Windows on ARM update: the best way to run emulators is to use WSL

yes

consider the following: SEGA Saturn

• there’s no Windows aarch64 builds of Mednafen nor RetroArch
• I don’t want to use RetroArch anyway, they’re: not nice people
• I don’t have MSVC and I don’t want to
• Msys2 exists! and it runs stuff!
• …but compiling on it is slow because most tools are still built for x86
• ……and I get this really weird error

make[2]: Entering directory '/home/Xerz/mednafen/src'
windres -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I../include -D_LFS64_LARGEFILE=1 -I/clangarm64/include -o drivers/win-resource.o drivers/win-resource.rc
llvm-rc: Error parsing file: Invalid token found at position 39
make[2]: *** [Makefile:6777: drivers/win-resource.o] Error 1

and then on WSL I can just… nix run p#mednaffe

for some reason ALSA is not working, but I’ll figure it out

you see why I like Nix :nixowos:

OK so ALSA should work by installing alsa-plugins-pulseaudio on AlmaLinux/Fedora/RHEL/Rocky, libasound2-plugins on Debian/Ubuntu or alsa-plugins on NixOS, then adding a very simple config file

….but it’s still doing nothing for me

VLC works… but only through the RDP sink

I’ll leave it at that for now, can’t figure it out

ok, I suppose I’m back to this

the RDP sink on VLC was detected via PulseAudio, so that’s good… but I still need to make sure ALSA can see it

interesting, just used MPV and realized that this might be a Nix-related issue after all

ALSA lib dlmisc.c:339:(snd_dlobj_cache_get0) Cannot open shared library libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so (/nix/store/yfbb7dngvzzz8dgnvbdxm6kdqf34z75p-alsa-lib-1.2.13/lib/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)

so since I’m on AlmaLinux, I installed mpv through EPEL/CRB

aaaaaaaaaaaaand, it… works?

no .asoundrc or anything, mind you

apparently a solution for the Nix issue was only added last year https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/277180

so now I need to override every package which has alsa-lib as a dependency aaaaaaaaaaaand done

…..this shouldn’t be a thing

at least it’s acknowledged

For now, this requires pointing to a different package in the derivations. Once we’re fine with the rebuild, we might rename alsa-lib to something like alsa-lib-wrapped and rename alsa-lib-with-plugins to alsa-lib in order to enable plugin loading for all packages fully transparently.

(sidenote: gotta love how my laptop can last for so long UNTIL I plug in, say, a phone that needs charging… and that alone can drain 30% capacity: oops)

ok I just wrote a flake to patch Mednaffe with

and I’m shocked that it seems like it was actually rather smooth sailing…??????

(I need to compile everything to make sure it actually works tho, one sec)

o the fans just turned on, that’s a new one

ALSA lib confmisc.c:165:(snd_config_get_card) Cannot get card index for 0

weh

ok let’s see if I still need that .asoundrc file

yeah still nothing