SNES9X - How to install?
 

I'm a 100% newbie. Don't know anything about Linux.

I have Mandrake 9.1 running KDE.
I downloaded the SNES9X emulator file *.tar.gz or whatever.
I extracted it to my directory.
THen when I run the Snex9x program, it says "Cannot find file Snes9x".
Everything else in the directory are TXT files. So what do I do since there is no easy Install Wizard like Windows.

Go to this site - http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/ - and add the plf, contrib, and texstar sources, as well as the update source if you already haven't done so. You will have to "su" to root at the terminal before entering the commands. This will update your urpmi sources so that you can install packages and update your system easily. After the process is complete you can enter the command "urpmi snes9x", as root, and you will automatically install the Snes9x package as well as any dependencies that are needed for it to run. Or you can go to "Configuration > Packaging > Install Software" and use rpmdrake to install or remove rpms in a nice GUI. For emulation however I would recommend hitting up "urpmi zsnes" first as it has a much nicer GUI than the front ends available for snes9x. If you get snes9x you might also want to get a front end so you can configure and run ROMs a bit more easily. They're under the "emulators" section in rpmdrake. Without one you'll have to invoke snes9x from the command line, along with some switches.

Okay, no offense, but I have no idea what the heck you just said or what to do. How do I do all those things you mentioned? how do I add the plf, contrib, and textar sources? and what's urpmi?

I do have ZSNES for Windows and I just unzipped it and it worked. I'm a little confused as to why linux makes installing software confusing. :( Please help a newb out! :(

urpmi is the Mandrake package management tool. It can install programs from the internet, or from your install CDs. It also handles all conflicts and problems that you may run into by trying to install software from a bunch of different sources that all have different requirements. Most of the popular linux programs have been "packaged" specifically for Mandrake in an attempt to make installing programs easier.

To setup urpmi you first have to open a terminal window. You should have a program called "Konsole" in your KDE menu. Also under your menu one of the main sections is "Terminals", you can use any of those instead of Konsole, (which you should also see listed in this section). After opening a terminal, type the following command -

su

And then enter, you will be prompted for the root password for your system. After that you are acting as the root user instead of working under your normal user account. Now you can configure your system, including updating your urpmi sources. At the website I linked to you should check the sections "contrib, updates, plf, texstar", as well as selecting the place closest to you from each of the drop-boxes. After hitting the proceed button you'll get 4 lines of text in the box that should look similar to this -


urpmi.addmedia plf ftp://knight.zarb.org/pub/plf/9.1 with hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia contrib ftp://ftp.tugraz.at/mirror/Mandrake-...1/contrib/RPMS with ../../i586/Mandrake/base/hdlist2.cz
urpmi.addmedia --update updates http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...ates/9.1/RPMS/ with ../base/hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia texstar ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/dist...drake/9.1/rpms with hdlist.cz


Copy and paste the first command to the terminal and hit enter, you'll download all the info needed to setup urpm. Do the same for the rest of the commands and then it's finished. Then you can type in "urpmi zsnes", as root, and everything is automagically done for you, complete with a menu-entry under "Applications > Emulators > ZSNES". Also like I said in the other post rpmdrake will give you a list of all the programs you can install this way as well as let you install and remove them. If you have any other questions just ask.

Well, I downloaded and installed those things you said.
But when I type urpmi zsnes, it just says program cannot be found or something like that.

So now what do I do????

There's nothing to install. You've downloaded the program right?. let's say it's called snes9x.1.39-linux.tar.gz

Uncompress it:

tar xvzf snes9x.1.39-linux.tar.gz

Then type ./snes9x <name of the rom> <option> It should work. E.g running Dragon Ball.

./snes9x roms/dragon_ball_z.zip -scale

That would load the rom dragon ball, inside my "rom" directory and scale it to fit screen. There're plenty of options all available in the readme document. If you don't like typing, search after a gui for snes9x. Google for snes9express. It's quite buggy, but helps a lot, specially when you need to config your buttons.

Ah, that makes more sense for SNES9X.

But the ZSNES one sounds way more complicated. I think I'll l just forget trying to install ZSNES as it is too complicated. I just wanted to try ZSNES in linux so that I actually had a reason to use linux other than web browsing for fun.

another question: all my roms are in my hard drive for Windows. Is there a way I can see my other hard drives? I noticed that Windows can't see the linux hard drive and linux can't see the windows hard drive.

Hi Micro420!! :)

Well, I also think it's quite complicated to install Zsnes. You need to have nasm ( a sort of assembler installed too) and I could not compile it. But Snes9x is nice, it's an executable that you run as I said above :).

Yes, it's possible to Linux to actually see (by that, I mean, read and write to ) Windows partitions. Although, Linux cannot write to NTFS, but it can read without problems. FAT32 Linux can handle without a problem :). I've used NTFS before in my Windows partition and, the only program I know that can covert from NTFS to FAT32 is PQmagic 8.0.

Anyway, let's move on and make your windows partitions available in Linux :).

As root, go into /etc/fstab. Open fstab with your favorite text editor (anything will do, gedit, kedit, vi... I use pico myself). Once there, add the following line in there:

That's assuming that you have fat32 file system (otherwise, change vfat to ntfs) and that your windows in located at the first partition, in the case, hda1 (or else, change to the partition it is). Remember that the code above will let any user in your system to read and write to Windows partitions. It should be accessible by typing /win98. If you have more then one windows partition (as C: and D:) you could organize your fstab better. Suggestions:

That will let you access windows C: and D: drivers from /mnt/win_c and /mnt/win_d :).
I have a huge amount of roms and movies in my HD, so I have one partition (in FAT32) called data, where I storage all my download stuff and can access from both windows and linux :) pretty cool huh :).