Open Emu

colinyell's picture

I have just discovered openEmu and its working great as an app but I cant get the quartz plugins to work. I have downloaded the example patches and when i change the ROM path to one that I have tested in the openEmu application nothing happens.

Is this not working because I'm running Lion?

Is there anywhere where I can get more info on openEmu, the site is not very helpful?

Cheers,

Colin

mradcliffe's picture
Re: Open Emu

I'm not familiar with OpenEmu's Qc plugin, but it looks lke the NES QC plugin has not been updated in 2 years. You may be correct in that it may not be working for 10.7 or 10.6 even.

borego's picture
Re: Open Emu

I'm running the OpenEmu patch on 10.7.4 and it's going fine for me. The problem I have is that we don't have the Controller Input to Structure patch seen in vade's videos - do you/does anyone have a .qtz with that patch in it handy??

I've run into the same problem with finding info/resources for OpenEmu - it seems like there's nothing available. I tweeted at their Twitter account yesterday and didn't hear anything back yet, so who knows how that's going.....

destroythings's picture
Re: Open Emu

I have this patch that came with the original OpenEmu quartz package that ive been using to get it into VDMX via syphon.

PreviewAttachmentSize
1+-+OpenEmu.qtz12.31 KB

borego's picture
Re: Open Emu

Ahh, perfect! That's just what I needed :D

colinyell's picture
Re: Open Emu

Its encouraging to hear its working for other people.

I'm using the 1+-+OpenEmu.qtz patch but still no luck. Should I have Open Emu running at the same time?

What about the save states? is it important where the paths are pointing?

Please do not upload software you do not own the rights to distribute.

I have attached a couple of the ROMs I'm trying to load, could they be the issue?

Cheers,

Colin

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Open Emu

EDIT:Looks like it was just a problem w/ not having the control structure...

////// I'm pretty sure it works, it may just that it needs to be run in 32-bit mode, or the plugin recompiled as a 64/32 bit Universal build. I haven't tried it in Lion, but I think I have in SL at some point, and it worked OK. When this was released, there was only a 32-bit runtime.

Either "command+I" on the QC icon and toggle on the 32-bit runtime, or recompile the plugin as a universal build... it may have some limitation to 32 bit though, I do not know, so be careful.

colinyell's picture
Re: Open Emu

I have got quartz running in 32bit mode and still the same result. Just get a black screen.

Any more thoughts?

Cheers,

Colin

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Open Emu

Read through all of the notes on the project... the more I think about it, it seems like you may have to install an external "OpenEMU" framework somewhere, and that they made it look for an external framework instead of it being bundled in the plugin. Like "OpenEMU" may need to be installed, then you'll find that the plugin works.

colinyell's picture
Re: Open Emu

I have the OpenEmu application installed as well as the plugin but I did install that first.

Actualy now I have checked the open EMU application is acting a bit weird. When I run a Rom it works fine but if I try to close the ROM window the window goes black and freezes. If I quit the application and run it again the ROMS automaticly run and work but I cant close them.

I shall try reinstalling.

itsthejayj's picture
Re: Open Emu

I do believe the new version of Open Emu has syphon support if that helps. I remember asking them about QC support about a year ago and they were talking about dropping that functionality. However the QC plugin and bit are still available in the code. Best of luck keep us informed if you manage to get things working.

vade's picture
Re: Open Emu

colinyell wrote:
I have just discovered openEmu and its working great as an app but I cant get the quartz plugins to work. I have downloaded the example patches and when i change the ROM path to one that I have tested in the openEmu application nothing happens.

Is this not working because I'm running Lion?

Is there anywhere where I can get more info on openEmu, the site is not very helpful?

Cheers,

Colin

Hello. I'm one of the developers of OpenEmu.

Long story short: We are focusing on the future - we moved our API to pure 64 bits and newer Obj-C runtime, which means supporting QC plugins, which should be both 32 and 64 bit compatible is not currently possible. We have adopted Syphon which gives you broader application support - but I admit you lose some of the fun possibilities of being able to control the emulators programatically.

Once we get 1.0 out of the door, I may look at re-implementing the QC plugin - if its possible, but for now, we are concentrating on getting a solid 1.0 out.

The reason no one has responded, is because 1.0b7 is no longer supported, and as per our read me's on the github project home page and our latest betas.

Not sure about some of the other comments here, some really off base stuff ;)

vade's picture
Re: Open Emu

Additionally, to be clear, there are potential issues running the QC plugin, and having the newer versions installed. The game cores, which Open Emu uses to run actual emulation, now are a different format with different, updated APIs and many bug fixes. They are not compatible between versions, so in essence, you are forced to use older, unsupported 1.0b7 game cores, with a much more limited set of supported emulators, or run the newer code base, which supports Syphon in the app, and lose compatibility with the QC plugins.

Sorry for the confusion, but we believe in the long run, Syphon support will offer more compelling use cases, and being able to adopt modern runtime features has already allowed for cleaner interfaces and higher performance.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Open Emu

To condense multiple paragraphs above from Vade, it sounds like if you back off to the version that was current at the time of the QCPlugins you should be good, because stuff has been broken.

I don't personally see anything off base in this thread; one guy had his problem fixed by attaching the controller macro - he must have been using the older version. There's nothing off base about my comments about plugin loading and 64/32 bit runtimes, nor the fact that it uses resources external to the plugin. I guess I must have missed something :)

Also, one should be able to use the old codebase OpenEMU with Syphon from QC by broadcasting out of QC using the Syphon server.

YMMV as always.

danwinckler's picture
Re: Open Emu

Inactive/dormant OpenEmu developer here -- hi, everybody!

Just to confirm and clarify a bit further, yes, you can still run the old version of the QC plugins as long as you are very careful about having the correct (old) version of the OpenEmu framework in your /Library/Frameworks/ folder and the old versions of the emulator cores in their proper place, too. This is old (old!) code and it's unsupported so you may have to do some digging back through the git repository and experiment to get things sorted out. I can confirm that this will work in Snow Leopard but can't confirm or deny it working in Lion.

Also, for future reference, the example and debugging compositions are here:

https://github.com/OpenEmu/OpenEmu/tree/master/OpenEmu/Debugging%20Compo...

https://github.com/OpenEmu/OpenEmu/tree/master/OpenEmu/Example%20Composi...

If you try this approach, best of luck! If you'd rather get with the latest and greatest and help bring the QC plugins back to life with the new, optimized code and Syphon awesomeness, we'd welcome your help.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Open Emu

I don't think anyone should be chided just for asking - I'm looking at the ReadMe history at github, that's being said to note the change. Don't see anything, but maybe I'm missing it: https://github.com/OpenEmu/OpenEmu/commits/master/README.md

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Open Emu

Nice!

vade's picture
Re: Open Emu

Please don't speak for me.

Nothing has been broken. The lack of QC plugins is a result of deliberate design decisions and adding of features not possible in the 32 bit runtime. Simply put, B7 is not binary compatible with B8. End of story.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Open Emu

No problem, afaik I'm speaking for myself and not you. I was clarifying to the user that they could simply roll back and still have it work, which was "read between the lines" style buried in the midst of a bunch of reasons (valid, I'm sure) for the reason it doesn't work anymore. I'm sorry that I phrased it as "condensing" what you were saying.

It's doubtful that a subset of features couldn't have remained working with a little more effort, making some rules so that 32 bit loads B7, or a "custom version" of B7 setup to work. I can see why someone would just go "it's not worth the time or effort". The feature set was broken/regressed, on purpose or not.

My comments are just to try to get the user(s) up and running using the feature set they need, as directly and quickly as possible. If you want to talk about it further, email me or call me up.

vade's picture
Re: Open Emu

sigh

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Open Emu

vade wrote:
sigh

I'm sorry that you find my take on it sigh-worthy or exasperating. Have a good one.

vade's picture
Re: Open Emu

I find it exasperating and sigh worthy because your claim more energy would somehow fix the fact that the 32 bit Obj-C runtime does not have non-fragile ivar support, and that somehow, because we are lazy and don't care enough, we had to drop QC plugin support.

By all means, go fix it. Apple and every Obj-C developer out there would really appreciate it.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Open Emu

I'll look at the code sometime. I think you're convoluting a couple of things and that the statement is loaded. Making classes private would be the typical way to work around that, and if that's N/A here, then there you go, I see why you didn't do it.

I don't think this is an emotional issue, just a "dude had to get something working, how can they get it working how they expect it to." My comments are based on that goal. This is veering OT, and I don't want to go down that rabbithole. You can contact me personally or start a new thread, because this now has little relationship to the OP.

danwinckler's picture
Re: Open Emu

Quote:
It's doubtful that a subset of features couldn't have remained working with a little more effort, making some rules so that 32 bit loads B7, or a "custom version" of B7 setup to work. I can see why someone would just go "it's not worth the time or effort". The feature set was broken/regressed, on purpose or not.

Would that it were so. This is a large, complex, open source project with many lines of code from disparate sources (and in many languages: C, C++, Objective-C, x86 assembly, ...), developed as a labor of love in the free time of those involved. As in vade's ivar example, there are a lot of nontrivial development challenges to be triaged and tackled to get this thing from promise to reality. Any fork for a special case (as you suggested) is something that has to be championed and argued for in a democracy of developers (again: free time, side project).

If you don't believe me, make yourself a pot of tea and look back through the past 3+ years of commits in the OpenEmu repository.

colinyell's picture
Re: Open Emu

Thanks for all of your help here. It looks like my simple solution is to run build 8 and just syphon to quartz.

Where do I find OpenEmu build 8 as I can not find it on Git hub or anywhere on the net?

colinyell's picture
Re: Open Emu

I still cant find the version of Open Emu with Syphon. Anyone know where to look?

colinyell's picture
Re: Open Emu

I worked it out eventually, Git Hub, compile and build.

Cheers,

Colin