Launch emulator on startup

[aaronmarsh632]

Hi,

I hope this is in the correct section.

I'm building a micro PC in a custom case that I want to use to play emulator games.

For the software tho I would like the pc to boot streight into the emulator of choice, in this case pcsx-reloaded. so it has more of a console feel rather than booting into an os first then logging in then launching the emulator etc, also would it be possible to control the mouse with a joypad? (I use an xbox 360 usb controller)

Thanks

[atreyu]

Hi,

What you want to do is very easy, but it will depend upon your distro, to some degree. I assume you have the commands to start up your emulator in a script - let's say it is called "/etc/init.d/emulator". Then in the file /etc/rc.d/rc.local (which should already exist, but again, this may be distro-dependent), you can put something like this:

if [ -x /etc/init.d/emulator ]; then
  /etc/init.d/emulator
fi

and upon boot-up, /etc/rc.d/rc.local is executed, which should in turn, execute your emulator start-up script.

Some other thoughts:

• you may want to put it in cron instead, which is called every minute, thus making sure it is always running. you'd want your script to make sure a copy of itself is not already running, of course. Or, you could roll your own daemon, which would provide you more control.
  
  
• you could make it a service/daemon and let the OS service manager take care of starting/stopping it. ie., in the case of SysVIinit (RHEL/Fedora,SUSE, etc.), you would put the script in /etc/init.d/, make sure it conforms to the proper SysV service syntax, and then it will be managed by the system. and you can manually start/stop it with:
  

  service emulator start
  service emulator stop

• you may want to start it in a screen, so that you can re-attach to it, when trouble-shooting problems that will eventually arise, e.g.:
  

  screen -S Emulator -dm /etc/init.d/emulator

  That command will start up your script in separate terminal session and throw it in the background. you can connect to it with:
  
  

  screen -r Emulator