RetroPie lr-fuse

[PeterJ]

I have recently started playing with Retro Pie on one of my Pi 4s and have a few questions if I may:

I have worked out to set the keyboard as the input device, you set controller 1 & 2 to none, and 3 to keyboard. How do you save your settings?

How do you exit lr-fuse and get back to the main menu?

Thanks

[Magic Knight]

To save the settings, select 'Save Core Remap File'.

To exit any emulator, push the Select and Start buttons (on whatever contoller you use) at the same time.

[PeterJ]

Thank you [mention]Magic Knight[/mention]

Its a pity that lr-fuse is based on such an early version of Fuse. I suppose I could use Fuse from the optional packages.

I get the feeling that RetroPie is mainly for Joystick use (consoles etc). Would that be right?

[saucysarah]

Fuse seems to be unloved on Retropie. The standalone version is up to date but you can't map any of the buttons when using a joypad/joystick and one of the main buttons keeps opening the menu which can't be changed ! Plus there is no shader support etc.

People have been asking for years (literally) for an update to lr-fuse but nobody seems to care if it works or not. There are several options that don't work at all like 'tape loading speed' and if you change the fire button then the virtual keyboard stops working !

Apparently there is another Spectrum emulator in 'Final Burn Neo' but don't know what that's like.

[PeterJ]

Thanks for the information [mention]saucysarah[/mention] (nice username by the way!). I think I may repurpose my Pi4 for something else.

[Magic Knight]

I only added my Spectrum favourites to the system to see how they looked, I don't think I'd ever use it to play Spectrum games for a long time. Usually I use ZX-Baremulator on my Pi 3. The main problem there is that I have to use a different keyboard, as the official Raspberry Pi keyboard doesn't have a Break key (well, my Japanese version of the keyboard doesn't).

Generally I think the aim is that everything can be done with one controller, i.e. playing the games and navigating the menus. I don't think they really envisioned anyone using a keyboard very much, though now that the Pi 400 exists, that may change.

I think it's best to just use a few systems and to add just the games you're likely to play, it gets far too unwieldly otherwise. The Spectrum is the only keyboard-based machine that I installed.

[saucysarah]

People have been asking for years (literally) for an update to lr-fuse but nobody seems to care if it works or not. There are several options that don't work at all like 'tape loading speed' and if you change the fire button then the virtual keyboard stops working !

Huh? I use lr-fuse every day and that doesn't happen at all.

Did you just call me a liar ? If you turn OFF 'Tape Fast Load' it still turbo loads the first few blocks. This has been reported on the Github for a long time but never fixed. https://github.com/libretro/fuse-libretro/issues/62 . Also, if you map the main firebutton to something different then you can't select anything on the on-screen keyboard. See the many Github issues.

[akeley]

Lr-fuse has its quirks but it's nowhere near as bad as it might seem after reading this thread. The remap options are actually quite powerful. I had been using it for a couple of years as my main ZX emu, before I switched to real hardware/MiSTer.

[PeteProdge]

Fuse seems to be unloved on Retropie.

I love Fuse - on a Windows, Mac or Linux desktop/laptop.

On RetroPie, it's an utter pain. There are so many hotkeys mapped for something in RetroArch, so keyboard play is a pain. I suppose there's a way of unpicking all that, but I've never sussed out how.

There is a build I have on my Pi 4 (I have RetroPie running on 3 and 4 models, I prefer the technically inferior 3, as things aren't as broken) where I've had some success in running a selection of personal favourites, with the custom keymapping for each game applied to my joypad.

As someone else said, RetroPie really is geared towards console/arcade/hand-held games. Home computers are a massive pain to run.

[toot_toot]

With the release of the Raspberry Pi 400, I thought it could be a good device to setup as a nice system focused just on emulating computers like the Spectrum (natch), C64, Amiga, MSX, Atari ST etc as it could be just a nice a quick way of playing computer focused games, instead of getting out my real Spectrum, C64 or Amiga.

I've been using RetroPie and it just doesn't seem that great in working with the keyboard. As people have pointed out, it does seem more focused on emulating systems (mostly arcade and console) through a joystick/joypad only controller. I'll spend some more time with it, but having to setup the keyboard as a separate controller input on lr-fuse and not getting any keyboard input (yet) on the C64 just makes it a real pain.

[akeley]

I think at some point I had most of the microcomputers set up working on RPi (with exception of BBC Micro). It's not a "plug and play" process but once you do it, it just works (that includes most of the keyboards, though there are a few gotchas regarding individual setups).

Retropie/Arch can seem tricky, what with it many menus and configs at first but the trade off is that it allows for great flexibility and fine tuning. Neither Lakka or Recalbox are as capable.

Of course, standalone emus on PCs will always be more powerful, but maintaining the whole lot of them isn't an easy task either.

[GreenCard]

With the release of the Raspberry Pi 400, I thought it could be a good device to setup as a nice system focused just on emulating computers like the Spectrum (natch), C64, Amiga, MSX, Atari ST etc as it could be just a nice a quick way of playing computer focused games, instead of getting out my real Spectrum, C64 or Amiga.

I've been using RetroPie and it just doesn't seem that great in working with the keyboard. As people have pointed out, it does seem more focused on emulating systems (mostly arcade and console) through a joystick/joypad only controller. I'll spend some more time with it, but having to setup the keyboard as a separate controller input on lr-fuse and not getting any keyboard input (yet) on the C64 just makes it a real pain.

I'm also perplexed by this. I use an arcade joystick as my main Retropie controller but I also have a keyboard hooked up for computer formats and I have no problems with it at all. I'm not sure what you can be doing wrong. I literally just plugged it in and it worked.

I found this to be the case too. I use a bluetooth keyboard with RetroPie, and it just worked without me having to do anything. I use a Recreated ZX Spectrum though (bought an unlocked one fairly cheap a while back) with lr-fuse and it works perfectly. With turbo-loading turned off, it's a suprisingly authentic "experience" (outside of having to navigate a menu to open files, obviously).

[toot_toot]

Maybe the issue is that I haven’t actually connected a joystick, instead I’m just using a keyboard with the cursor keys (plus others for fire buttons, start, select etc) mapped as RetroPie controller keys,l. I wonder if I’d started with a joystick or joypad first, then it might have worked better. Anyway, I’ll tinker with it more.

[PQR]

There is a build I have on my Pi 4 (I have RetroPie running on 3 and 4 models, I prefer the technically inferior 3, as things aren't as broken) where I've had some success in running a selection of personal favourites, with the custom keymapping for each game applied to my joypad.

As someone else said, RetroPie really is geared towards console/arcade/hand-held games. Home computers are a massive pain to run.

This echoes my experiences with running RetroPie on a 3B.
Retroarch is really aimed at using a controller as main input device. I had to use a keyboard a few times because the controller had an empty battery and then it became quite hard to navigate.

My current setup uses a Dualshock 4 as main input device where I've mapped the controller buttons to particular keys in Fuse. I also remapped Fuse's virtual keyboard to the SELECT button (because START can be mapped as a key in Fuse, and SELECT not).
Then I made a selection of favourite Spectrum games that can easily be played that way. Often making pre-configured snapshots.

The majority of games don't require more than 12 keys in total anyway. And for some games where keyboard input is required – such as the teleport in Starquake – I don't mind using the virtual keyboard.

[Joefish]

Even with a controller, it's a pain.

There's an overlay of functionality from RetroArch to assign joystick movements and buttons to keys on the keyboard, but it conflicts with another setting where you assign your controllers. I can't remember the exact setting I now have, but I had to delete everything a few times before I got it right. And I dread accidentally changing something and ruining it again.

There's also always the problem of having to select your control method before you start most Speccy games, so I prefer to map the joystick to the default keyboard controls so you can just start the game and play. But that needs to be configured per-game, which seems to be the riskiest and least stable setup of all, since per-game saved settings then conflict with per-emulator saved settings, and don't always seem to load and/or over-ride the other in a logical order.