Emulation in Red Hat

[Calum]

okay, i visited my folks' house recently and got to have a shot on my megadrive*, master system etc and it reignited my desire to get all those old games (which i mostly have ROM images of) to run under red hat 9. Well i downloaded a lot of the 16 bit and 8 bit games console emulators from Zophar's Domain and basically i can get zsnes, visualboyadvance and xgnuboy to work fine, meaning i can use gameboy, gameboy color, gameboy advance and super famicom games. However i try though i can't seem to get any of the megadrive, master system or atari 2600 emulators going at all. This usually seems to stem from this sort of error:

checking for sdl-config... no
checking for SDL - version >= 1.0.0... no
*** The sdl-config script installed by SDL could not be found
*** If SDL was installed in PREFIX, make sure PREFIX/bin is in
*** your path, or set the SDL_CONFIG environment variable to the
*** full path to sdl-config.
configure: error: *** SDL version >= 1.0.0 not found.

but then i do this and:

-bash-2.05b# rpm -ql SDL
/usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0
/usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0.0.5
/usr/share/doc/SDL-1.2.5
/usr/share/doc/SDL-1.2.5/BUGS
/usr/share/doc/SDL-1.2.5/COPYING
/usr/share/doc/SDL-1.2.5/CREDITS
/usr/share/doc/SDL-1.2.5/README-SDL.txt
-bash-2.05b# which sdl-config
/usr/bin/which: no sdl-config in (/usr/java/j2re1.4.2/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/X11R6/bin)
-bash-2.05b# rpm -qv SDL
SDL-1.2.5-3

which annoys me. i do indeed have SDL installed, but i don't have that sdl-config script it looks like, i did think about installing wine and running some of the fairly simple windows emulators for sega consoles, but the wine i have is the one on the RH8 CD and it doesn't want to work with my red hat 9 (and i can't be bothered tweaking wine as i think it is a dead end concept anyway, no disrespect to the developers who i am sure are doing a very good job) but to be honest on a pentium 3 700MHz there is probably something to be said for not using an emulator to run another emulator anyway. So what i am really saying is, does anybody know anything about running these 8 and 16 bit games console emulators in linux, and if so, how can i do it etc?

i'm also going to try and get a turbografx and an amiga emulator on the go but haven't tried them yet.

ps - oh yes one other thing, in konqueror (which i am currently using) it seems to think most of my ROM image files are all the same type of file. most of them are all detected as ROM images but if i set a default application for the *.smd ones then it applies that setting to all the rest (the atari, gameboy, sega ones etc) even though they all terminate in different extensions (*.gba, *.gbc, *.smd, *.gg etc) how do we sort it out? to make the matter more interesting, a couple are showing up as mp3s and one seems to be looking like a tar file, obviously it's determining the file type by the file's content, which is good in some cases, but not in this case.
does anybody know how to get kde to sort this out so it recognises the different types of ROM images as different file types?




*that's a sega genesis to you

[Void Main]

# apt-get install SDL-devel

[Calum]

SDL-devel, eh?
ok thank you! what is SDL anyway? like DirectX?

btw for anybody who reads this and also has the kde filetypes dillema, you have to go into kcontrol, then in the file associations dialogue you have to create a new file type for each type of file you want to apply new settings to. otherwise, when you "edit file type" it simply edits the "unknown" file type.

looks as though i will be having fun with these emulators (getting them to work i mean, not playing the games!) there are some linux ones, and a few DOS ones i might try out in DOSemu, sadly about half of the linux ones are closed source, and they seem more or less a write off since they have usually been compiled on a system that my red hat 9.0 bears no resemblance to whatsoever.

[Tux]

I think it's some dort of 2D audio visula library for making games, although i'm not really sure about it.

[TheQuirk]

"Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer." - www.libsdl.org