Sega Titan (STV) not supported?

[rtomasa]

I was wondering that if the stand alone version of the core can handle STV games: https://mednafen.github.io/documentation/ss.html#Section_stv
Is there any reason to not being supported in the libretro core version? The core does not report .zip extension support either.

[StormedBubbles]

Hey, thanks for pointing this out. I had no idea that STV was supported in Mednafen. According to the changelog, support was added on July 4, 2022. I tested 1.31.0-UNSTABLE on 64-bit Windows and got Die Hard to work by putting all of the BIOS files and the (non-merged) MAME diehard.zip in the home directory of Mednafen and then dragging the zipped file to the Mednafen executable.

In Beetle-Saturn on my Raspberry Pi 5 (Bookworm), putting the BIOS files in the same place I put the Saturn BIOS files leads to failure. When trying to launch the zipped file, the emulator would crash back to my frontend with this in the log:

[INFO] [Content]: Core requires uncompressed content - extracting archive to temporary directory.
[ERROR] [Content]: Failed to extract content from compressed file: "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/arcade/diehard.zip".

The documentation linked by @rtomasa suggests that it is also possible to launch from one of the uncompressed files inside the zipped folder, so I tried that too (all of them) and was sent to the Saturn BIOS screen with a message to insert a disc into the drive.

I downloaded the source code to Mednafen 1.31.0 and can see where STV support was added ( mednafen -> src -> ss -> stvio.cpp along with the corresponding header file + a bunch of other files among the includes). Those files are all missing from Beetle. However, I don't see the code posted to GitHub, so it's hard for me to compare and tell what else changed and what would need to be added to get this working in Beetle. I will try adding the missing files to see if something ends up working 🙂

[StormedBubbles]

Just a quick follow-up: as anyone probably would have guessed, just adding the missing files in the ss folder to Beetle wasn't enough. The emulator still compiled for me, but I got the exact same results I mentioned above. Looking at the recent commits here, what is probably needed is a "Backport 1.31.0 STV support" PR. I am not aware of what else would need to be added or what other changes have been made to the original source for this Libretro core. Hopefully, someone more in tune with adapting Mednafen changes to Libretro will take an interest!

[rtomasa]

Thanks for your time testing this thing. Hopefully support will come once an updated backport is made as you pointed out.

[StormedBubbles]

The recent new stable release #36 gives some hope that the entire emulator will get updated sometime in the near future. This would likely be better than cherry-picking features here and there.