For people that like achievements

[hansolo77]

Awesome, I wanna see a popup menu (like pressing the Xbox Guide Button on 360). It's definitely a pipe dream, and I imagine it would take rebuilding GameEx (hint hint) to make it happen.

[Adultery]

Well the tools are there now for sure if he decides to use them.

[Adultery]

After much fine tuning... http://ra.hfc-essentials.com

Scott over at RA (hell of a guy I might add) has assured me that he will add friend lists and messaging system to the API calls using an access token.When that happens I'll add those calls to the sample page above.

I've laid some of the ground work down for parsing the API in a new DLL (I am now serving the console list and the game list, working on retreiving user data next), which when I finish up I will upload here so anyone who wants to use it can include the DLL in their projects. After the DLL is finished, I'll move on to the launcher itself.

Hopefully in the future I can somehow hook the DLL into GameEx, so that you can view and track achievements within the front-end as opposed to having to launch the emulator itself. The launcher will, of course, handle all this.

So much to do, so little time.

[nullPointer]

Sounds like you're making amazing progress man! Well done!

[hansolo77]

Moving right along! I love this idea and can't wait to see the finished project. I still haven't registered over there yet, but I'm thinking about it.

[Adultery]

Stop thinking about it and just do it. I hear tell that PS1 support is coming soon. :-)

[hansolo77]

i havent looked, do they have their own mame too?

[Adultery]

Not yet.

[Adultery]

Here's a little sample of the progress so far:

Launch Before and After support, run games directly from the UI, download emulators and set static paths to them for each system, keymapper support for integrating Xpadder and Joy2Key (maybe Pinnacle Game Profiler if I get around to trying it), integrated ZIP/7-ZIP support... Fun fun!

The achievement list for the game shows the title of the achievement in red if you need it, or green if you have it already. So far, so good.

Next thing on the menu is to set up the EXE browsers and the ROM browser. The DLL is still a work in progress, I'm adding things as I need them.

More to come, stay tuned!

[nullPointer]

Man seriously, you're like a code hero. This is looking AWESOME!

[kev25b]

Wow that is awesome.

[DazzleHP]

.... .... ......... still ->

[KRC]

This is becoming something very special indeed

[Adultery]

Anyone wanna beta test it? I've got it up and running enough where I'm willing to share it. I will enable the downloads and the keymapper support later, everything else is working.

It's pretty simple, I'm sure you guys can figure out how it works. Let me know if you have any problems, I haven't had a chance to play a bunch of games and test it out. Thanks to Drac for the header logo on the launch form. Click on it and it'll take you to RetroAchievements.org

If you choose to not enter your user information, the app will use a guest account to view stats and achievements, but it's so much better if you add your User Name and API key.

After I add the last two features, I'll finish up the DLL and add support for launching games without having to click on stuff (ie cab friendly version via command-line).

Enjoy, and please let me know if anyone hits a snag!

RA_Launcher-Beta.zip

[KRC]

I just downloaded it but will test it later on today.

[KRC]

Scrap the above I just gave it a quick test.

I ran the launcher and then RA Gens, RA Gens made me sign in twice before the Rom would load. Started Sonic 2 didn't get an achievement as I didnt play it long enough but all seemed to launch right I think. I'll have to play it a little longer and watch out for those achievements to pop.

I've attached an image to show that everything looked ok.

Edit: I did notice a slight delay with a black screen when I hit "Play This Game" which (4 or 5 seconds) before launching to RA Gens.

Also had an automatic login failure. Not sure if that's to do with the launcher though.

[Adultery]

The only thing is unless you change the game in the list, it won't update the achievements list. I noticed this earlier but I'll fix it. No big deal imho.

Since Gens doesn't offer zip support apparently I'll add my own zip handling for the official release.

The sign in problem is an RA problem, but he says he's still ironing out the bugs. Sometimes the API call spits out blank documents because his server gets bogged down, although they just changed hosts, so this will hopefully be fixed (or he found the memory leak and fixed it). :-)

The black screen is because of the way GENS runs, none of the other emulators have this problem. I have to disable aero on my machine or it stutters which stinks. Too bad that emu is flaky, and KEGA isn't open source, Gens is a mess compared to what i'm used to...

I'm probably gonna add a window utility to the FE that expands the window to full screen windowed mode to hide the desktop and turn off aero when it launches, since it doesn't allow command line args for things and there send to be a problem with achievement pop ups with gens in full screen mode.

As long as it's hiding, launching, and restoring (and the also launch commands) are working okay, the rest is easy. Should have 1.0 out sometime next week hopefully. :-)

Thanks for your help KRC. :-)

[KRC]

All in all, nice work Adultery, It looks very promising.

I wonder how difficult it is to actually create and integrate achievements?

[Adultery]

If you have the patience for searching memory addresses, it's not to hard. I was thinking of doing achievements for Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball to learn the ins and outs.

[KRC]

I'm going to look into it but not look too hard as I have other project's to deal with.

[X1pheR]

This sounds very cool. Did anyone ever make any progress on this?

[hansolo77]

I really want to reopen this thread up.  I kinda put the whole idea on the back burner for me.  I'm not a programmer, and the launcher idea and stuff was all Adultery's baby.  But I just want to bring back into the light the whole RetroAchievements activity again.

So as most of the regulars here know by now, I have a Raspberry Pi 2 that I deliberately bought to use as a Media Center device via Kodi, and it works great.  I then discovered an addon for it called IARL which essentially downloads (legally, it's in the Government sanctioned Internet Archive) ROMs on the fly and launches them, then erases them when you're done playing to save SD card space.  It has now been updated to work hand-in-hand with another addon called GameStarter.  GameStarter is an all-in-one program that installs RetroArch, the essential cores (you still need to provide BIOS files) and pre-configures EVERYTHING.  The nice thing about this is, GameStarter's version of RetroArch includes a version that has Retro Achievements built in!  So I didn't even need to do anything other than enable them via RetroArch's menus.  Trouble I'm finding now is, I'm not earning any via the various games I've tried to play.  It might be the core, it might be the game.  I'm hoping some of my good friends here still follow the whole RetroAchievements "scene" and might be able to provide me some insight.

I suppose another thing I'm going to have to try and do would be to setup GameEx to use Adultery's launcher and make some new custom menu entries to launch the preferred emulators.  But that's a future endeavor.  I'm really just looking to get it to work via RetroArch for the moment.  So.... anybody still interested in this and might possibly be using a similar setup as me that might be willing to help tackle and troubleshoot?

Also, look me up and add me as a friend there!  I'm still listed as hansolo77...

http://retroachievements.org/user/hansolo77

[RIP-Felix]

Just read through this, as I missed it. Interesting that work just seemed to stop abruptly. Why when Adultry said he was about to release 1.0 version of this app did the posts just stop...Kinda makes the conspiracy theories float around in my head. A, what are you up too?

Seriously, though, I never was into the achievements thing. It kinda started when I fizzled out on console games in favor of retro titles. I do like the idea for retro games though, if there was some reason to keep playing besides nostalgia (like HiScore competitions and the GameEx community HiScores) it might compel me to stick with a title longer and enjoy it more. I think this idea, if it could be successfully applied to Mame, especially, or to Project 64 and PSX (I prefer ePSXe, but that's not going to happen) this could be in line with the incentive/social media model of functionality frontends like Evolution seem to be trending...Hmm...

[Adultery]

I think this project would be better off using RetroArch. More and better emulator support (including MAME), multiple OS support, and it's code is open source... I admittedly never really got into this enough because the emulators were clunky. We should think about moving this to a better more adopted platform...

[hansolo77]

I think the problem I was having was related to the Emulator I was trying to run.. GBA games don't seem to be fully working with the RetroAchivievements just yet.  But, once I got into NES and SNES, they were all popping up like they should.  Very exciting stuff! 

I agree 100% RIP-Felix.. that's why I'm so excited to make this work.  Achievements (Xbox) and Trophies (PlayStation) are what makes those consoles a lot more fun these days.  Rather than just play the game to finish it, you actually come back to the game time and time again to try to earn those Achievements you couldn't get.  Doing things you didn't think of doing before, like completing a stage without taking damage (beat-em ups), or finishing a stage without shooting (shoot-em ups).  There's a lot more fun (at least for me) to accomplish these things.  And by having it tracked and earning points for doing them, you sort of earn bragging rights amongst your peers.  For instance.. my brother could earn one I've been having trouble with, and he'll have that over me till I finally get it.  It's more fun that way, rather than just beating the game.  Retro games for the most part only have replayability for (as you say) nostalgia, or perhaps for trying to beat your best score.  Other than that, they only offered a chance to complete the game.  This gives you more perks.  I've got my Facebook account linked to it too, which (in theory) is supposed to post you achievement as you earn it to your feed so your friends can see.  Hopefully I'll get a friend or 2 interested and want to participate too!

Since this is a new install of RetroArch/etc... I'm still in the process of configuring it to work well on my system.  This involves verifying what cores (and their settings) work best, making sure the controller mapping works, etc.  I'm about to get into the Sega stuff soon, which is my forte since that's the systems we had growing up (Master System, Genesis/CD/32x). 

@Adultery I've not spent any time on the PC side of emulating with RetroAchievements...  Do you know if your little plugin/app is still required?  I assume it's controlling the login to the server bits and tracking.  From what I can see now, they have specialized emulators that actually do all that internally.  I'll have to check if you're not sure.  It'd be nice if all we have to do is just plug in our username/password in the emulator and just play.  GameEx wouldn't need anything more to function.

---

Edit - Just a quick update... on the RetroArch side of things, the whole process of tracking memory keys for earned achievements is done through the frontend (RetroArch) directly.  The "support" side of things I'm guessing is just a matter of whether or not the emulator supports some form of debug output so the frontend can monitor for memory flag changes.  I've found through testing that certain cores will popup a warning like "This emulator does not support Achievements" whereas others won't say anything at all.  So basically, any emulator (core) that does have a way for RetroArch to monitor that stuff should work.  Specifically for Sega Genesis, a lot of people seem to be using PicoDrive rather than their RAGens emulator.  However, on the PC side (if you're not using RetroArch and are instead just using a stand alone emulator) you might have to use THEIR emulator...  For NES, FCEUmm works great, but emux and Nestopia are incompatible.

This has got me thinking something else too...  Is RetroArch available for Windows?  Maybe the ideal way to go is to just install that on my PC, and just have GameEx launch it on command.  For my Raspberry Pi setup, it's already doing that so I know RetroArch is capable of running things directly via command line (specifying a core and rom).  If the RetroAchievements author is still planning to go forward with messaging, etc.. that'd be awesome.  Especially if there's going to be a way to bring up a list of online friends, and have it pop up an onscreen note about them coming online.  Integrate in some Kailera or other netplay, and I can essentially once again play some of my favorite Sega games with my brother like we're on Xbox!  All we'd have to do then is just get some kinda TeamSpeak going and we'd be set!  So yeah, I'm thinking I might investigate this further if I can find some free time.  In the future, if all of this is true, GameEx could probably hook into all that for Evolution.  IN-GAME handling can be done via RetroArch, and OUTSIDE via GameEx.  This is an exciting time for Retro Gaming I think!