Game discs on raspberry pi Lakka

Libretro Lakka
#1

So I plugged my external DVD drive up to the raspberry pi 3 running lakka. It detects it, and I can even look at the files on the discs.

What I find odd is that I can not figure out how to play my legitimately owned original PlayStation game discs, but I have no problem loading up copies of the discs and playing them.

I really just want to play the games directly from the game discs. Any advice on starting an a game from disc? I tried scanning, and lakka doesn’t recognize the games as games, and the emulator doesn’t start the disc either-- at least not a way I could figure out.

#2

RetroArch doesn’t support running games directly from disc. You would have to rip it to a bin/cue image first.

Someone was trying to play bin/cue images from optical discs awhile back to get the same sort of feel but I think he ran into issues with seek times or something…?

#3

I think I can fix it so that it does. Lol I just thought it was weird since it’s an actual game, but I get why. It’s code that would be useless to most people.

The other persons latency problem makes sense. It’s having to read an image from a real disk. Or the drive was slow.

I am doing it for the feel. I’ve got almost everything ready except this, and the VGA to YPbPr converter I’m almost done with. I’m putting the Pi 3 and the DVD drive, into my PSOne shell with the Sony PSOne LCD screen. I could do the video through the auxiliary, but I tested that and it looks bad.

This Lakka theme fits perfect. I just tried it yesterday and love it.

#4

I was asking because I didn’t want to do work if there really were an option that I just overlooking. Thanks though!

I know I can figure out how to do this with C++, but I’m pretty new with it. I’m also learning bash, and I know XML. Would bash or XML be easier to interface pcsx rearmed? I’ve only done web pages in XML, that’s why I don’t know for that one yet.

#5

I believe it’s a frontend issue rather than a core issue, and RetroArch is written in C. I think it’s probably going to be a pretty substantial task, actually.

#6

Yeah, sorry. I’ve been awake two days. I meant for the frontend interface to pcsx rearmed. I’ve got some ideas that might work. I was thinking a bash script, but I’m not sure yet if that would be appropriate. I haven’t found anything useful to do in XML yet. I’m gonna try a solution later when I wake up that wouldn’t require any programming if it works. I’m going to relabel a link to the dvd drive as an img file extension, us dd to copy it to usb, then use brasero to make a cue and bin iso of the usb. I’ll try to get the emulator to load that to link it with the DVD drive.

#7

heh, ok, sounds promising. Good luck :smiley:

#8

Well, I did it. I made a cue and bin iso image of the link to the DVD drive.

I wasn’t at all surprised to find that it did not do what I wanted it to do lol. The emulator just rejects it.

So, I don’t know if epsxe has public source code, but I’m going to try to wedge some classes and objects into pcsx rearmed that are going to function similarly to epsxe’s if I find its source code. I’ll edit the menu to include a disk option too. Hopefully a developer updates the emulator with this option before I do this, because this will take me months since I’ll be doing it in my free time.

Do you guys want it when I’m done?

#9

ePSXe is closed-source, so they won’t be any help, no. I think Mednafen can run physical discs, though…? If so, that may be a good place to look for ideas.

If you can get something going, sure, we’d love to at least take a look if not merge it straightaway.

#10

I was afraid it would be closed source, since I saw that the android version of it isn’t free last I looked.

CD support was removed in version 0.9.38 in Mednafen. I’ll see if I can find the source for 0.9.37 or earlier after I finish my schoolwork. I think this would be easier on me since Mednafin is command line driven. Analyzing the code for it and pcsx rearmed is what is going to take me the longest. I haven’t messed with anything on this scale yet. That’s probably what will take months, but maybe not if it’s well commented.

Another software code that I want to look at is Kodi’s. I hope it’s not closed source. It has a dvd player that will start playing my dvd’s just by pushing play. It’s pretty much exactly what I want for playstation emulation. So if I find the Mednafen source, and if Kodi’s is open, then I’ll write something that is based on both for the discs to run in Lakka. After that, it’s easy to make the operating system run the game disc at startup if a game disc is inserted.

The physical disc functionality is the biggest missing piece to the PSOne project that I’m doing. I’m going to show it on my youtube channel, but I just think it would be awesome to do anyway. I saw another project that a girl did like this that I like, and I have everything to do exactly what she did. But mine is going much further. I’ll get an Odroid to see if I can do more than I can with the Pi, but so far all I have planned is for the Raspberry Pi 3.

I’m desoldering a lot off of it off so that it fits in the case with the disc reader, and re wiring the usb’s somewhere else. I might do USB’s where the memory card slots are. I am either reassembling the PSOnes disc drive with the dvd drive’s guts, or just using the dvd drive as is, depends if I can fit the stuff and have it work well. I’m shrinking a usb powered hub to support the drive. I’m taking the VGA to YPbPr adaptor that I made to non-invasively interface the LCD input with a breadboard, and fitting the stuff onto a much smaller PCB. I have to put a fan in it too, but I don’t see where it can go without ruining the look. I do a lot of hardware stuff, getting the physical stuff together will take me a week at the longest.

I’m glad I found Lakka. The menu is AWESOME for this project! I’m glad I messed my RetroPie install up, or I wouldn’t have given it a shot. My friends are gonna drop logs when they see this finished lol

#11

Sounds ambitious! Good luck with it :slight_smile:

You should be able to find older revisions of mednafen’s source code in our cores’ repos, though I’m not sure if we preemptively carve out anything before we commit it. It’s worth checking out, at least.

#12

I searched for Mednafen, and had a return of beetle listings. Are they the same?

#13

Nevermind, it’s part of it. I only found one version for psx in the repo though.

#14

Yeah, beetle is based on mednafen.