Castaway Atari St


christo930

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Does anyone know if there is a way to change the control scheme in the atarist emulator(s)? When I play games on the C64, I reassign one of the other buttons to "up" so I can have a jump button and a fire button. It's actually one of the reasons I would rather play with an emulator than the real thing. I'm trying to play rainbow islands and it's impossible with using the joypad thing as up. If not, can it be done with the Amiga emulator? If not not, can anyone add it? I'm sure I'm not the only one who likes to do that.

Chris
 
christo930 said:
Does anyone know if there is a way to change the control scheme in the atarist emulator(s)? When I play games on the C64, I reassign one of the other buttons to "up" so I can have a jump button and a fire button. It's actually one of the reasons I would rather play with an emulator than the real thing. I'm trying to play rainbow islands and it's impossible with using the joypad thing as up. If not, can it be done with the Amiga emulator? If not not, can anyone add it? I'm sure I'm not the only one who likes to do that.

Chris

This is not possible with Castaway, or at least it was not the last time I checked. And you are right, you are not the only one who would like to do that. This is very sad, because this makes many (most?) games useless. Who wants to use a virtual keyboard to launch a grenade, use turbo or change weapon?

It is possible to assign buttons to keys with UAE4All, but as far as I remember, it was not very convenient. And UAE4All is not as fast as Castaway, most games do not run fullspeed on the GP2X (and often they do not run at all).

I have to say that I was fond of computers when I was a kid, I owned a Thomson, an Atari, an Amiga1200 and some PCs. I never owned a console. So when I bought the GP2X, I believed I would mainly use it to emulate computers, but I gave up, and now I use my GP2X for homebrew and Megadrive/SNES/NeoGeo emulation.

Computer emulators on GP2X are not mature/stable enough, controls are impossible/hard to properly setup, loading time is too long. Unfortunaltely, the best option is to use SNES or Megadrive version of Atari/Amiga games when available.
 
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If theres some interest bug me and I'll take care of it :)

The older castaway (on GP32) was keymappable and supported config files (and loadingup configs based on disk image automatically, and so on.) I ended up dropping that way back when converting it for gp2x since I didn't think many people really used it, and I was rewriting a lot of stuff at the time.

I can add a rudimentary keymapper in there ("assign spacebar to button_X", that sort of thing.)

Remind me in a bit (week or two).. I've had a really really bad last year for work, so just getting back to normalacy now (whew!)

jeff
 
skeezix said:
If theres some interest bug me and I'll take care of it :)

The older castaway (on GP32) was keymappable and supported config files (and loadingup configs based on disk image automatically, and so on.) I ended up dropping that way back when converting it for gp2x since I didn't think many people really used it, and I was rewriting a lot of stuff at the time.

I can add a rudimentary keymapper in there ("assign spacebar to button_X", that sort of thing.)

Remind me in a bit (week or two).. I've had a really really bad last year for work, so just getting back to normalacy now (whew!)

jeff

That would be awesome. The ability to make x or y as joystick up and x or y (or whatever) assigned to a key on the computer kb. That would make so many of the games more playable.
 
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skeezix said:
If theres some interest bug me and I'll take care of it
smile.gif


The older castaway (on GP32) was keymappable and supported config files (and loadingup configs based on disk image automatically, and so on.) I ended up dropping that way back when converting it for gp2x since I didn't think many people really used it, and I was rewriting a lot of stuff at the time.

I can add a rudimentary keymapper in there ("assign spacebar to button_X", that sort of thing.)

Remind me in a bit (week or two)..
I'm liking the sound of this!
biggrin.gif
 
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yes, this would be a very nice feature! skeezix, you are the man.
 
Course I am (we all are!) .. but accolades for this when I do it :) Strangely, I'm also getting various requests for the PSP version too, out of the blue. Yay for Atari ST :)

Bug me next week .. just got back from vacation and hell-year of work so getting my brain organized again .. best not take on too much this week, need to veg a bit :)

jeff
 
Hey Skeezix! I emailed you earlier today about this (but on the wiz), and only just noticed this thread, coincidence!! Anyways, hope this will be easy to do for gp2x and wiz at the same time when you get round to it. Stunt Car Racer will be even more fun!!

Thats right I remember the control mapping files I used to have on the GP32, Captive used 4 different mappings that you cycled through with the select button. Ideal! If you can use the same system maybe can just copy over my old .cnf files? Hmm but then we have more buttons now... Will wait and see.

Big ups to the ST!

:)
 
skeezix said:
Course I am (we all are!) .. but accolades for this when I do it :) Strangely, I'm also getting various requests for the PSP version too, out of the blue. Yay for Atari ST :)

Bug me next week .. just got back from vacation and hell-year of work so getting my brain organized again .. best not take on too much this week, need to veg a bit :)

jeff

Is the time right to start bugging?:)

Chris
 
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Not a bad time; time is still a little curnchy but life is looking up :)

I guess the question right now (to delay you guys? hmm ;), is defining what we're talking about.

I think I 'overkilled' it on GP32 .. was a good system, but maybe overdone and over-generalized. (ie: That one could have config files, one autoloaded with a given disk image (same filename as disk image with different extension I think), and it had a key-binding that let it load another config file; so folks could map left-shoulder to go to file 1, and right shoulder to go to file 3, while its on file 2, say, and thus rotate through a series of configs in quick succession, etc. Sick, but maybe overkill ;) You could also pull up a menu, to pick from a config file in a directory.

So what are we talking here..

1) GP2x and Wiz both (maybe PSP is I'm feeling uppity that day)
2) For Wiz version, fix 'control menu' (joy or mouse or joymouse/etc) to not move instant-fast, so actually usable ;)
3) .....

Do we need to just hit a menu (start -> pick config -> show list from a directory with .cfg extensions say), and pick one?
Do we need auto-load config based on filename?

I forget how I did it on gp32, but I think it was formatted like:

host-key <whitespace> ST-key or Effect <whitespace> effect-option (not applicable for st-keys)

I also had special log to handle shift/caps/etc, but I think I'd like to ignore that; ie: when you hit 'A' key on keyboard its actually 'a'. To get 'A' its shift+'a', but in reality, games wouldn't generally care about the difference of A to a, they just want 'a' (except for Nethack and maybe flight sims which tended to overdo the keybindings.)

So in theory, a config is really just..

key_y st_up
key_x st_a

That sort. Could be some special ones..

key_rtrigger load_config 'foobar.cfg'
key_x set_clockspeed 600

That sort. What special 'effect' bindings would be needed? 'load config file'? Is that useful? Setting clock? Setting frameskip (not needefd for Wiz likely, but whatever.) Loading a floppy? Ejecting Floppy? I'd rather avoid unnecessary ones of course, time being hard to come by and all that.

One note .. I imagine these keybindings would be 'activated' as a control mode; ie: joy or mouse or custom-config, for example. Why? Because the given control modes define what the keys do, so when ytou load a config you're essentially altering the control mode, ie: switching it.

this suggests some effrcts would be control mappings..

key_y joy_up
key_left mouse_moveleft
key_right mouse_clickleft

That sort.

ie: So you could use the config to redo the built in defaults. (ie: The built ins would essentially become default config files.)

So this suggests..

Filename.ctl (say) is a config file that is shown as a control mode .. I'd include a few defaults (if they can be expressed in terms of config files anyway), and
Filename.cfg (say) is a pure config file. (The difference being you want some to show as control modes, and some to be loaded _by_ control modes, in the example above where you have a button that cycles through modes.)

I suppose there could be meta too..

show_title <- show nothing
show_title MyMode 10,30 <- show text MyMode at 10,30, so that you could cycle through your own custom configs and have the current 'mode' shown

Anyway, you see that I can keep going off in space with ideas and options, but probably half of the above is not needed.

So question is..

WHAT IS REALLY NEEDED, AT ITS CORE? I don't want to over do it, and I don't have time to over do it :)

jeff
 
skeezix said:
Not a bad time; time is still a little curnchy but life is looking up :)

I guess the question right now (to delay you guys? hmm ;) , is defining what we're talking about.

I think I 'overkilled' it on GP32 .. was a good system, but maybe overdone and over-generalized. (ie: That one could have config files, one autoloaded with a given disk image (same filename as disk image with different extension I think), and it had a key-binding that let it load another config file; so folks could map left-shoulder to go to file 1, and right shoulder to go to file 3, while its on file 2, say, and thus rotate through a series of configs in quick succession, etc. Sick, but maybe overkill ;) You could also pull up a menu, to pick from a config file in a directory.

So what are we talking here..

1) GP2x and Wiz both (maybe PSP is I'm feeling uppity that day)
2) For Wiz version, fix 'control menu' (joy or mouse or joymouse/etc) to not move instant-fast, so actually usable ;)
3) .....

Do we need to just hit a menu (start -> pick config -> show list from a directory with .cfg extensions say), and pick one?
Do we need auto-load config based on filename?

I forget how I did it on gp32, but I think it was formatted like:

host-key <whitespace> ST-key or Effect <whitespace> effect-option (not applicable for st-keys)

I also had special log to handle shift/caps/etc, but I think I'd like to ignore that; ie: when you hit 'A' key on keyboard its actually 'a'. To get 'A' its shift+'a', but in reality, games wouldn't generally care about the difference of A to a, they just want 'a' (except for Nethack and maybe flight sims which tended to overdo the keybindings.)

So in theory, a config is really just..

key_y st_up
key_x st_a

That sort. Could be some special ones..

key_rtrigger load_config 'foobar.cfg'
key_x set_clockspeed 600

That sort. What special 'effect' bindings would be needed? 'load config file'? Is that useful? Setting clock? Setting frameskip (not needefd for Wiz likely, but whatever.) Loading a floppy? Ejecting Floppy? I'd rather avoid unnecessary ones of course, time being hard to come by and all that.

One note .. I imagine these keybindings would be 'activated' as a control mode; ie: joy or mouse or custom-config, for example. Why? Because the given control modes define what the keys do, so when ytou load a config you're essentially altering the control mode, ie: switching it.

this suggests some effrcts would be control mappings..

key_y joy_up
key_left mouse_moveleft
key_right mouse_clickleft

That sort.

ie: So you could use the config to redo the built in defaults. (ie: The built ins would essentially become default config files.)

So this suggests..

Filename.ctl (say) is a config file that is shown as a control mode .. I'd include a few defaults (if they can be expressed in terms of config files anyway), and
Filename.cfg (say) is a pure config file. (The difference being you want some to show as control modes, and some to be loaded _by_ control modes, in the example above where you have a button that cycles through modes.)

I suppose there could be meta too..

show_title <- show nothing
show_title MyMode 10,30 <- show text MyMode at 10,30, so that you could cycle through your own custom configs and have the current 'mode' shown

Anyway, you see that I can keep going off in space with ideas and options, but probably half of the above is not needed.

So question is..

WHAT IS REALLY NEEDED, AT ITS CORE? I don't want to over do it, and I don't have time to over do it :)

jeff

I guess just the ability to assign d-pad movements to buttons and letters to buttons.
Just for example, in rainbow islands I'd like to have dpad up do nothing and have one of the buttons be dpad up instead. It would be nice to be able to save the mappings as well, maybe on a per game basis? So if I had rainbow.stt disk image, it would save a rainbow.cfg
Maybe that wouldn't work on multi-disk games, but I think I explained it well.
Being able to map keys and joystick presses would open up a lot of ST games that are hard to play because of the lack of buttons on the st standard controller.

I haven't used it in a while, but are there save states? It would be nice to save the state so you don't have to load the game via virtual disks each time.
Thanks,

Chris
 
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skeezix said:
Yep, savestates are in all versions.

jeff
I was wondering if there was any progress with this. I am looking forward to playing some of the games with the better control setup.

Chris
 
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