MiniVMac in Retroarch?

[Drybonz]

In MiniVMac standalone, you place your .dsk files in the same folder and the emulator .exe and name then disk1 and disk2 to load multiple disks (basically the system disk and a disk of games, etc).  How do you get the second disk to load with the system disk when using Retroarch.  I can only figure out how to get it to load the system disk.  

Thanks for the help.

[sundogak]

You are in essence using the command line interface for RA/LB.  For command line and MiniVmac in Windows you have to pass each disk path to MiniVMac at launch in quotes separated by a space. 

So outside of LB, a command to launch two disks looks like this (your paths will vary). If you are not in the minvmac exe folder, you also have to put full path to EXE as well from CMD line:

"Mini vMac II.exe" "G:\Emulators\Apple Macintosh\Mini vMac II\System 7.0.1.dsk" "G:\Emulators\Apple Macintosh\roms\Wizards Fire.dsk"

In LB it is same basic logic only LB already has path to emulator and has full path to one disk if imported already.  I don't use RA for this emulator so my example below using non-RA Mini vMac executable directly.  But will be similar logic for RA as well.  LB is pointing to the Wizards Fire DSK in the launching line.  Then in custom command line under emulation you can add in the other disk explicitly using full path and quotes.  You could also add it to the emulator command directly but then that means it will always use whatever disk you reference with that emulator.  If third disk you would add with space and path similarly. 

Ultimately, I find it is just as easy to use the miniVmac drag and drop interface in most cases or using a HD image versus floppy.  Unfortunately, LB doesn't have a variable for Additional Apps (like %ROMFILE%), so you are stuck with always naming additional disks explicitly.  This is the same for other systems like Apple II.  

[Drybonz]

Thanks for taking the time to write up a detailed explanation.  I appreciate it.  This makes perfect sense... the problem I'm running into is that with the RA core, if I have custom command-line parameter with the path to the second disk, it won't launch at all.

*edit*  Reversing the first and second disk fixes that, so that it is launching the system disk first, but then it simply doesn't load the second disk.  My second disk is a compilation of games that I loaded onto a blank virtual disk a long time ago (using HFV explorer, or something... I actually don't remember how I did it).  This works fine in the standalone, but RA won't seem to load a second disk.

Edited September 17, 2022 by Drybonz

[sundogak]

There was some info on this issue in the RA github site here.  I messed a bit with it using the command line for RA:

G:\Emulators\RetroArch\retroarch.exe -L minivmac 

In theory this should work (but didn't on my setup..just loaded disk 1):

G:\Emulators\RetroArch\retroarch.exe -L minivmac "G:\Emulators\Apple Macintosh\Mini vMac II\System 7.0.1.dsk" "G:\Emulators\Apple Macintosh\roms\Wizards Fire.dsk"

There was a person on the github site indicating the issue was properly escaping the quotes. But they were using RA on a Mac so what they indicated wasn't working when tried on Windows (plus seems would gag on LB on one disk if that were the case).  So unclear if just improperly formatted command or just the core isn't passing it at all or correctly.  

Edited September 17, 2022 by sundogak

[Drybonz]

I think the only thing that is different from what I was doing is the "-L".  Not sure what that command is, but I just tried to work it in, but didn't see any change.  I've also wondered if there are shortcuts for the ctrl/alt commands from the standalone version (example alt-m for magnify, or load disk would be especially helpful).  I don't see anything that suggests that there is in the online documentation, etc...

[Drybonz]

As a workaround, for now, I just opened both disks in the standalone mini vMac and copied all the game content onto a folder on a copy of my system disk so that I can access it all on one disk in RA.  Maybe down the road they will have an easy way to mount two disks at startup.

[Drybonz]

On 9/17/2022 at 7:00 PM, sundogak said:

I messed a bit with it using the command line for RA

Sundogak, do you have any problems with the command line options for (the standalone) mini vmac?  Mine seems to refuse to recognize any of the options (I get the message about the argument being no good when I launch mini vmac).  I've double checked that I'm using valid arguments with the gryphel website, tried entering them with different formats in and out of LB, and tried with the standard mini vmac and some variations I made thru the website, but it seems to continue rejecting them.  I thought you might have some insight on it.  Thanks.