[The Big Ol' Retroarch Shader Thread]

Well, it depends on what exactly you're trying to replicate. There are scanlines, grain, and bloom - all of which are present in the presets already. Most of what you're seeing that's giving that a unique look comes down to the assets themselves and what looks to be some kind of additional lighting engine, none of which is stuff that shaders have any control over - that's based on the content. In other words, if you stripped away the scanlines, grain, and bloom from that picture and gave it to me, I could add a shader on top that would make the end result look similar (probably better even, honestly), but I can't make a preset that will cause content to spontaneously develop dynamic lighting or replace textures 

Glad you're enjoying the shaders!

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

Take No Prisoners has now been added to Zomb's Lair.

[help commodore64]

No problem @5thWolf I don't use any of these anymore though. I would suggest taking a look at the below thread 

 

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

That's perfectly understandable. Trust me, I know.

I'll just post them in here as I go and hope for the best. If people see them and use that information to update the DB, great; if not, it'll just be business as usual regardless.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

Alright y'all, I've been busy working on individual game releases for Zomb's Lair lately but I'm currently gearing up to resume work on C64 Dreams.

Something that I thought might be helpful for the project would be for me to list the games that I've added as I go, preemptively, so that anyone that will be working on media/metadata for the DB can work on that beforehand rather than after the fact. I work on the Launchbox side of things as the last step of the process, so that would make things easier for me as well since I could just scrape the DB after the updates had already been made. I currently have 150 games picked out with the goal for the next version being 500, but not all of those 150 have been tested yet so I don't want to list them until I've done that (because they might turn out to be crap and end up getting removed). 67 of them are actually done though, so those are good to go. I'm sure that some of these have DB entries with media/metadata already, but I just figured doing it this way would make things easier for everyone. @Z3R0B4NG I don't know how involved you are with that side of things, but if there's anyone specifically you think I should shout out for that, just let me know.

Spoiler

2438 The Return
Ace of Aces
Adventures of Tronic
Age of Heroes, The
Alien Bleed
Aviator Arcade II
Birdie Bird
Bobby Bearing
Centric
Cybo-Cop
Deadly Thunder
Death Battle 2200
Drol
Dungeon of Rott
Escape to Murky Woods
Forever Extending Hungry Snake, The
Game of Harmony, The
Ghost of Genghis Khan, The
Ghost Town 64
Golden Pyramids, The
Guild of Thieves, The
Gun City
Gun Runner (Mnemonic Productions)
Gun Runner (The Power House)
Gunboat
Gunfighter
Gunfighters
Gunfright
Guns 'n' Roses
Gunslinger (Datasoft)
Gunslinger (Virgin Mastertronic)
Gunstar
Gutt Blaster
Guzzler
Hades Nebula
Hagar The Horrible
Halcyon
Halloween
Halloween Police
Halls of Death
Hammer Boy
Hercules - Slayer of the Damned
Jumpman Junior
Kobo64
Left 2 Die
Left 2 Die Part 2
Magical Girl Mary vs E.V.I.L.
Mancala
Mega Tank Blasta
Mirage
Old West World, The
Outlaw
Project FX-64
Ring of Power, The
Rudy Hammer
Sizzler
Sooper Froot
Space Mission
Space Swarm 64
Stellar Wars
Storm Chase
Summer Games
Survival Messenger
Tai-Pan
Toilet Paper Stacker
Winter Games
Zambeezi

I've also setup a Discord server for Zomb's Lair which includes a C64 Dreams channel for discussing the project, if anyone's interested. You can find it here.

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

Lifeforce Tenka has now been added to Zomb's Lair.

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

Logical Journey of the Zoombinis has been updated to version 2.0. This updates the game version to Logical Journey of the Zoombinis Deluxe, adds Retroarch support with shaders and bezels, controller support via Antimicro, Reshade support, and ASuite for management.

I still plan to do this with a few more of the older packages, bringing them in line with the feature set of the newest ones, but a user recently made me aware of the Deluxe version of the game which brings a few improvements over the original (which is what was used in the original package) so I figured it'd be a good opportunity to take care of this one.

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

Iron Assault has now been added to Zomb's Lair.

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

Gothos has now been added to Zomb's Lair.

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

I forgot to mention it in here, but I've started a Discord server for Zomb's Lair. Anyone interested is welcome to join. I discuss upcoming projects I'm working on, take requests, talk about the tools I use to make the packages, and just blather on about old games in general

You can find it here.

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

Master of Dimensions has now been added to Zomb's Lair.

This marks the 50th package available on Zomb's Lair! It's been a long road, and I look forward to the next 50. I've got plenty more in store. More to come soon!

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

1 hour ago, D-TurboKiller said:

-I switched the CPU to Pentium 133, the one I couldn't run the games at full speed. Quite important, since it's a good way to measure the speed percentage when I applied a setting.

-Booted up Zero Critical, but without the CD inserted. This way the game is running, but it's stuck on a warning screen, which is great, since it's running at the same speed as the actual game: around 80% speed.

-Tried out all the renderers. Lower performance in general, but regular OpenGL came close. Once again. OpenGL 3.0 stood on top.

-Having the renderer now set to OpenGL 3.0 (OGL 3.0 renderer specific settings hadn't been touched yet, still the defaults), having VSync ON actually increased speed by around 2%. Now max speed is at 82%, min speed 76%.

-Scale filtering set to Linear seems to be a tiny bit faster, but it's hard to tell.

-Setting the output scale to 4x doesn't seem to make any noticeable difference.  Maybe a tiny bit slower, but it's unnoticeable. I left it at 1x to avoid unnecessary overhead.

-Placing Output stretch-mode to 4:3, then OGL 3.0 renderer-specific settings to the following: Input stretch-mode set to "None"; Input Scale set to "4x"; Shader refresh rate to "Same as emulated Display". An interesting result occurred: max speed remained the same, but min speed increased to 78%! Every other combination just slows it down, even if slightly.

Interesting results, don't you think? Hopefully that helps.

That'll work. I basically just wanted to make sure that increasing the input scale to 4x wasn't going to have a significantly negative impact on performance. Seems as though it had a positive one, oddly.

1 hour ago, D-TurboKiller said:

I know the official one used PCem v14 and it barely ran at over 60%, but was there really that much optimization involved between versions? I can't really tell from the changelogs.

That would be my guess, yes.

1 hour ago, D-TurboKiller said:

Perhaps is it the fact that I'm using Windows 98 SE?

That's highly unlikely. If anything, that would add more overhead. 98 is almost never warranted/beneficial over 95 for the purposes of emulating these games.

1 hour ago, D-TurboKiller said:

Or what I suspect at the moment, the fact that I picked a different machine from yours? Maybe there's just less emulation overhead involved with certain machines? I suppose that would make sense.

That's significantly more likely. With that said, I don't really plan on changing that.

The BIOS for the FIC VA-503+ isn't actually included with PCem by default either.

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

Did some testing for the upcoming package with some interesting results. To my hand/brain, OpenGL 3.0 seems to actually reduce input latency slightly over the options, and this is improved further by making a few additional changes. I'm not certain whether or not these have any additional performance impact though. There is none for me, but I'd be curious if there is on your hardware @D-TurboKiller. Try setting the renderer to OpenGL 3.0 and then going to Video > OpenGL 3.0 Renderer > Input Stretch Mode > 4:3 and then Video > OpenGL 3.0 Renderer > Input Scale > 4x. This feels noticeably better to me than just using Auto. I'm not certain if that input scale setting increases hardware requirements though.

From the upcoming package:

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

Well, this is fortuitous. I was looking for an easy way to swap out the PCem settings in the launcher for more than just the renderer settings - it's easy enough to swap out any one value doing what I've always done which is essentially making multiple versions of a config and then making .bats that replace the used config with another with slightly altered settings. I've done this for DOSBox, Retroarch, and other things. This is no problem so long as you're only changing one value and don't need to toggle different things separately - like say a combination of the renderer and CPU speed. At that point that method wouldn't really work unless I made a separate .bat and separate config for every possible combination of those (which isn't going to happen).

But I just came across the rather eloquently named FART - Find and Replace Text. It's a command-line tool for replacing text in files. This is perfect because now, rather than replacing the entire config with another, I can replace specific strings of text with another, so I can make changes to specific settings independently via command-line. Another gadget to throw into the tool belt.

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

33 minutes ago, D-TurboKiller said:

Of course, no worries Zombeaver. I have no intention of degrading your efforts (quite the contrary!), and I apologize if I might've indicated otherwise.

Understood, and I didn't really take it that way just explaining the logic behind what's there and how I get there. It's a process. I know that in a lot of cases the settings used are higher than "what's needed" as a bare minimum but there's still a reason for it. I do know of a couple though that I specifically intend to revise some settings for in an update like Biosys (which was my first use of PCem and I wasn't as well versed with it at the time).

33 minutes ago, D-TurboKiller said:

You've done wonderful work, regardless of what a select few might have issues with. I was pretty impressed with the extra attention to detail, like the Launcher present in the Majestic Trilogy, which was both convenient and tweakable. And not needing to switch CDs in Obsidian is just fantastic. Two thumbs up indeed!

Thanks. I try to make it as easy as I can.

I'm not always able to eliminate disc-swapping, but I try to when I can. Some games make that easier to do than others.

33 minutes ago, D-TurboKiller said:

Ah, I thought the input lag was just a matter of having a low resolution, so the mouse cursor didn't have a lot of screen space to move accurately, especially in low-res games like 320x200.

That's part of the issue, for sure. There's nothing you can really do about that. But if you go from say a Windows 95 environment in PCem and then go to a Windows 95 environment in DOSBox, same screen resolution, same sensitivity settings, there's a noticeable difference (for me anyway). PCem is certainly still usable though.

33 minutes ago, D-TurboKiller said:

As for OpenGL 3.0, again that's something that worked for me in particular, but adding that setting in the Launcher would do just fine, so someone could always try that as an alternative.

I should be able to do that.

33 minutes ago, D-TurboKiller said:

One last thing I'd like to add, since you've mentioned VSync. Just note that this is a GPU-specific fix and I own an AMD GPU (AMD RX 470), I don't know what the NVidia equivalent is (maybe Fast Sync). There was this game in particular called Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, and it was driving me nuts. If I had VSync off, it exhibited the worst frame tearing I've ever seen in any game, and if I left it on, the tearing was fixed, but the input lag was so bad, it was easily over *half a second* at times! What I did to finally fix the problem was, through the GPU's software settings, forcing a feature called Enhanced VSync for this specific game. Basically what it does is having the benefits of VSync but without the input lag. And yes, it did actually work: frame tearing was gone and so was the input lag! Unfortunately this isn't something you can force since it's GPU-bound, but... something to note if you're having a particular game with bad frame tearing

Yes, sometimes it can be beneficial to force various options through the Nvidia control panel as opposed to a game's own implementation of them. I've experienced similar things with Nvidia hardware. I don't know about Fast Sync specifically, my card doesn't support it (GTX 780), but that wouldn't shock me.

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

Point and clicks are some of the worst culprits of noticeable input latency because you're constantly moving a mouse cursor. It's very noticeable to me even going from the most ideal settings for reducing it in PCem to DOSBox. It's basically always there in PCem, and then there are various changes that can be made that will only make it worse (like enabling vsync, which seems to do very little in PCem to begin with... other than increasing input latency).

In any case, my point in all this is that I already make a conscious effort to do what you're asking. If you need to dial down settings more for your hardware, okay. I already do that to begin with until I reach a point that I'm seeing some sort of performance impact (minor, in some cases, to be fair). If someone came to me with questions about what changes they could make to cater to weaker hardware, I'd have no issue assisting with that. But my point is that the settings I use aren't just arbitrary. I won't go as far as to say that tweaks shouldn't be made in some cases (I have a few early ones in particular that I know I need to adjust), but in many cases they're dialed in where they are for a reason; and some people's hardware won't be sufficient.

I don't mind switching over to OpenGL 3.0 in theory, if that's going to prove beneficial (although I don't know how comfortable I am with assuming that that's going to be ideal across all hardware/software as opposed to Auto), but only if it's not going to negatively impact the input latency.

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

I'm using a 6 year old PC with an i7 4770k without issue so I'd say there's more than likely a deeper issue on your side; the presence of Wine seeming to be the most probable culprit. In all honesty I ordinarily dial back the CPU speed for the final release. Emulating a Pentium 200 runs at full speed for me. I ordinarily dial it down until the game runs slower in some way/at some point. I even try to ordinarily take a look at the system requirements as listed on the box and aim around the recommended (not the minimum) hardware. Sometimes I'll go a little above if I can notice a difference in load times or performance. The settings I use though, by and large, are not that demanding to be completely honest with you. None of these are intended to be used on Linux/Wine so I can't guarantee how well or if any of them will work in that setting, and I'm not going to cater to that. About the best I can do is get it to an "about right" value and tell people to make adjustments if necessary for their hardware (it's easy enough to do). There are a few that I intend to go back and make a few tweaks to, and that might include speed settings but, again, emulating a P133 is not particularly outlandish (even on relatively ancient hardware like mine). I've seen several packages from The Collection Chamber that use a P166 with 128MB of RAM.

I do wish that PCem's tools for tweaking performance were as robust as DOSBox's. I always use "cycles = max limit [#]" for the DOS stuff which is extremely useful since it essentially means "as fast your PC can handle but no more than [x]" which gives you an upper limit to prevent problems from running too fast while simultaneously not locking it into an arbitrary fixed speed that the host might not be capable of reaching (which is essentially what you're stuck with for PCem). Unfortunately, there's no equivalent to that in PCem currently.

57 minutes ago, D-TurboKiller said:

-Obsidian needed a little extra step, at least in my case. It was at 100% speed in many cases, but there was just as many where it'd stay above 90%, which was causing severe sound stuttering, even with the config file you posted. Amazingly, I found out that by switching the renderer to OpenGL 3.0, the game was now stutter-free

I'll take a look at this again, but my recollection of using OpenGL 3.0 as the renderer was that it increased the input latency a bit (which is already worse in PCem than it is in DOSBox). Will have to experiment some.

[Zombeaver's PCSX2 Configs / Simple 1-Click Installs With PCSX2 Configurator]

It saves to the inis folder in your PCSX2 folder. I think you can change this in the settings file in the configurator plugin folder.

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

Mummy: Tomb of the Pharaoh has now been added to Zomb's Lair.

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

The Day The World Broke has now been added to Zomb's Lair.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

It should also be noted that if you're going to do that, you should make sure you use the update that I posted a couple pages back, because the core options changed (because I'm using @Pixelpiper's core now). This is what's going to be used in all future releases so it would invalidate your new option files if you tried using then after updating to the next version.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

No, it's done through the core options. If you change it there, it will change it for anything that doesn't have an existing core option (.opt) file for them. To change it per-game, you would change the value and then use the top option in the list to save a core option for the currently loaded game only. This creates an .opt file that's named after the game in config\Vice x64. These essentially work as overrides except they're specifically for core options.

Be aware, however, that the vast majority of these games are designed for PAL. The only games that are setup to use NTSC are ones that specifically require it (few and far between). In some cases it will work for both, but I can't guarantee it.

[Zomb's Lair - Reviving Old Classics]

Sunstorm Interactive Hunting Pack has now been added to Zomb's Lair. This includes Deer Hunter (1997) + Deer Hunter Companion and Extended Season expansions, Rocky Mountain Trophy Hunter (1998) + Alaskan Expedition expansion, and Wild Turkey Hunt (1999).

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

I thought I already had BC's Quest For Tires, but I guess I only have BC II currently. That will definitely be added.

The Pawn and Wizball are already in the collection. Jumpman Junior is going to be in the next set as someone else requested it already (I actually uploaded it as an interim addition earlier in the thread).

I'm familiar with all the others and can add them in the next update.

[C64 Dreams (massive curated C64 collection)]

6 hours ago, zorkiii said:

Also for the games that were automatically favorited in the games collection (for launchbox) what's the quickest method to un-favorite everything to start from scratch? EDIT: wait scratch that, I found it - just had to select all in launchbox for the games collection and right click > edit > select favorite in the dropdown and click next to set them all to false but thought I'd add the comment here in case it helped anyone (sorry if it's already covered which it prob is).

Yep, you got it.

The game's that are listed as favorites by default are all of the best of playlists combined.