of TTY2OLED, created for it. Really handy to be able to see the name of the currently running game on it.

[Sigismond0]

Don't know if it's possible, but is there any chance of support for this being added for i2c2oled. The size of the yellow "header" section looks like it should be just right to display the game name and keep the core logo in the blue.

[Sigismond0]

Any ideas on why I get this error screen when enabling TTY2OLED support? Outside of MiSTer_SAM the core graphics pop up beautifully. In MiSTer_SAM, it shows the core graphic, then swaps to this error screen instead of instead of showing the game name. Any thoughts on why?

afAFSbN.jpg (102.37 KiB) Viewed 10830 times

[hipsofjw]

Has anyone been able to successfully use this in offline mode? Here's what happens whenever I try and run it following the instructions on the github either from the MiSTer menu or from SSH:

- /media/fat/Scripts/MiSTer_SAM_on.sh
- autoboot menu
- enable autoboot
- SAM required files not found.
- Surprised? Check your INI.
- Proceeds to try and download stuff from Github (which it can't since it's blocked in my country)
- Times out
- Any key to escape

I've tried over and over again to get this running but it just won't operate in offline mode since it has to connect to github to even start. I don't really understand the "Surprised? Check your INI." I don't see anything in the ini file about running autoboot or offline mode.

[LamerDeluxe]

Any ideas on why I get this error screen when enabling TTY2OLED support? Outside of MiSTer_SAM the core graphics pop up beautifully. In MiSTer_SAM, it shows the core graphic, then swaps to this error screen instead of instead of showing the game name. Any thoughts on why?

There's a ticket for this problem here: https://github.com/mrchrisster/MiSTer_SAM/issues/95

I made a fix for this, that also adds the newly added tty2oled option of random transitions. Just replace your MiSTer_SAM_on.sh script with the one in the attached zip.

[Sigismond0]

That did the trick. Thanks!

[LamerDeluxe]

That did the trick. Thanks!

I'm glad to hear that!

[UScr00ge]

Having a new weird problem with SAM where only Arcade games are being randomly selected ... not GBA or SNES or Genesis or anything else.

Wondering if a recent update_all MiSTer update broke it. Anyone else having this issue?

[UScr00ge]

I'm not sure if it changed on the MiSTer side via update_all.sh, or via a MiSTer SAM update, but my SAM is now correctly traversing all of the available cores again

[LamerDeluxe]

I'm not sure if it changed on the MiSTer side via update_all.sh, or via a MiSTer SAM update, but my SAM is now correctly traversing all of the available cores again

Happy to hear that!

I think the new MGL files could help the MiSTer SAM script to work more reliably, if it was adapted to use them.

[Sigismond0]

I'm not sure if it changed on the MiSTer side via update_all.sh, or via a MiSTer SAM update, but my SAM is now correctly traversing all of the available cores again

Happy to hear that!

I think the new MGL files could help the MiSTer SAM script to work more reliably, if it was adapted to use them.

Yeah, if SAM could randomly select a ROM, create a MGL, and then use that to launch it that would be great. No more copying ROMs into a temp directory, and no more cases where that gets interrupted by a shutdown or something leaving a broken file. Theoretically that should also allow for much wider core compatibility right?

[LamerDeluxe]

I'm not sure if it changed on the MiSTer side via update_all.sh, or via a MiSTer SAM update, but my SAM is now correctly traversing all of the available cores again

Happy to hear that!

I think the new MGL files could help the MiSTer SAM script to work more reliably, if it was adapted to use them.

Yeah, if SAM could randomly select a ROM, create a MGL, and then use that to launch it that would be great. No more copying ROMs into a temp directory, and no more cases where that gets interrupted by a shutdown or something leaving a broken file. Theoretically that should also allow for much wider core compatibility right?

Yes, that is what I'm expecting, should be less fragile than it is now. Alternatively have it create folders of MGL files, where you could remove games you don't want included in the attract mode.

[Mr. Encyclopedia]

Yeah honestly I'd be fine with a SAM that just randomly chooses from a folder of MGL files. The process of making MGL files can be pretty easily automated so I could see a world where I put shortcuts to my top 100 games in there, or let SAM or some other script generate MGL files for every stupid rom in my complete collection.

Looking at the github page it looks like mrchrisster and others are looking into MGL file support in SAM, I might just take a look myself and see if I can make my own variation of it.

[LamerDeluxe]

Good to hear MGL support is already being looked into! SAM is such a good combination with the TTY2OLED display.