Oric emulated under RetroArch

[Adam]

Hello,

I haven't seen mention of this, so just thought I'd mention it here.

I've had great fun emulating the Oric/Atmos under RetroArch.

I have RetroArch set up on an M1 MacBook Air. That RetroArch has a DosBox Pure core. I guess any installation of RetroArch that can run the DosBox Pure core can do this.

I set up the old Euphoric emulator (written for DOS) to run under DosBox Pure.

It works great, and you get all the usual good stuff from RetroArch - infinite save states with thumbnails, screen filters like scanlines and CRT curvature etc (if you want, depends on how you set it up).

I haven't found a problem with any game I want to play so far. Euphoric is a great emulator, and thanks to RetroArch and the DosBox Pure core, it's been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age.

It's certainly the best way to emulate the Oric that I've found so far, on MacOS on ARM64 architecture. I say 'so far' but I won't be looking any further as it seems to be perfect.

[Jonh]

Hi Adam,

I tried to set up Retroarch on my 'Hackintish', it loads Euphoric into the Pure DOSBox, but I have a keyboard problem once the Atmos is on screen, certain keys seem to be being used as shortcuts.

Did you have to make any adjustments to get the keyboard working properly in the emulator?

Thanks,
Jon

[Adam]

Did you have to make any adjustments to get the keyboard working properly in the emulator?

I've gone through a considerable pain barrier trying to emulate old systems with keyboards, i.e. old home computers rather than games consoles, through RetroArch.

I *think* this is the best way I can distill all the obstacles I've hit and worked around to get to a position I'm quite happy with:

* Be willing to get rid of all hot keys except for 2 crucial ones, the 'game focus' hot key, and the 'menu' hot key. In other words, go to Settings > Input > Hotkeys, and go through EVERY binding there, removing the binding (it tells you at the bottom what button to press to remove the binding for the currently highlighted hotkey) for everything except for 'Game focus' and 'Menu Toggle'. I have 'Game Focus' bound to the command button to the right of the spacebar on my MacBook, and the 'Menu Toggle' bound to the option button to the right of that. Then, once you've loaded a core that depends on keyboard input, you can press 'Game Focus' to pass the keyboard input directly to the emulator. To quickly snap out of a game to save a state, I can quickly press 'Game Focus' to toggle it off, then 'Menu Toggle' to bring up the menu, as the two keys are right next to each other, and neither map to anything important on the Oric, for example. I then save state by using the menu options, then go back to the game and quickly press 'Game Focus' again.

* If you insist on having lots of hotkeys, e.g. to save state, rewind etc, and I tried, and think it may be possible but there were lots of issues I never fully resolved, then: The Settings > Input > Hotkeys > Hotkey Enable item is your friend - set the 'Hotkey Enable' key to something, and then if for example you want the 's' key to be a hot key for saving state, it should only be recognised as a hot key if you are also pressing the key you selected for 'Hotkey Enable'. However, one thing I found on my particular RetroArch, is that the 'game focus' key seemed to always be recognised as a hotkey, even if I wasn't also pressing the 'Hotkey Enable' key. Also, I think RetroArch on my Windows PC behaved slightly differently.

Honestly, other than the above, which I truly hope helps to get you somewhere you're happy with, I don't think I can offer more assistance without going down the rabbit hole again, to jog my memory, and it's already made me lose a lot of hair! I kept thinking I'd got things set up nicely, only to be frustrated eventually. That's why I unbound all but 2 hotkeys in the end. I liked having lots of hotkeys set up, but I can live without them. The saving grace is that I still do what I want quite quickly, which for me is just saving and loading states, because whenever I press 'Menu Toggle', RetroArch goes back to the most recently used menu option.

[Adam]

One further thing that I'll say is that, since the MacBook keyboard layout is very different to the Oric's, for some games it's best to remap keys at the MacOS level, temporarily, for certain games. So I installed something called Karabiner-Elements on my MacBook. Once you've set that up, it puts an icon in the top menubar in MacOs, and it's really quite quick to flip between a normal keyboard profile, and one which maps keys in such a way it makes certain games playable.

It doesn't just apply to the Oric or RetroArch. Installing Karabiner-Elements and learning how to use it and set up profiles is very worthwhile if you're into emulating any system with a different keyboard layout.

[Jonh]

Thanks Adam, here we go...

[Adam]

Good luck