MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hi! I love the SAM - but have an issue in that it is stuck on at the moment.

Let me explain: I can be in the middle of playing a game, but SAM will kick in and spin up a random game every few minutes.

I've run the script to turn OFF SAM but... it's still happening.

What should I be looking at to troubleshoot?

Mewcenary wrote: ↑Fri Aug 04, 2023 6:39 pm

Hi! I love the SAM - but have an issue in that it is stuck on at the moment.

Let me explain: I can be in the middle of playing a game, but SAM will kick in and spin up a random game every few minutes.

I've run the script to turn OFF SAM but... it's still happening.

What should I be looking at to troubleshoot?

That shouldn't be happening, as it should detect your controller. You can try to turn off the autorun option in the settings. Also check that SAM is only set to run from the main menu.

There are some controllers that dont get detected by SAM. It could be that that's the issue here. What kind of controller are you using?

Just a quick question but if I dump on my sdcard videos/films etc...can they be played locally on the Mister like a video player? My Mister is currently running on both my Oled and CRT and I could definitely see myself watching some 90s content through the Mister on my CRT (hell even newer stuff as well). And if it's possible what is the maximum accepted resolution for the video files? I'm talking about the am script of course and since it can play video files from archive.org, I'm guessing nothing should prevent it to run local files right?

https://github.com/mrchrisster/MiSTer_S ... M.ini#L109

Yes, you can set video playback to local and move video files into the /media/fat/video folder (or define another path in the ini)

File format should be divx 640x480

Awesome news! thank you!
I actually feel this should be advertise waaaaay more as a feature, because it turns the mister into a VCR/DVD player it's pretty awesome.
And yes you need to convert the video files but still!

How can you directly bootup a videofile by chosing it in the video folder? I saw a video player extension that installed in the addon that seems to work with remote, but I didn't find how to start it. I didn't see any dedicated script. I must add that my scripts are running cropped on all side on my CRTs for some reason, it doesn't happen in cores, so maybe I missed some crucial infos XD

Thanks, I'm glad we have a video player for mister as well
I'm in the process with wizzo to test another way to play videos on MiSTer and we also want to include this in remote.

Currently SAM will randomly play a video from the folder and there is no way to tell SAM which one you want. To get rid of the crop, you would need to adjust the CRT video mode in SAM's ini. It can be a little daunting to mess with the video mode so your success may vary getting better results.

I wish there was an easier way to control various aspects of video playback on MiSTer but unfortunately it's not officially supported by the community yet (and probably never will). Our best bet is that someone will create a DVD core to play videos and I heard there is one in the works. This way your CRT crop would be correct.

This is awesome. Maybe the answer is in here somewhere but is there a way to display the core/game on the screen while this is running?

Unfortunately not possible. We have put in a request with sorgelig but we don't expect support for such a feature. The best way is to either check the ssh monitor of SAM or get a hardware display like tty2oled.

In other news:

• Saturn support. Easiest way to get it working is use vampier's update script ( www.vampier.net/Saturn ) and then copy your games in cue/bin format to /media/fat/games/Saturn. I recommend a region free bios. You can find it in this thread (Google Drive Link) https://www.reddit.com/r/SegaSaturn/com ... load_link/ . I use "Saturn v1.01a (WW-RF).bin". Don't forget to update with update all as well.
• Define the length for skipping bios messages in MiSTer_SAM.ini

• Added N64 support

I have Amigavision & use Update All, so two main Amiga setups. I am trying to understand how I get SAM to launch the Amigavision setup. I keep launching the Update All migy. Thanks!

Not sure I understand, would you mind explaining this some more? Update all updates the minimig core but shouldn't give you any Amiga games, so not sure what you mean with two amiga setups.

As long as you have the AmigaVision files set up in the right folders and activate Amiga in SAM it should play the amiga games for you.

Yes, I was vague. Sorry.

Normally I would launch Amigavision with its provided MGL which shows up as "Amiga" in the OSD. My other setup is just launching the RBF directly (the file provided by Update All) which is titled "Commodore Amiga." I have different settings for both.

Is there a way for me to launch that MGL with SAM rather than the RBF directly?

I did try and bring everything over to the regular RBF setup, and it pretty much worked except it would not respect my choice of Demos only. I would get games despite the setting. So I figured let's see if I can just launch the MGL.

I can only lock in demos by cheating. Putting them all in games.txt (renaming the original games and demos backup names) and then calling for Games in MiSTer_SAM.ini

No idea. But I get my demos

As of right now, only the Amiga Rbf is supported, no mgl. Strange with the demo selection not working, might be a bug. I'll Look into it when I have some time!

Copy! Meantime, brilliant work. Demos 24/7 now

I found another decent solution. Install Mister FGPA Remote and go to the screenshot section. When you want to know what the game is take a screenshot. It will show the game name and core. So really Mister FGPA Remote could provide what I (and I suspect lots of others) are looking for. It could just do the screenshot functionality every minute or something and could have a setting to delete them to clean up the files if needed.

mrchrister wrote: ↑Tue Aug 22, 2023 9:04 pm

Unfortunately not possible. We have put in a request with sorgelig but we don't expect support for such a feature. The best way is to either check the ssh monitor of SAM or get a hardware display like tty2oled.

In other news:

• Saturn support. Easiest way to get it working is use vampier's update script ( www.vampier.net/Saturn ) and then copy your games in cue/bin format to /media/fat/games/Saturn. I recommend a region free bios. You can find it in this thread (Google Drive Link) https://www.reddit.com/r/SegaSaturn/com ... load_link/ . I use "Saturn v1.01a (WW-RF).bin". Don't forget to update with update all as well.
• Define the length for skipping bios messages in MiSTer_SAM.ini

That's a good way to do it. Remote is awesome!

Anyone's MiSTer SAM break in the last week, possibly due to a MiSTer update? Starting about a week ago my MiSTer SAM kicks in and randoms into a single game, and then gets stuck there as if I pressed a button to play the game that has loaded.

edit: Weird, I recreated my MiSTer_SAM.ini and everything is working again. False alarm I suppose.

New feature:

SAM's GOAT list.
I have created a list of awesome NeoGeo and Arcade attract modes. You can enable this feature from the preset menu.

Any hope of ever fixing the bug where SAM prevents tty2oled from entering sleep/screen saver mode? I love SAM...but not enough to kill my precious OLED. =)

Hey rhester, I'm not planning on supporting the screensaver function anytime soon, sorry. The reason is that it's a very specific use case and getting tty2oled supported wasn't easy in the first place. The dev (paradox) that worked on tty2oled support for SAM has moved on and I wouldn't have time to enable screensaver mode and test it.

My MiSTer with OLED is on 24/7 for the past year and I don't have any burn in on my OLED yet. SAM is showing logos between every core change which resets the OLED, so if you use SAM there should be no need for a screensaver.

The problem isn't when SAM is running...it's that if SAM is even loaded and idle/waiting because I'm actually playing a real core, the OLED screen still won't go into screen-saver mode...so the risk of burn-in ironically isn't when SAM is active, but when it's idle (and that's bad).

Wow, you were quick to respond
It might have to do with the way tty2oled daemon sleeps when SAM is in use. venice added support for SAM a while back and all SAM is doing is tell tty2oled when to take over and when to go back to normal operation. It would be something to discuss with venice.

Hi@all,
there are two tty2oled related things working together.

The control script (Daemon) tty2oled.sh which sends normally the data to display,
and the Screensaver which runs on the Display himself and which is configurred using the settings in the tty2oled ini files when the control script starts.

If SAM is started,

1) the screensaver is disabled (if I remember correctly) sending the command "CMDSWSAVER,0" to the Display,
https://github.com/venice1200/MiSTer_tt ... cmdswsaver

2) and the control script is set to sleep as SAM takes full-control of the Display output.

# 2022-09-20 Support for MiSTer SAM adding the tty2oled "SleepMode"
#            Create the file "/tmp/tty2oled_sleep" by using "touch /tmp/tty2oled_sleep" and the tty2oled Dameon goes to sleep.
#            Remove the file and the tty2oled Daemon goes back to work.

Everything must be reverted to get the display and the Screensaver working again when SAM stops.

Means the the Screensaver must be re-enabled by sending "CMDSWSAVER,1" to the display
and "Sleepfile" /tmp/tty2oled_sleep must be removed.

I think that's all.

Thanks for taking the time to respond, Venice! The best thing would be an ini option in this case to send the restart screensaver command if desired by the user.
I'll play around with this next week.

Thank you both for looking into this!

@venice reactivating the screensaver after sleepfile deletion seems to fix the issue. Just sent you a PR

@rhester72 Screensaver should not get disabled anymore. Please update SAM and see if it works for you.