Atari800 emulator on LibreELEC

[HiassofT]

I recently packaged the Atari800 Kodi Retroplayer addon for LibreELEC and since a few days it's available from our official addon repository: LibreELEC Add-ons -> Game add-ons -> Emulators -> Atari - 5200 (Atari800) (sic!)

 

Under the hood it uses the libretro port of Atari800 which isn't too up-to-date, has a couple of (more or less annoying) quirks, but the issues are quite easy to resolve and it's good enough to play most games

 

After installation you have to copy the OS ROMs (atarixl.rom, atariosa.rom, atariosb.rom, ataribas.rom) into the correct folder:

/storage/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/game.libretro.atari800/resources/system (if you do it via ssh/scp) or

addon_data\game.libretro.atari800\resources\system in the "Userdata" windows share.

 

Note: you have to manually create the directories, game.libretro.atari800 and anything below won't be there after initial installation.

 

Quite annoyingly the atari800 addon won't re-check for added OS ROMs after you started it once. You can work around that by ssh-ing into LibreELEC and manually deleting "/storage/.atari800.cfg" - editing the .atari800.cfg file may also work.

 

You may want to adjust the addon settings / emulator configuration and change system type and PAL/NTSC video standard. Better don't play around with internal resolution though, that didn't end well here ?

 

Then enter the "Game" menu in Kodi, choose the folder with your Atari stuff and select the ATR etc.

 

It seems the libretro folks forgot to include "car" and "xex" in the list of supported extensions (I'll have a look at getting this fixed), but there's a simple workaround for that, too:

ssh in, edit "/storage/.kodi/addons/game.libretro.atari800/addon.xml" and add these extensions to the "<extensions>" definition. It should then eg look like this:

Quote

<extensions>xfd|atr|cdm|cas|bin|a52|zip|atx|xex|car</extensions>

Then restart kodi (or use reboot from the kodi menu) so that the changes take effect.

 

so long & happy Atari gaming,

 

Hias

[tane]

Almost 3 years ago I packaged this add-on for Kodi, never released before. It's called Retro Games, and it's based on RetroArch (it could handle many systems also), but at this time it's only filled with a small collection of Atari 5200, 8-bit and 7800 games. It has some extras, like maps. Likely it would require an update of cores, games and maps, however when it was done, a thing I like is it's a straightforward add-on, ready to go, only one extra movement with the .cfg file (instructions provided). Just upload it with a USB drive attached to your device. Also I like a lot it can handle screenshots for every game.

When I was playing with this, I noticed a lag with the fire button, I didn't know if it was because the RetroArch distribution used, or only with my device.

Hopefully someone else can continue with this project.

 

Regards.

Retro_Games_for_Kodi.7z

[snafu05]

One maybe dumb question: Where di I find the files that I am supposed to copy to the /storage/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/game.libretro.atari800/resources/system after I installed the add-on?