Zombeaver

"based on or determined by individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the intrinsic nature of something" I think that actually sums it up just fine. You're making a choice on the basis of a specific criteria that has no inherent impact on the determination of value or quality of the games in question. It's not based on any other intrinsic value, it's not even based on a value that anyone but you would care about. The fact that the 80s is when you were active has no relevance to literally anyone but you. That's what makes it arbitrary. You can define or refer to that with whatever word you want though. Feel free to replace with "silly" if arbitrary offends your sensibilities. Whether or not something is "good" is obviously going to come down to a certain matter of taste. I never said anything to the contrary. I don't know of any game critic that would ever say anything to the contrary. I'm making the determination based on how playable a game is (in 2020), which is based on yes, my opinion, and on a "fun factor" again based on my opinion, avoiding the hundreds of Boulderdash hacks/clones (or equivalents for other games), avoiding non-English versions of games where relevant, and avoiding stuff that... just looks like complete garbage. Nobody's going to agree with 100% of my decisions, but 99.9% of them aren't going to care enough (or know) one way or the other anyway. I am willing to go out on a limb and say that my (admittedly debatable) rationale is more relevant to 99.999% of the target audience here than yours is though. For someone with such limited time, you certainly seem to have plenty enough to come in here, dragging this increasingly ridiculous conversation along. If you have anything actually relevant to contribute to this project, feel free, but I'm not going to waste any more of my limited time on this. In the time that we've been having some kind of inane semantics debate, I could have gotten more work on this done. This is not your personal sounding board to talk about your projects, talk about your golden years in the scene, your bartop, your graphical or programming skills, or the undoubtedly numerous other fantastic qualities of you. None of that is relevant to this thread. There's plenty of space on the forums for that kind of thing. This isn't it. If you have a specific game request, a specific feature request (that I'm able to accommodate), or have some issue (that's within my ability to resolve), I am happy to oblige. Otherwise, it needs to go elsewhere.

I've already done that. The parameter is "Is it good?" I have to dig through piles of shit in order to determine what passes that parameter check. By saying "I don't care about anything from the 90's for C64 no matter how good." you are quite literally doing it on the basis of an arbitrary year. Game = Good + Year > 1989 = Don't care Game = Good + Year </= 1989 = Super interested There are C64 games that came out after 1989 that, surprisingly enough, are actually quite good. There are C64 games that came out in the 80s that, shockingly enough, are actually quite awful. It's almost as if there are good and bad games that came out both before and after an arbitrary year. If you want to be arbitrary about [insert random variable], by all means go for it! That is your prerogative. But don't tell me that it's not arbitrary.

Yeah, me either, thus the whole curation thing. Most people aren't going to be willing to dig through 25,000+ titles (or even 10,000, for that matter) to do that though, so therein lies the rub. Curation purely on the basis of an arbitrary year is seriously bizarre, but hey

Which is what I said, yes. That is a pretty bizarre statement. There are many, many titles all the way back in the 80s that fall right into this category - there are quite a few in this collection which itself is already cut down through curation. Magazines like Compute! and diskmags like Magic Disk 64 and Game On released many such games regularly; nearly all of which had scene releases as well (that's what's in the collection). This is not to mention just other weird stuff like Mario's Brewery (which I actually have a cart of sitting right here); which I guess technically does have "official" art if you count what's on the cart (there was no box, as far as I know) This type of thing really wasn't that uncommon. There were something like 10,000~ commercial titles for the C64. There are 25,000+ titles on Gamebase64 (which is missing a lot of stuff from the last couple years). Not all of those 15,000 titles were made in the 90s. Frankly, it's not particularly relevant whether a game was released in 85, 95, or 2005. It's all the same library. A PC game that's released on Steam or, hell, itch.io in 2020 isn't inherently any more or less important than [insert PC game from 10+ years ago] on the basis of some kind of esoteric notion of a "heyday". It's the same library. The only metric that actually matters is whether or not something is actually worth playing. Some of them are good, some of them are shit (a statement that safely spans both commercial and non-commercial releases), and it turns out that, in this case, there are lots of good ones that have no official art. Which is what's already been done, yes. Those are what's being discussed to begin with though. Many (not all, of course) of the games that have official art already have 3D boxes. The games that don't, don't. In the case of the ones that don't have official art, Lassiveran's boxes fill in some of the gaps for traditional boxes, but not 3D boxes. Personally, I don't like 3D boxes that much so I'm not planning on making any, but I will eventually make my own normal boxes for the missing gaps (and probably replacing Lassiveran's boxes as well, just to make it a bit more consistent).

The problem is that a lot of these games have no official art. Many of them were just made by [insert random dude in his garage]. Big publishers like Activision, EA, etc. had the budget to release nice, high quality packaging for their games, but there are significant portions of the C64 library that were just hobby projects that found their way out into the public in one way or another. The closest you're going to get for those games is something like Lassiveran's box set which I'm already using wherever possible, and there's still plenty that are missing. 3D boxes, specifically, are less common than normal boxes already, and without official art to work with in many cases there will likely always be large gaps, unless someone were to A) do their own custom boxes similar to what Lassiveran's done or B) made 3D box versions of Lassiveran's art. I do plan on making my own custom boxes for ones that don't have official art eventually, although I don't plan on doing 3D boxes. That sounds interesting, REDUMP doesn't provide a parent/clone set for 1G1R, i'm sure i could free up some serious space on my unRAID server if that was a thing and with CD based systems it might actually be worth it, you got a post somewhere about that or a link? This needs to be taken to PMs.

Alright, so everything's done. Everything's imported, media added for everything, made a couple more custom note overlays, cleanup's done... at this point I'm just going to do some final testing and we should be good to go. If anybody is having any issues with the testing version, let me know, otherwise I should have it out in the next couple days.

I went through and re-tested over 30 of the games that I've made updated configs for (that were for 3281) in 3400 and so far no issues or regressions (or at least no more than the couple that were already in 3281 from 2711) so that's encouraging. I will be finishing up the remaining 20% to be updated and then pushing them all through, it's gonna happen I promise, but I really have to finish up the next update for C64 Dreams before I get too sidetracked on this again. I've been working on that for months now and I really have to get that done first for my own sanity's sake. Once that's done, I will be switching gears back to finishing these up.

Yep, that does fix it in 3356+ looks like, so that's a plus. Will have to go back through and test the other updated configs on 3400. The only other thing I see in the changelogs between 3281 and now that looks like it could be significant is a mention in the log for 3369 about a lot of visual bugs fixed in Musashiden 2 (Musashi: Samurai Legend) so will have to look into that as well.

Half-Pixel Offset? If that's what you're talking about then no it doesn't. Not in 3281 anyway. The changelog for 3356 does say they added in something called "half bottom detection" which "helps" Midnight Club 3 and some others so I can try that. That'll mean I'm going to have to go back and re-verify previously updated ones too though. There were some pretty major changes in PCSX2 between the previous build that was used and now, I don't know how much that will carry through from 3281 and the newest build.

Just been busy, it'll be done once I take care of a few other things. It has issues, as noted on the sheet if you took the time to read it. It's either deal with the issues present with hardware rendering or switch it to software rendering. There is no perfect config for hardware rendering for the game. Literally zero of the configs use 1.4.0. Read the opening post. I have a link for the specific version that it's intended to be used with (which is a 1.5.0 build). It's mentioned multiple times in the post, but they are for 1.5.0. The specific dev build used is linked. The current update process will be for a newer build, but that's not done yet.

Good to know and glad you got it sorted!

I don't know what to tell you there. Nothing is different about them than what's in every prior release. libwinpthread-1.dll is already in the Retroarch folder so I'm not sure why it thinks it's missing. I've had a couple other people test (and I've tested on multiple PCs myself) and no one else is reporting that error. Did you extract all the folders or try to merge with an existing set? As with every prior update so far, do not do that. Extract this, in its entirety, somewhere fresh. This is not meant to be merged or placed on top of existing files. The only other thing I can suggest is maybe make sure that the archive isn't "blocked" on your PC by right-clicking on it, going to properties, and clicking unblock. I am going alphabetically but I regularly check CSDb.dk for new releases as well (you have to in order to keep up) and when something new catches my eye I add it in. Sometimes I'll just browse through every release by a specific group like Remember, Hokuto Force, or Triad and just pick out things that look interesting from there (since I already know I like these groups, that can be a good place to start). I'm at the end of "G" ("Gu" to be more specific) though in terms of Gamebase64 screenshots. Please read what I put in the post. I don't know what to tell you there either. CudaText is literally just a portable text editor for editing the .cfg file. This could again be the result of not extracting everything or not unblocking the archive.

Okay so here's the version for testing. The version number is 0.20 instead of 0.19 because this one's kindof a milestone update so we're skipping. Shenanigans! C64 Dreams v0.20-testing I'm not going to post a changelog (which is quite extensive) at this point - I basically just want people to play around with it and let me know if they have any issues. The new NTSC bezels are done and cleanup is done. I still need to make custom joystick controls for one game (Renegade) but that can wait for the final release. Reminders: This does not include Launchbox at the moment as that side of the update isn't done yet. It isn't needed to use these though. Just go into the Games folder and then into a subfolder for a game and start the .vbs file inside. There's a new configurator for quickly switching out shaders, overlays, and adjusting the base config. This should work out of the box for any 16:9 resolution. If you are using 4:3, 5:4, etc. it's going to need some manual adjustment. There are still 11 games that have 1080p-specific settings that won't be right on anything other than that resolution; and because the dimensions have changed somewhat, the previously provided settings for other resolutions will no longer be valid and new ones will be needed. The 11 games are listed below: Alien Syndrome Ballblazer Brainway Draconus Forgotten Forest Frogger Arcade Gemini Wing Genesia Tiger Claw Turbo Outrun Zolyx Everything else is setup in such a way that it should "just work" with any 16:9 resolution, including the three NTSC titles - Death Bringer, Donkey Kong (Atari), and Masquerade.

Yes, you don't start the .bat files, you use the .vbs files (which starts the .bat while hiding the cmd window). What games are you wanting added? This is why I've asked (repeatedly) for any requests. They won't be in the next update at this point but I can add them to the list for the one after that.

Occasionally

Spent a while working on some new bezels: Bruce Lee: Retrograde: Times of Lore:Ultima III: X-Out: I still need to make some more for NTSC.

I'm not aware of a way to hide the splash screen. You can find the WHDLoad.prefs file here.

Another quick status update: All of the 300 new games are done, bringing the count to 2000. All version updates are complete (86 games updated). I've added Blast From The Past volumes 16-25. I've updated the controller mapping image to reflect the addition of the virtual keyboard function, as well as note some special keyboard keys (Esc = Runstop, Tab = Ctrl, etc.) I've added 55 new custom notes overlays bringing the total to 80. (I originally thought it'd be 100 for this release but I honestly feel like I'm scraping to come up with more that really warrant it at this point so I'm going to stick with 80) I've added 16 new demos bringing the total to 50. I've added 10 new SID track bringing the total to 60. Zzap!64 issues 36-50 conversion is complete. PRG/Group/Version info is now complete for all 2000 games. (phew!) I've setup a simple configurator panel as I do with some releases on Zomb's Lair to allow for quick selection/adjustment of different settings: I need to add custom controls to 1 game. I've created a new bezel with the updated aspect ratio for Project Firestart but I still need to do it for Black Tiger, Retrograde, Supremacy and hopefully one or two new ones. I also need to do this for 4:3 NTSC games - that's done for the Project Firestart one. I still need to do a bit of housekeeping before releasing the early version. Once this stuff is finished up I'll be releasing a version for testing here that will not be setup with Launchbox, since I've yet to even start that side of it yet. You'll just have to go into the Games folder then one of the subfolders for a game and start the .vbs inside to start the game.

You can disable it. Just remove the binding. It's a hotkey like anything else. Just remove the bindings for volume up and down in hotkeys. Find the hotkey you want to remove and press Del.

It's not so much that I've locked it as I've simply changed what numpad minus does in Input > Hotkeys. By default it's the hotkey to reduce the volume. In my setup it's "enable hotkeys". It will default to 100% volume but I don't know if you mean you want an actual gain adjustment on top of that or not (as in, by default, it's 100% of a 0db adjustment which is "normal" volume). If you do want an additional gain adjustment, you can do that in Settings > Audio > Volume Gain. The maximum is 12db and the minimum is -80db. 12db will make it really loud.

No, it's that way by design. It's because there's a core override in place. When there's an override, that's used and not overwritten unless you specifically tell it to overwrite it by going to overrides > save core/game/etc. override.

That's intentional. It's so people don't change something, intentionally or unintentionally, and then mess everything up. You can make changes to either retroarch.cfg or config\VICE x64\VICE x64.cfg. The latter of which is a core override so any settings specified there take precedence over retroarch.cfg. Specifically what you're looking for is: menu_unified_controls = (which you want to be "false") You can also make a change and then go to Overrides > Save Core Override though I don't recommend that, as it'll remove any settings from the override which are identical to what's in retroarch.cfg (it's that way by design, but I like having common use things listed in the core override for testing purposes, even if what's in the base retroarch.cfg).

Well, it's not going to hurt anything in this case. If you took away the top and bottom portions of that second screenshot that's exactly how it looks on a 16:9 screen with the bezel turned off. The settings I used before probably wouldn't look right on a 4:3 / 5:4 monitor either. Even with the original custom resolution the blue portions to the left and right were still visible if the bezel was turned off (because it's maintaining the aspect ratio, and doesn't actually crop at all). My suggestion would be to dial in a custom value in the resolution settings that crops (zooms) it appropriately (horizontally) for your display and then leave it there (which I think was basically your plan from the get go). Since you'll have more of the top and bottom visible anyway that should cover basically everything with one setting. You're just going to have a small amount unused space on the top and bottom in some (probably most) cases.

Go to Input and turn off "Unified Menu Controls"

Interestingly enough, set to NTSC + Zoom: Maximum + Aspect Ratio: 19:12 puts it right on the dot with a normal 4:3 overlay for a 16:9 display, so I'll probably go with that for the NTSC titles. My SNES overlay, as an example: