Running mame engines with picochess in foreground so that we can operate them

[Dirk]

Running mame engines with picochess in foreground so that we can operate them

Hello all  fans of old chess computer!

I couldn’t find a solution for my problem yet so I try it this way in the best Picochess forum I’m aware of ;-)

So we can play against mame emulated chess engines with the help of picochess even without having to know how to operate the emulated device! How cool is that? And why bother with another platform for playing against these old chess computers?

Well, although I really enjoy the ease play and use of the mame emulated chess engines in picochess I sometime would like to see how the old chess computers looked like and even want to operate it in order to change settings/levels etc. because that could make even more fun than planing against it with Picochess.

There are two possible solutions for this (as far as I am aware of. ;-)

1. Running mame/mess on the PI with GUI support so that we can see the GUI of the engine and could operate it via a touch screen a a tablet which connects to the PI via VNC (thhanks to Marcels base image). Unfortunately there must be specific SDL libraries or graphic driver installed to make this work. I get error messages when starting mame from a desktop OS (at the moment I have no access to my chess things but you can try for yourself by starting mame from the Desktop OS (eg. With Marcels last desktop enabled image.) I am not familiar with all these things so couldn’t find a solution (I know that mame in theory would run with GUI on a PI eg for the retropie emulation project). So if someone could find a solution over the holidays: great ;-) I would love such a solution…

       2. Starting remote engines via picochess on a touch enabled tablet

For Option 2. I found no solution yet because I could either start the remote mame    engine with GUI support on a MacBook, here is the a video  showing this in action:)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8pcumbz8q4welbg/MESS_REMOTE.mov?dl=0

But with MacOS we have no touch (that might change in future ;-) or start the remote engine on a windows tablet but then  the engine process is not allowed to run with GUI in foreground (restriction of the Windows SSH server).

So what we need for this remote engine approach is a 3rd party SSH Server for windows which allows us to run the SHH remote engine process in foreground and with GUI output.

I could not find one yet. Maybe someone knows such a SSH server software or even can think of a completely different solution!?

For a temporary workaround I use my revelation but not connected to picochess but in its native mode: the revelation offers the possibility (by way: picochess as well and I have improved it in V3) to add remote engines via the UCIServer - a small windows program running in background.

With the Revelation UCIServer we can add windows uci engines which will then appear like a native engines on the revelation. It can be selected via the revelation engines menu  and this starts the engine process on the windows computer where the UCIServer is running in foreground and with GUI support, great but not picochess :-(

Thanks & happy holidays to all!

Dirk

[RandyR]

Interesting concept, Dirk.

Maybe something like this can be adapted:

https://www.linux-projects.org/uv4l/tutorials/play-retropie-in-browser/

Randy

[Dirk]

Hi Randy,

cool - that browser access sounds ebven better like my first option with the VNC connection!

But of course for this our mame executable would have to run on the pi with gui outbiut (at the moment we start mame without any graphic output as we don’t need it in order to play with picochess) but this causes the problem as mame will crash when running in standard mode ion our raspianOS version.  And I don’t know the libs or graphic driver we would need for this…

Dirk

 

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[RandyR]

I think getting the display output is just a matter of compiling with X11, but I could be wrong. I've only compiled it for Aarch64. Not sure what options you and Al used in your compile. But, there are quite a few examples of pi arcade systems.

I'm sure you can do it!

:^)

Randy

[Dirk]

Finally we found a solution for option 1running mame within picochess with GUI support  (thanks to Randy & Kiko), see https://groups.google.com/g/picochess/c/Ca593LxTBfw

Beside of this I am still interested in  the option 2 (running mame vis SHH as remote engine with GUI output in windows) so if one knows or finds a (free) ssh server for windows which allows running its remote triggered application to run in foreground with gui output you are welcome ;-)

Dirk