E.M.M.A. (Emulated Machine, My Amiga) Pt1

Hi all, now here is something I first posted on Blitterwolf on 7th November of 2016 but I thought it worth sharing again as it is still something I am passionate about, there will be further parts to follow.

I had initially thought of putting my Sam440ep board into a laptop case and having a native Amiga laptop, I posted on amigaworld.net on the 10th October 2016 looking for advice on weather anyone thought it possible.

It is now nearly one month on and I have decided that the idea was beyond my capabilities if at all possible.

I already had in my possession a copy of AmigaOS4.1fe Classic and a copy of Amiga Forever 2016 and also recently purchased the book AmigaOS4.1 Emulation (Complete Guide Not Just For Beginners) so all I needed was a laptop.

AmigaOS4.1fe Classic

Amiga Forever

AmigaOS 4.1 Emulation

Choosing the laptop was a bit time consuming, I needed one with a CD drive, don't want to mess with SD cards, cheap as my intention was to run it solely as an Amiga so didn't want to fork out a lot of money on a laptop with a 17 inch screen, 8gb of memory and 2tb hard drive. I found a nice 14 inch model with 4gb and 500mb hard drive and less than £250.00.

Preparing the Laptop

I was slightly mistaken that getting home with the laptop and then installing Amiga Forever, no that would be way too easy. I got home at 2pm yesterday got it charged and switched it on, it proceeded to install a couple of updates to Windows 10, when I say a couple I mean a couple of dozen as at 10:30pm it is just finishing the last update giving me just enough time to install Amiga Forever.

Now lets get Amiga Forever configured.

To be continued...

Follow and comment below

Michael

NUMBER 70 (Approx.)

Well a rather unassuming box arrived a couple of days ago, apparently stating in an email I received that it had been handed to the resident (me), however I was at work at the time and once home I was informed by the neighbour that it had been left on the doorstep and they had taken it in.

No matter how unassuming the box was it had rather familiar words on the side in a rather familiar font "Made in China". I couldn't wait to open it but thought I should take some photos as I went along.

A Brown Box

The number 70 the title of this post refers to is number 70 in the collection of handheld consoles I own, most running Android, this one is a Retroid Pocket 4 Pro.

Retroid Pocket 4 Pro

Not only did the package include the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro but to my surprise it included a clear grip and a case.

Clear Grip

Case

Emulation is quite a big passion of mine and has been for many years, one of my favourite emulation experiences was E.M.M.A.(Emulated Machine, My Amiga) which I started in November of 2016. Other passions of mine are computers, consoles and handheld consoles the oldest of the handheld consoles is from 1981 (not an emulation machine though).

So back to number 70, the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro and the task of gaming emulation ahead of me and the Android 13 operating system that is on it, so I need a microSD card (which size) for game ROMS and it was at this point I started the search for a card and after a ten minute search I found an unused 512GB card.

Now to choose which systems will be best to emulate, no point in trying PS3 or Switch as these would be out of reach of the hardware and on the other end of the spectrum is Gameboy and Gameboy Colour these systems would be better suited to hardware with a lower specification.

My first thought is the Playstation series, so let's start there with the Playstation Portable (PSP), Playstation and Playstation 2. My collection of PSP ROMS are 128GB alone and Playstation ROMS are 232GB so no space for Playstation 2 so lets have a rethink. How about another handheld console for example my collection of Gameboy Advance games are 11.4GB so I'll put those on, my collection of Mega Drive (Genesis) are 723MB and has some good games so I'll throw those on, NEOGEO ROMS are 10.1GB, TurboGrafX ROMS are 341MB, Dreamcast ROMS are 36.5GB and SNES ROMS are 3.79GB, I think I'll call it quits at that.

I knew I didn't want to emulate any computers as most expect a keyboard which the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro doesn't have and a virtual on screen keyboard would have to be used which I'm not particularly keen on.

Console	Stand Alone	RetroArch Core
Playstation Portable	PPSSPP	PPSSPP
Playstation	Duckstation	SwanStation
Gameboy Advance	Pizza Boy	mGBA
Mega Drive (Genesis)	MD.emu	Genesis Plus GX
NeoGeo	FinalBurn Neo	Final Burn New
TurboGrafX	PCE.emu	Beetle PCE
Dreamcast	ReDream	Flycast
SNES	Snes9x EX+	Snes9x

Or I can use RetroArch which would cover all of the systems, I have used RetroArch on other handhelds so this is the route I will take, all my ROMS are saved on an external hard drive so all I have to do is attach this to my laptop and insert the microSD card into a card reader and copy the required folders from one to the other, rather time consuming but worth it.

Now over to my Retroid Pocket 4 Pro and insert the microSD card and turn on, now to install RetroArch, to do this we need to go to the RetroArch website and download from there as it's not available on PlayStore.

I'm going cheat a bit in my blog here and point you to an extremely good set up guide by Russ at Retro Game Corps which informs you of all the set up information you need from RetroArch through to individual emulators for consoles and computers.

Once RetroArch is setup you can access your ROMS from there but I prefer to have a graphical front end and there are plenty to choose from, such as Daijisho (Free), Emulation Station, Beacon Game Launcher, Plain Launcher (Free) and Reset Collection (Free), and my choice which is just my preference is Daijisho. Joey's Retro Handhelds has a great Daijisho Setup Guide and I would advise following this.

Hope this leads to some happy gaming for you out there and if you love Number 70 then you'll love the remaining 69 of which Number 1 is, chronologically, from 1989 which is my Atari Lynx.

Enjoy

Follow and comment below

Michael