Zombeaver

Jason Carr said ...add a second Retroarch emulator (not the files, just the emulator record in LaunchBox), and configure each differently and pick between the two when you're adding games for Sega CD. Yep, this is what I do. I do this for my "Arcade" platform because I have some games setup to run on RA / Final Burn Alpha and some to run on RA / MAME. Basically you just need to create a new LB emulator entry for your alternate core, name it something like "Retroarch - Picodrive", and add in the appropriate platform in the platform tab (presumably Sega CD) along with the launch command but directed to the Picodrive dll rather than the Genesis Plus GX one. Take a look at your existing RA emulator entry in LB as an example. Whatever it has listed for Sega CD in the platform tab, you want to mirror that on the new emulator entry you create, except that where it says something like "libretro_genesis_gx_plus.dll" you're going to be changing that to "libretro_picodrive.dll" (or whatever it is) in the new entry you're creating. Then you just need to right-click and edit any appropriate games, go to the emulation tab, and choose "Retroarch - Picodrive" as your emulator.

cejpe said I'm assuming you would just configure everything on the host PC and just stream Launch Box? Yes, that's correct. Any configuration is done on the host. The Steam Link is just facilitating remote access, similar to something like GoToMyPC except that this is specifically designed for gaming - low latency, high visual quality, and the ability to send controller inputs to the host. I'm using a wireless 360 controller (the USB dongle has to be plugged into the Link) and a Logitech K400 which also uses a USB dongle. If you're wanting to use the Link for emulation, a wireless keyboard/mouse combo is highly recommended. Got have all those F-keys! :) If you do choose to go this route, let me know if you need any help with setup as this has been my ongoing project for more than a month now. One thing you may want to consider, if able, is to just test out normal Steam in-home-streaming between two PCs/laptops - the performance should be mostly identical to using the Link. I tested that pretty extensively prior to purchasing my Link because I wanted to work out any kinks beforehand.

The vast majority of the work is being placed on the host, not the client. Hardware decoding is client-side, but most PCs should be capable of that; and even if you're using a toaster as a client you could always use software encoding on the host (so that hardware decoding isn't necessary on the client) to get around it and the software encoding is quite good too. Network performance can be an issue for maintaining a high bitrate (25mbps+), but I've got a pretty substandard wireless router (it's wireless N, not wireless AC) and it still works great for me. I tend to leave it around 20mbps and it looks/runs great. I'm wired from host to router and wireless from router to Steam Link and the other PC. i7 4770k GTX 780 / 3GB 32GB DDR3 RAM Soudblaster Zx Windows 7 64-bit

Well, like I said I'm not using a server at all. I'm using a host which is my primary PC. With Steam in-home-streaming any PCs on the network that have Steam installed can be the host or client. Any client can stream from any host. You load up the device you want to play on (another PC or a Steam Link), choose the device you want to stream from, and then start the stream. Your inputs with a controller are sent through the network to the host machine. There's little to no discernible latency between input and action on the screen. It's something like <10ms. I can play Contra 3 or any other game that requires fast reactions with zero issue. I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between playing on the host and playing on a remote client. You can add non-steam applications to your steam library (like Launchbox or Big Box, for example) and control them via in-home-streaming.

DOS76 said I have a local instance of LaunchBox/BigBox on all of my computers same thing for the emulators and then I access some of the roms from my server So in other words you're using the server purely to hold the roms and are maintaining multiple separate instances of LB and your emulators on each computer? That sounds like a logistical nightmare to update and maintain across multiple systems to me... Doing it with in-home-streaming means you have 1 host, 1 LB database, and 1 instance of each emulator that are accessible by as many computers (or Steam Links) as you want to add onto your network.

I'm confused as to why you need the server at all if your goal is to use steam's in-home-streaming. I use in-home-streaming to stream Big Box + Retroarch (and a number of other emulators for that matter) from my desktop to a Steam Link in the living room or my laptop or my second PC. A dedicated server is not necessary to do this. If your goal is simply be able to stream and play roms over a network, I would remove a dedicated server from the equation as it's an unnecessary complication to that end. If the setup I described is what you're wanting (host PC streaming to other computers or a Steam Link over a network) I would be happy to assist, I just want to make sure there isn't some really important reason (that I'm not understanding) that you must do this by way of a server.

@Jason Yep, I got email notices. Thanks for looking into these!

If you're willing to go outside of ePSXe, I'm fairly certain that you can enable auto load/save states on game load/exit in the Mednafen core of Retroarch. I know that standalone Mednafen has it so it's likely that the RA core does as well. Mednafen (and Retroarch for that matter) is seriously awesome. It's much more accurate than ePSXe. There were some games (like Jumping Flash 2, for example, which has lots of weird/missing geometry in ePSXe) that I was convinced were never going to be right unless I broke out a real PS1... then I used Mednafen with them and they're perfect.

SentaiBrad said I do not like Rounded squares or the rounding that can happen with Filters like HQ2X, 3X etc. It just looks bad to me. For 3D though, it can look decent. Oh, I agree. I only use Hq2x on 3D games - it looks quite good with things like Mario 64. Everything outside of the mupen core I use CRT-Easymode though (including Mednafen). It just looks great with pretty much everything. It looks especially good with sprite-based games, but looks good on 3D as well (except for N64, in my opinion). I switched away from CRT-Royale because, while it can look better than Easymode in some cases (all instances of which are in sprite-based games) it tends to look quite terrible in a 3D setting. It also has a tendency to wash out colors in some cases which I don't like. Here are some decent overviews of some different CRT shaders: Filthypants / CRT Pixel Shader Filter For SNES, Filthypands / More CRT Shaders, and Shmups / Retroarch shader thread. I'm a big fan of scanline/aperture filters for everything from PS1 backwards. Upscaling looks great for PS2 onwards, but PS1 titles tend to just look...wrong...when upsaled. The low resolution had the effect of both hiding certain things that weren't meant to be seen and it adds its own character to the image that just gets swept away when you upscale which makes it look entirely too clean. A good scanline/CRT filter can have the effect of both increasing sharpness and obfuscating those unnaturally sharp pixels and they do a pretty good job of restoring them to the state that they appeared on non-high definition displays. The next thing I want to do is test out some NTSC filters. I've seen some impressive looking results with these in the right setting. Scroll down to the shot of FFVI on this. Obviously this is all subjective...

Have you messed around with any of the shaders in RA? Some of them look quite good - typically I stick with CRT-Easymode for most systems (I started with CRT-Royale but visual quality could be a bit of a mixed bag depending on the system/game whereas Easymode is more consistent across the board) but for N64 I use Hq2x which looks quite good with it.

I don't think you can map the guide button with Xpadder but you could certainly do it with any other button or combination of buttons with that. I have back+left bumper mapped to ESC, back+right bumper mapped to Enter, and back+left trigger (Alt)+right trigger (Tab) for example.

Yes, I saw it. Wasn't sure if any of these had existing issues in it though, which is why I posted it here to potentially prevent duplicates. I looked, for the record. But I've be added them there in any case.

Is there one for disabling the startup logo for Big Box? I didn't see it if so. Some new requests: 1. Ability to quick-sort in Big Box like you can in LB (title, date added, etc.) and the ability to specify/limit those sorting options. It would preferably be something you could do with a button press like L2/R2. 2. Cross-platform playlists, so you could select a title in say Neo Geo and choose "Add to playlist -> Favorite Shmups" and then go to Genesis and do the same thing. There could be an entry in the platform list for "Playlists" that took you to your sub-lists. 3. Multi-emulator option. I'd like to be able to add multiple pre-defined emulators that can be used per game so that, for example, I could choose say Retroarch as the default, but then adding an alternate in the game settings. You can already do this, but it requires that you add it as an additional app, so you're adding in the app title (ePSXe), specifying the path to the emulator, and have to specify the launch commands every time. I want to be able to just edit the game, go to the emulation tab, and specify a second emulator that I already have setup in LB as another option that will show up on right-clicking the game (like an additional app). 4. Export game list; total and per-platform. I'd like to be able to generate a nice little formatted spreadsheet of my games list. Thanks as always!

Paynemaster said how does it work when u putt a new rom in the allready active list? How can i automatic search for that rom/roms I think you can do a refresh if you specify the folder where the platform's games are located. I just drag and drop new stuff though. Anything new that I want to add I just drag from Windows directly into the Launchbox UI, specify the platform, and go.

DOS76 said You have to use a .bat file these are the ones I am using. Set the bat up as the emulator and then add which ever platforms you want I have Naomi Naomi 2 Atomiswave @echo off SET STRING=%1 SET STRING=%STRING:.zip=% SET STRING=%STRING:J:\Emulation\Naomi\ROMs\=% echo %STRING% start demul.exe -run=atomiswave -rom=%STRING% @echo off SET STRING=%1 SET STRING=%STRING:.zip=% SET STRING=%STRING:j:\Emulation\Naomi\ROMs\=% echo %STRING% start demul.exe -run=naomi -rom=%STRING% Err...I'm not sure why you need to do any of that. Using the no-space modifier + appropriate command line parameters per platform entry in the emulator settings works just fine.

TONBOX777 said OMG works! Thank you very much , you are my Hero! Happy to help! :D

Okay, uncheck the "use custom command line parameters" in the game entry itself. You don't need it since you have them set in the emulator entry already.

And associated platforms? You have the parameters there?

Can you post a screenshot of your emulator page? I think you may need to use the "no spaces" modifier as well (I think it says something about being "primarily for use with nullDC").

I haven't used Demul with Naomi titles, so I can't really comment there (although I believe what you have is correct, so it may be something in Demul itself), but it definitely works for DC through Launchbox. I believe the launch commands are the same but "dreamcast" so: -run=dreamcast -rom= I have mine setup as a command-line parameter in the emulator entry through, not on a per-game basis. You may want to try that. You should be able to add Demul and then add two separate platforms to associate with it in the platform tab - one for DC and one for Naomi and then add the appropriate command line parameters. Doing it that way means you won't have to enter those commands for every game. I believe you also need to set Demul itself to automatically go fullscreen on game launch in the settings somewhere. Sorry, I can't remember the exact wording/section but I can post screenshots when I get home this evening.

I concur with everything Brad said, although you can also use Imgburn for ripping (or converting), which is free. I've used it quite a bit both for ripping my own discs and converting rips from other formats (mounting an image via Daemon Tools and then using the DT virtual drive as the source for Imgburn and converting to bin+cue) and have had great results with Mednafen. Another thing to note is that Mednafen does support ccd+img+sub in addition to bin+cue. Be aware, however, that it's much pickier than ePSXe when it comes to acceptable rip quality, even if your sheet is correct, and there are no small number of bad rips floating around the interwebs. If a game won't run, first verify that your cue sheet is correct as Brad mentioned. If it isn't, it's possible that you have a bad rip. I've had a number of games that didn't initially run in Mednafen (even with correct cue sheets) that run fine in ePSXe, but worked fine in Mednafen when using a good rip. ePSXe isn't nearly as accurate as Mednafen, however, which is why Mednafen is still better, in my opinion.

Is there some particular reason you haven't updated to 5.5? In any case, you can add it in the section you highlighted, yes. If you have the platform named "PSP" or "Sony PSP" or some such, that's what you need to put in the field underneath "Associated Platform" and if you want that to be the default emulator for that platform, check the "Default Emulator" box.

Here's one for the 3DO. Full gallery here.

Mine was set to my Retroarch system folder. There wasn't a MAME folder in there, so I did some reading and evidently there's a bug that sometimes causes it not to be created, so I created one, then a sub folder named "cfg" and then created a blank file that was named "default.cfg" and that seems to have done the trick. Changes made via the tab menu are now being saved! ...then I had to deal with a weird issue where it kept wanting to pull up the tab menu when I hit the left trigger on my controller. I think I've got it all sorted out now, but apparently that's been a known issue for some time now. Anyway, thanks for the help!

No? How do I do that? Is that a line in one of the config files? If so, which one, and what line? I appreciate the help by the way!