PNG cartridges

[Shatur]

What happened?

Pico-8 and TIC-80 supports cartridges as PNG images (TIC-80 supports it starting from 0.90.1723, scroll down a little bit).
But such cartridges opens as images using the RetroArch image viewer. To fix this we should disable image viewer by toggling Retroarch Settings > File Browser > Use Built-In Image Viewer.

For TIC-80 we also need to add .png here:

RG350_adam_image/data/local/home/.simplemenu/section_groups/home computers.ini

Line 69 in 9472a7b

romExts = .tic,.7z

But for TIC-80 it won't start with this extension.

Here is a command to save game as PNG:

tic80 --cli --fs . --cmd "load game.tic & save game.png & exit"

After this command I can successfully run the generated PNG on my PC, but it fails to start on my handheld with "code is empty" error. I can reproduce the issue on my computer when I trying to load a PNG cartridge with a .tic extension (instead of .png). So I assume that the issue is related to the extension detection, but not sure how we can solve it.

Device

RG280V

Version

v2.1

[eduardofilo]

Perhaps the problem is that the version of TIC-80 wrapped in the RetroArch core is based on a version prior to 0.90.1723. According to the core_info of the latest stable version of RetroArch for ODbeta, it is based on 0.80.0.

I am closing the issue as I have merged the PR you did to solve the PNG upload. Thanks again.

[Shatur]

@eduardofilo thanks for looking into it!
Looks like TIC-80 have an option to build a core for RetroArch. Can we compile the latest version for Adam image?

[eduardofilo]

Go on. Please try. I think you have more skill than me with cmake projects.

[Shatur]

@eduardofilo I successfully compiled the latest version (v1.0.2164) from scratch (you need to cherry-pick nesbox/TIC-80@d10fa21, won't be necessary in the next release) and put the resulted tic80_libretro.so to local/home/.retroarch/cores/ and replaced the old one. Unfortunately, this did not fix the problem. I'm going to open an issue in the TIC-80 repo.
But how can I upstream a never version to the Adam image? It would be nice to update the core anyway. Here is the binary: tic80_libretro.zip.

[Shatur]

Opened: nesbox/TIC-80#2048

[eduardofilo]

The integration of RetroArch in Adam is done through this repository that is integrated as a submodule.
https://github.com/eduardofilo/RG350_auto_ra_installer

This repository takes the cores from the official distribution. But when in the past I had problems with the DOSBox core, I reserved in the assets directory a copy of the working core which is then manually copied just before packaging the image, as you can see here:
https://github.com/eduardofilo/RG350_adam_image/blob/master/build.sh#L169

So when you get the core with the problem solved, we can incorporate it this way if the modification takes time to enter upstream in the official RetroArch distribution.