Zombeaver

What's this? A potential admirer of synthwave? I actually have pretty broad taste in music, but that's one area of particular interest to me. I also create some stuff of my own (not much that's Synthwave though):

It's just the Japanese title for the second game. The first game is called "Forbidden Siren" outside the US whereas in the US it's just called "Siren". Siren 2 (Forbidden Siren 2) was never released in the US.

Here's an alternate: I can remove the "Forbidden" if you want.

Awesome. Thank you!

One other thing to note about the controller support that not everyone may be aware of (or care about, in fairness) is that it universally supports xinput, which means it can be used via Steam Link/Steam In-Home Streaming; even in some cases where the standalone emulators themselves don't (in the cases where they don't support xinput). That's actually a major boon for me. Shaders and Hard GPU Sync (+ Frame Delay) are definitely huge too, like lordmonkus said. Shmups, in particular, feel significantly better in RA (in general) than elsewhere because of Hard GPU Sync + Frame Delay. It's also worth noting that there are some cores that have advancements over their standalone versions as well, like save state support and internal resolution adjustment. I was a little hesitant to make the switch when I first encountered it. I had been using various and sundry individual emulators for years, knew them pretty well in and out, and had taken the time to set them all up the way I wanted. Retroarch seemed like this massive and somewhat unintuitive beast that was a bit overwhelming. I still think it's a bit on the unintuitive/non-newbie-friendly side, but that's improved somewhat over time, and once you get your head around it it's a wonderful tool. There are a few cores that I think need some work (Yabause is crap - in RA and standalone both; Reicast is mostly crap compared to Demul, standalone PPSSPP performs better/more reliably than the RA core; and RA MAME isn't quite on the same level as standalone, for a few reasons) but by and large if I'm able to use RA for the task, I usually do.

I've not tried Game Gear specifically, but I know there are some great Game Boy and Game Boy Advance shaders that give the image a handheld border and decrease the image size like what you mention - they actually filter the image itself as well though to look like the screen of the device. I would think there would be a similar version for GameGear. I believe the ones I use are in the "Handheld -> Console Border" folder. Based on the Github there's a Game Gear version. "gg-2x.cgp" - "gg-6x.cgp". Is this the one you're currently using?

One thing I noticed about the image size after posting a few earlier is that there's actually an option to change the dimensions that they appear as in the post (you double-click on the image in your post and an options box appears), but they're apparently clamped down to a maximum of 500 x 212 resolution (or maybe just 500 x 500 but because of having "maintain aspect ratio" selected, changing the height resolution to higher than 212 would push the width to higher than 500... that's probably it. It actually said "no larger than 212" when I tried it though). I'm not sure why anything would be getting cut off based on what I saw... it has a toggle-able aspect ratio maintain option which is nice. I actually really like the new image attachment method once I figured out how it worked. You upload the image, click in your post where you want to put it, and then click on the image in the uploads list and it drops it there. Very convenient! The fact that text formatting follows standard text editor keyboard shortcuts now (Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I, etc.) is great too!

Here's some PC Engine variants of these @CriticalCid. I'll be working on your Arcade requests next. PC Engine: Normal: Scanlines: Normal - Version 2: Scanlines - Version 2: PC Engine-CD: Normal: Scanlines: Normal - Version 2: Scanlines - Version 2:

Yep, absolutely. You sir, get an upvote

I don't think there's a way to just change the color. If that's something I wanted to do, I'd probably go the route that @Rincewind suggested. That is a weirdly super-specific thing to make an entire website for haha If it's something you'd really like to see implemented, you could submit a Bitbucket feature request for it.

So I got to thinking about the rep thing this morning. Could we just go with an upvote or nothing system? If Reddit has taught me anything, it's that you can say something that's 100% factually and demonstrably accurate and people will downvote it if it's something they don't want to hear; which is complete BS in my opinion. I'm willing and able to defend anything I say (because I wouldn't have said it otherwise) but if, instead of actually voicing some kind of dissent (which I'd actually like to hear, by the way), you just click downvote because you don't like what I'm saying... that's the height of trolling as far as I'm concerned; and I'd just as soon not have a systemically supported means of trolling if it's all the same.

Ah okay, gotcha. I hadn't noticed that in the time I was testing it. I just thought since we have all this extra screen real estate now we should use it

Interesting! A [insert multi cue sheet names] to m3u auto-create would be wonderful, although I'm not sure if that's what you've got in store.

Any chance of uploaded images in posts being a bit bigger like they were when we were testing during the stream? I thought that looked pretty great. EDIT: Oh, and thanks for fixing the spoiler tag! I see that it's working now.

Any hints for what goodies are in store for the beta?

I mentioned that during the stream haha. It sounds like the old tiers were actually one-tier higher than they should have been for everyone. I'm like 30 posts away from...getting back to where I was for the last 400 posts haha The new forums are definitely sweet though. Very spiffy and fast. Just gotta get used to everything.

The Commodore 64 has "64" in its name because it had 64 KB of RAM. "Oooooh ahhhh!" Now, 34 years after the release of the C64, I have 32GB of RAM in my main PC, which is 33,554,432 times more than it had. Technology typically advances pretty exponentially. It's actually kindof amazing how close to reality Moore's law proved to be; though, from what I've read, it's become a bit less accurate from 2013 onward and apparently we're starting to hit a point of "saturation". It's still amazing to think how far we've come in such a comparatively short amount of time.

lordmonkus said That floatiness and animation was in Symphony of the Night too and is something that could be easily tweaked as it gets closer to a finished product if they feel it needs to be changed. Not really, not in the same way (or at least to the same degree) as what I'm talking about. That's why I linked the video from SOTN. Watch him go left and right up the stairs. Now watch when Miriam turns from one direction to the other. I'm less concerned with the animation itself (from a visual standpoint) than I am with the potential control loss from animation lock. If you actually can't change direction until that 0.5 second or however long animation is complete, then no, it's actually not like SOTN at all. It could be that you actually can change direction but it just has a bit of an overlong animation. It's difficult to say until I have an actual controller in my hand to see how it feels. But yes, it could definitely be tweaked between now and release for sure. It's just something that stood out for me while watching gameplay clips.

I'm definitely interested, but something about the gameplay videos I've seen has kindof concerned me... the movement looks a little floaty and potentially slow to respond due to animation. It's hard to say without having a controller in my hand and playing it - it just kindof stuck out to me. It could be that in reality your control isn't actually animation locked - again, hard to say without playing it, it just looks that way. Pay attention at 1:55 in that video when she turns from left to right and then right to left. Maybe it's just the animation itself, I dunno. It just looks "floaty". Take a look at this for comparison. There's still plenty of animation while walking but he basically switches direction instantly. Animating the switch in direction might look prettier but there can be gameplay ramifications as well (if you really are animation-locked). Nitpicky...I know. The game is gorgeous, aesthetically-speaking; and I'm a huge SOTN guy, so I'm definitely looking forward to checking it out.

Glad to hear it!

CriticalCid said I don’t know what you think it would do but all it does is to fill in the “Region” value based on the tag in the ROM filename. The value exists since a long time but was never automatically parsed when you have imported games. I don't know what it does, that's why I'm asking haha. I thought based on the description it was going to auto assign the associated platform based on the region it saw (so TurboGrafx-16 for ones that have a (USA) tag and PC Engine for ones that have a (Japan) tag, for example) but it doesn't seem to do that, which is fine by me, it's just not how I interpreted the feature description. CriticalCid said All I’m saying is that LB should use this value to determine which region should be used for the artwork and name (when alternative names get added to the db). That seems reasonable to me. Again, my issue has never been with the concept of merging the entries, in and of itself - it's that I don't want to merge them if existing region-specific data is going to be lost as result of it. If they can be merged without anything being lost in transition, I'm all for it. Part of my IRL job is systems analysis. I've borne witness to data migration on multiple occasions and you know what the recurring theme was literally every single time? Shit breaks or it gets lost or it gets corrupted in some way; often all of the above. So long as we can do what you're suggesting without those things happening, we should do it. I'm not being stubborn or confrontational - I just don't want good data that people have spent time and effort compiling and submitting to be lost. Based on a quick browse through the Super Famicom platform on the DB, that platform shouldn't be particularly difficult to merge into SNES at all. I saw... Assault Suits Valken (Cybernator) which could just be deleted... and a boatload of Japan-exclusive stuff. If we want to say all of these are for the "SNES"...okay then. It's not technically accurate but it's not really going to hurt anything either. The Famicom, however, seemed to have quite a bit more multi-region crossover. Moving exclusive stuff over shouldn't be a problem, but what about say Galaga vs Galaxian? They're both...mostly the same game, but with different titles per region and currently neither entry has images from the other. Should the Galaxian images be added to the existing Galaga entry and the Galaxian entry deleted or should the Galaxian entry just be changed to "NES"? What about Probotector vs Contra? I'm assuming this is what you're talking about when you mention alternate names. I think that's a good idea so long as the data from the alternate region is properly migrated over. I'm repeating myself at this point, but as long as existing good data can be merged together but still region-separated within one game entry, we should do it. It's just that that's not as simple as flipping a switch and saying "Now they're all NES!"

Yeah, I've grabbed a couple new things myself as result of it. I'm at 60 currently. Sengoku Blade I was actually able to get working after converting all the mp3s to wavs (it won't mount in DT otherwise) and then converting to bin+cue. Thanks for the tip on that! At this point the only things that are outright broken for me are: 1) Elan Doree, and based on what Hakase-Nyan over on the Reddit thread said, it must be a problem with my rip. I haven't been able to find a working alternative though and CD-Mage doesn't seem to work in this case. 2) Virtual Fighter, which is broken for everyone. So...one actually broken game out of 60 tested. And the 59 that work typically run better (or at least as well) than they do on the alternatives (assuming Yabause/SSF are able to run them at all, which is a much more frequent "if" than it is with Mednafen). Love it. One other kindof interesting thing of note that I discovered is that there's a prototype version of Deep Fear that's US region - the game was never released in the US. The prototype works great in Mednafen haha.

CriticalCid said EDIT: I just looked it up in the changelog and it was added in 6.4 - New Feature: Region information can now be parsed from ROM file names for No-Intro and Goodsets and possibly other naming formats What form does that actually take during the import process? I've never noticed a prompt or anything indicating that any sort of specific region had been recognized. Based on that it sounds like it's already implemented, but I've never seen anything indicating that it was adjusting regions during or post-import as result of it. 6.4 is less than a month old though so maybe it just hasn't impacted anything that I've imported in the meantime. I know that I've imported a lot of TurboGrafx stuff during that period, probably half of which were Japan region (so actually PC Engine) and it never said anything about it. When it asked what types of roms I was importing I just said "TurboGrafx-16" and it didn't split them up at all. They all have (USA) or (Japan) at the end of the rom names. Looking at the Games DB though... it looks like there isn't even a PC Engine platform listed, so I guess that's it. That seems kindof weird to me considering there are tons of PC Engine exclusives...

CriticalCid said As of now you can upload artwork for different regions for every game. Only the metadata is currently lacking of multiregion support. So alternative names would be a good point to start with that. Ah, okay. CriticalCid said Also LaunchBox currently downloads all available artwork for every region but it’s totally random which artwork it uses. Yeah, I've noticed this as well. I've just been either deleting everything other than the one I want or changing them to "Box - Front Reconstructed" or "Box - Back Reconstructed". This is admittedly pretty annoying. CriticalCid said That’s why I said it would be about time that LaunchBox uses the right artwork based on the region tag in the ROM name. This assumes that the rom files even have the region tag. It also would mean that LB would treat rom file names differently than it's always done - which is to ignore text within special characters. I would say once again that this is probably harder to implement than it sounds - it'd have to be setup in such a way as to recognize the region tag (which can be in a number of different forms like U/US/USA/NA/NTSC and J/JAP/JPN etc.) and simultaneously ignore everything else in special characters. It seems possible, but potentially problematic. Here's a random C64 rom file name from my library: Rick Dangerous (1989)(Firebird Software)[cr REM][t +6 REM][a][Docs].d64 Gooooooood luck with that haha

I've been messing with these a bit more lately. The idea I have for them is to do 3+ for each system. When they're placed in the appropriate Images -> Platforms -> [platform name] -> Fanart folder it will actually cycle between them at random while switching between any games within that platform that don't have existing fanart. I'm hoping that eventually a new priority will be added to the Background Priorities list (Tools -> Options -> Images -> Background Priorities) that will be specifically for platform fanart, because right now if the game itself has it's own fanart it will always appear, rather than platform fanart. I'd like to have a way to have these always appear for everything within the relevant platform. Anyway, these are what I've come up with so far: