I.K.E.M.E.N GO on Raspberry Pi 4 [Now with an Install Guide!] (2024)

@Larkas Apologies for taking forever to reply to this, my motivation for running stuff on RetroPie took a bit of a blow a while back. But I'll still try and help out!

It absolutely could be done, but just not with how I currently have full-games set up to run. One day I want to rewrite it to simply set the working directory to one containing a fullgame's files and run Ikemen_GO there, thus allowing pretty much every fullgame to run regardless of file structures or anything.
IKEMEN in general has kinda spotty gamepad support right now, but the Xinput pads should at least be supported, strange. I've used no less than three unique Xinput controllers with my Pi running IKEMEN and all of them work just fine, so I can't really hazard a guess as to what your issue might be. :<

Hello! It's been quite a while since I've touched RetroPie or this project, but I'm currently looking into making a complete refactor into how the scripts work in order to allow multiple full games!

I found out that, since IKEMEN uses the working directory to start reading files in, you could just use a command like this:

cd /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mugen/fullgame && /opt/retropie/ports/ikemen-go/Ikemen_GO

And IKEMEN will run itself in that fullgame directory, essentially allowing you to store multiple of them at once.

My gameplan now is to create a dedicated "system" with dummy ROMs (similar to ScummVM's .svm files) that when launched, tell runcommand which corresponding directory to cd into and launch. For example, loading test.mgn would load a fullgame at the directory /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mugen/test.

Once that's done, I'll update the scripts and guide above, as well as make a post explaining how all of that works. :)

UPDATE TIME! I can now proudly say my scriptmodule finally supports multiple game installs!

How it works!

When you install IKEMEN Go now via scriptmodule, instead of a port, you will now have a dedicated M.U.G.E.N folder in your ROMs folder. This folder contains two types of files: folders (each of which represent a fullgame) and a dummy file named after the folders and with a .mgn extension. An example (the default IKEMEN Go content) will be created upon install.

Adding games

If you're copying a native IKEMEN game such as Famicom Fighters, simply copy the game's content to a new folder.

If your game is based on M.U.G.E.N, such as Hyper DBZ, you'll need to first copy the ikemen-go folder (or download a fresh copy of IKEMEN Go 0.98.2 and extract its contents to a new folder), then copy the game's contents on top of that (saying yes to any overwrites). Otherwise you might run into errors about missing files that IKEMEN needs, but MUGEN does not (namely external and the debug font, but likely other issues as well).

Either way, in order to launch a game, create a .mgn file named after the folder of the game you want to launch. The contents of the .mgn file do not matter at all; just make sure the filename matches the corresponding folder exactly (case sensitivity and all).

How to install!

The install procedure should be largely the same as before: download the two scriptmodules, put them in the required place, open RetroPie-Setup and install ikemen-go. However, there's gonna be one more step you'll have to take: scriptmodules (best I can tell) do not have any way to specify file extensions directly, so you won't actually see a M.U.G.E.N system appear right away. To fix that:

Open either /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg or, if it's present, /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg
Find the system entry for M.U.G.E.N; this is created automatically when you install IKEMEN Go.
Change the <extension> line to this:

 <extension>.mgn</extension>

Save and restart EmulationStation.
If for whatever reason you don't have a M.U.G.E.N system in es_systems.cfg, you can also just copy-paste this entire block to add it manually:

 <system> <name>mugen</name> <fullname>M.U.G.E.N</fullname> <path>/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mugen</path> <extension>.mgn</extension> <command>/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 _SYS_ mugen %ROM%</command> <platform>mugen</platform> <theme>mugen</theme> </system>

A small note

Because of the way this is set up, you'll have to reconfigure your controllers with every new game. However, you can speed up this process after you've set it up once; find a game where you've configured your controllers to your liking, open up game_name_here/config/save.json, and copy-paste the KeyConfig and JoystickConfig sections to the config/save.json of any future games. You might be able to just copy the entire save.json wholesale, but certain games might have issues if they modify certain other parameters like System or CommonConst.

Theme stuff!

Since IKEMEN Go now creates an entire new 'system', that means theme authors can now include support for it! The theme system folder/ID is just mugen, so feel free to add support!

For those using lilbud's Switch theme, I've created this image that you can add to the art folder:

The guide at the top of this thread will be updated shortly. :)

"No config found for system mugen"

ok, so I thought I followed along with everything, but when I go to launch "IKEMEN-GO" in MUGEN, I get "No config found for system mugen". I get the same message when trying to launch another game from there. What did I miss?

Hello everyone! Long time no update but I figured I'd let the community know in case this helps anyone else.

If anyone wants a working version of the setup script, I have scripts that will compile the latest nightly:
http://www.trinitymugen.net/~Creator/Jesuszilla/scriptmodules/ports/ikemen-go-nightly.sh
http://www.trinitymugen.net/~Creator/Jesuszilla/scriptmodules/supplementary/golang-1.20.sh

Replace the scripts in the setup steps with these if you want a working version of the latest nightly installed separately. @SuperFromND should be working on new scripts in the future but this will allow you to install a separate nightly build for now (which includes 3D stages but beware: they don't perform well on Pi 4 as of the date of this writing; someone is working on improving the 3D rendering as I write this post).

A user in the I.K.E.M.E.N Discord confirmed these modified scripts work with Pi 5 as well and 3D stages do perform better there from what I've seen from footage (I have no Pi 5 to test myself but the confirmation is good).

EDIT: If replacing the steps in the tutorial above with my scripts, make sure to surround the URL's in quotes " " like so:

sudo wget "http://www.trinitymugen.net/~Creator/Jesuszilla/scriptmodules/ports/ikemen-go-nightly.sh"

~ Is a special character in shells so that could cause errors trying to use the command otherwise.

@Jesuszilla thanks for sharing! i got ikemen-dev working except for the .mgn file bit.
i got mugen working on wine through emulatonstation some time ago but i wanted to try ikemen without duplicating data so i symlinked my existing mugen folders under my wine roms dir, created .mgn file for the corresponding symlinks so it looks like this:

when i run a game off emulationstation ikemen will run with the default pak.
this is how the entry for ikemen in es_systems.cfg looks:

<system> <name>mugen</name> <fullname>M.U.G.E.N</fullname> <path>/home/osmc/RetroPie/roms/mugen</path> <extension>.mgn</extension> <command>/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 _PORT_ mugen %ROM%</command> <platform>pc</platform> <theme>mugen</theme> </system>

my emulators.cfg looks like so:

ikemen-go-nightly = "XINIT:/opt/retropie/ports/ikemen-go-nightly/ikemen-go.sh %ROM%"ikemen-go = "XINIT:/opt/retropie/ports/ikemen-go/ikemen-go.sh %ROM%"default = "ikemen-go-nightly"

a game in my gamelist.xml looks like so:

<game><path>./AvengersVsX-Men.mgn</path><name>Avengers vs. X-Men</name><desc>description</desc><image>./media/images/AvengersVsX-Men.png</image><video>./media/videos/AvengersVsX-Men.mp4</video><releasedate>20130318</releasedate><developer>infinitymugenteam</developer><publisher>infinitymugenteam</publisher><genre>Fighting</genre><players>1-2</players><playcount>23</playcount><lastplayed>20240526T020120</lastplayed></game>

and this is my runcommand output (ikemen runs fine, just not Avengers vs. X-Men):

Parameters: │Executing: xinit /dev/shm/retropie_xinitrc -- vt1 -keeptty │ │ │X.Org X Server 1.20.11 │X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 │Build Operating System: linux Debian │Current Operating System: Linux TV 5.15.92-1-osmc #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Jul 25 00:03:42 UTC 2023 aarch64 │Kernel command line: coherent_pool=1M 8250.nr_uarts=0 snd_bcm2835.enable_compat_alsa=0 snd_bcm2835.enable_hdmi=1 smsc95xx.macaddr=E4:5F:01:00:49:20 vc_mem.mem_base=0x3ec00000 vc_mem.mem_size=0x40000000 roo│t=LABEL=root-rbp4 osmcdev=rbp4 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait quiet cgroup_memory=1 cgroup_enable=memory │Build Date: 22 January 2024 06:21:42AM │xorg-server 2:1.20.11-1+deb11u11 (https://www.debian.org/support) │Current version of pixman: 0.40.0 │ Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org │ to make sure that you have the latest version. │Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting, │ (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational, │ (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. │(==) Log file: "/home/osmc/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log", Time: Sun May 26 02:51:10 2024 │(==) Using system config directory "/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d" │(II) modeset(0): Initializing kms color map for depth 24, 8 bpc. │Set mode 1920x1080@60.00Hz on HDMI-1 │ │Executing (via xinit): /opt/retropie/ports/ikemen-go-nightly/ikemen-go.sh /home/osmc/RetroPie/roms/mugen/AvengersVsX-Men.mgn │ │xinit: connection to X server lost │ │waiting for X server to shut down (II) Server terminated successfully (0). Closing log file.

initially i copied the Avengers vs. X-Men folder into the ikemen roms folder but got the same result.

then i copied the linux binary and files into a windows mugen folder, and that did run but i'm hoping i can use emulationstation.
what am i doing wrong?