o2em

[Green Gibbon!]

I don't think anyone else here messes with emulation much, but I'm a bit stumped on this one and no amount of Google searching is bringing up the answers to my problem.

I just downloaded o2em, the Magnavox Odyssey2 emulator. It's ver 1.17, the last one released on the official site. I got everything I need, including the launcher, and started it up. It seems to work fine, detects all the games and everything. One curious thing I notice is that the bios directory in the settings menu defaults to a file called "bios_c52.bin". The only bios file I can find at all, anywhere, is the "o2rom.bin". I point the bios directory to that, but I don't know if it has anything to do with the problem.

Anyway, whenever I try to load a game, I get this error message: "Error running o2em. Maybe the Allegro DLL is missing..." Which it isn't, the allegro dll was included in the zip file. Does it need to be placed somewhere special? Or what?

[Dark Crow]

You might have luck placing the .dll into the C:/Windows/System or System32 folders and running the emulator then. If not, then it's probably the wise idea to just delete them. I think that you should just find the correct BIOS file, though.

[Frieza2000]

Did you unzip Allegro? I remember Nebula requires roms to stay zipped. Maybe it's something similar.

[Bo]

It works for me... here's what I did:
Download o2em <a href="http://o2em.sourceforge.net/downloads1.html">here</a>.
Unzip it to its own folder.
Download o2rom.bin <a href="http://www.videogamearchive.com/emu/o2_rom.htm">here</a>, then put it in the o2em's "Bios" folder.
Download a game and put it in the o2em's "Roms" folder.
Open a command prompt and get to the o2em directory.
Type "o2em romName.bin" where romName is the ROM's filename.

That's probably what you tried, but if you're messing with any frontends, that may screw things up.

[Green Gibbon!]

Yeah, it works when I load it manually through dos, but it doesn't detect the controller. This version's supposed to have joystick support, and there's an option for it in the launcher. Plus it would be altogether more convenient to simply double click on the game I want to play.

Also, now when I try to load a game through the launcher, I get a general "error loading bios rom" message. This is the official frontend from the same guys who handle the o2em application, so there shouldn't be any conflict. One thing I noticed is that the o2em program has been updated as recently as this year, but none of the sites with the bios have been updated since, like, 2000 or something. Maybe the o2rom.bin is an older version of the file?

Also, there are supposed to be other bios files that make the emulator react like different international versions of the Odyssey2 (the Videopac and whatnot), and I can't find those anywhere, either. Either Google is utterly failing me or I'm just plain fucking stupid, but can anybody find anything other than "o2rom.bin"?

[Green Gibbon!]

Just for the record, I found the Videopac bios at least, here: http://www.emunova.net/emulation/utilit ... yssey2.htm

It's still not working for me, though. This is apparently an abnormal problem.

[Green Gibbon!]

DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY I JUST WANT TO PLAY PICK-AXE FUCKING PETE

[Bo]

Just for kicks, try putting the emulator files in a directory with a short path (e.g. C:\o2em) with no spaces in it... my configuration file got truncated after a space, and I think that may be a problem.

Edit: If it makes you feel better, I get the missing Allegro DLL file now too. This frontend sucks.

[Green Gibbon!]

Yeah, I found this one other emulation message board where this dude's like, "Hey, wassup with this allegro dll thing?" A couple people suggested the obvious things, and that was it. (Same day I posted mine, actually.) I guess there's precious little interest in Odyssey2 emulation... At least I know it's not just my problem exclusively.

I'd just load everything manually, except the default keyboard layout makes no sense and there's no way to change it.