[Satellaview multi-week games and SRAM]

Don't suppose you'd like to post your solution for the Ancient Stone Tablets?

[Working Phillips CD-i Emulators]

On 3/17/2022 at 9:37 PM, Lordmonkus said:

Because it contains bios you cannot post a link to it.

okay thank you!

[Working Phillips CD-i Emulators]

I've been having the hardest time getting Phillips CDI games to work in both mame and retroarch so I've compiled 2 emulators and a collection of files with a typed walk through on how to get games going. Its not really space efficient (you have to install a new emulator per game) but it works for the 4-5 games I wanted to use. I've uploaded it to archive for people but I was curious if I'm allowed to post a like to it? It contains the two Emulators, bios, 5 games and batch files used to launch games without using the emulators GUIs.

[mame unable to create the direct3d device after Bezelproject install]

3 hours ago, SmashNickles said:

I had to adjust my display resolution

Yes I restarted my machine (the ol turn it off and on again trick). All is working fine now so not sure what I managed to mess up. After the restart I reinstalled mame through launchbox mame importer. Then reinstalled the bezels just to make sure that was the issue but the bezels are working perfectly in tandem with mame. I dont know what I did to break it in the first place?

[mame unable to create the direct3d device after Bezelproject install]

It must have been a fluke cause they seem to be working fine now?????????

[mame unable to create the direct3d device after Bezelproject install]

Lord kill me now. I figured the last thing I could try was a restart. It worked. Gonna try to reinstall the bezels and see if the same results happen and will post the findings. 

[mame unable to create the direct3d device after Bezelproject install]

So I had mame running perfectly but then I used the Bezelproject installer (windows) to see what the hubbub about bezels was. Admittedly they are cool however, after running 1-2 games I am now get the error "mame unable to create the direct3d device (88760868)" after installing them? It doesn't matter if I launch them through Launchbox or independently either, I get the same result. I tried doing a fresh install of mame 0.240b through launchbox and from the actual installer from mamedev (the version I was running before hand) and the problem persists. All the info about this error seems to be 3-6 years old but I haven't sifted through enough old forums to figure out a solution yet so I figured I'd ask here. I've un-enabled the bezels through the bezelproject program and then uninstalled it (which still left some files in its install directory -_-) . I'm was still getting the error from all three installs of mame (so I deleted all three and tried one last time to do a fresh install which didn't work out). Any advice on how to save my arcade setup without nuking it and starting from scratch?

[Demul and Launchbox]

Is there a way to make this portable? I would like to make my arcade setup on a T5 SSD and the drive wont always be assigned the same letter so the bios paths for demul wont be the same every time. Or is there a different route I should take?

[Nokia N-Gage Working! (somewhat)]

Okay so this worked for me kind of, but still had issues with some games that I knew worked in the emulator outside of launchbox, but not when launched from launchbox. (Requiem from Hell for instance would launch when directly launched from the eka2l1 emulator but not from the files darkshade had provided in launchbox) Here's what I did to fix that issue and hopefully this helps someone in the future if they run into the same issues that I was having and thanks to Darkshade and Mr.Laor for all the info they and their posts on the subject provided. (Most of this post is basically a carbon copy just with tweaks to file names and condensed into one post)

1. Follow the guide to set up the emulator from the OP Video here. note: Of the Symbian OS' that he linked to in the description of the video the one that has best compatibility is RH-4 as the blzinstapp will actually work. I'm not sure if I can link it so Google is your best friend.

2. Once you have your emulator set up you need to have it set up in launchbox (under tools, manage emulators, add) and after you have put in the path the the executable and named your emulator, make sure to tick the box for "Use file only without file extension or folder path" and add in the default command line parameters this. 

                                       --app %romfile% --fullscreen

3. Download this folder of blank files and save them into a folder where you will be able to keep track of it.

Mine looks like this: H:\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Command Lines

The blank files will all have odd names like 0x101F402 and the reason for this is those are the App IDs for each game in the emulator and will correspond to the shortcuts that we will need to make in step four.

4. I altered Darkshade's .bat file to produce the shortcuts the same way it did before but with the correct App IDs. So to produce the shortcuts we will need download this .bat file and place in the root directory of your emulator with the eka2l1.exe program.

Mine looks like this: H:\LaunchBox\Emulators\EKA2L1(Nokia Ngage RH-4)

You will need to create a shortcut to the emulator by right clicking eka2l1.exe and selecting create shortcut here. It will create a file called "eka2l1.exe - Shortcut" which is what we want. Run the "Ngage App ID Shortcut.bat" after you have created the shortcut to eka2l1.exe.

5. Take the Game shortcuts folder that has been produced in the root folder of your emulator

again this folder: H:\LaunchBox\Emulators\EKA2L1(Nokia Ngage RH-4)

and place it in the folder where you stored your command line folder from step 3. Now its time to import your games into launchbox. Import all the files from the command line folder you downloaded in step 3 as "Roms" and scrape for the platform "Nokia N-Gage". You will most likely not get any art work as the games will all be labeled the odd file names like 0x101f409 so don't panic.

6. Once all your games are imported close launchbox and Download this. It's a filled out platform xml file that needs to replace the one launchbox just created in LaunchBox\Data\Platforms\Nokia N-Gage.xml

Mine is under this: H:\LaunchBox\Data\Platforms\

Once it has replaced the one launchbox made, open it with your favorite text editing program(I highly recommend Notepad++ because its free and great) and press "ctrl+F". In the options there should be a "find and replace" option with two bars to fill out. In the "find" bar copy

Replace\This\Directory

into it. Now we need to add what we are replacing it with, which will be the folder where you placed those command line files from step 3. The easiest way to do this is open windows explorer and navigate to the folder. Right click the address bar in the window and copy as text.

Mine looks like this: H:\LaunchBox\Games\Nokia N-Gage\Game Shortcuts\

Note like Darkshade said earlier make sure you have the backslash on the end there. "\"

After its done finding and replacing just save the file as is. Open Launchbox and all the games should have the correct meta data and names. Feel free to scrap the art work now.

Now as far as I know there are a few games that A)Do not work correctly, B)Do not have box art/meta data, C)only work on certain Symbian Operating systems like RH-4. I have only tested all the games I have on two of them (RH-4 and RH-29) but I compiled a list of working and not working with app IDs into this Excel sheet and maybe it will help others in getting the rest of the library to work correctly. That excel sheet can be found here. 

I hope this helps someone and again thank you to both Mr. Laor and Darkshade for all the info and work they put into this! Cheers everyone.