[RetroArch: Certain MAME games refuse to run]

My best guess for why it's crashing in Mame is either the rom is incompatible with the Mame core or there is a bug in that old core that makes that game not work.

[Not Launchbox but I don't know who else to ask :-(]

Right off the top of my head I am gonna guess that you may be using the 32 bit version of Retroarch and some cores are 64 bit only and incompatible with the 32 bit version.

Are you downloading the cores using the Online Updater in Retroarch or are you downloading directly from their website ?

[RetroArch: Certain MAME games refuse to run]

The best thing I can tell you is download a 0.78 stand alone Mame and test you roms using the command line. If a rom is incompatible and either missing or have incompatible versions of files within the rom zip file it will tell you in the command prompt window what file is missing and where it is looking for it.

It will look very similar to this. In the above screenshot it is telling me that it cannot find the sc01a.bin file and it looked in the 2 files gorf and votrax. This was a screenshot I had from a while back when I had problems with Gorf and Wizard of War and by the looks of it my votrax file was incompatible with the version of Mame I was using at the time, I believe the votrax file is a bios type file for both of those games.

Piecing a rom set together from individual downloads from various a site can be extremely tricky because you have no idea usually what version the roms are for. You also have to know for sure that the games you are having problems with are working in the version of Mame you are using. It's a bit of a nightmare to do things the way you are doing it.

[RetroArch: Certain MAME games refuse to run]

I moved this thread to the appropriate section because this is not a Launchbox related question.

I am assuming you posted about this over on the Retroarch forums here: https://forums.libretro.com/t/cant-get-certain-konami-games-to-run-in-mame/16888

My best guess as to what the issue is because you hand picked individual roms you have roms that are incompatible with the version of the Mame core you are using.

[Make Mame look as good (hi-res) as AdvanceMame for Vector roms?]

I haven't tried BGFX with vector line stuff but I have tried and used BGFX for a short while. I used back when they first implemented it before the HLSL fixes that made it good. But once they fixed HLSL so it looked good on every game I switched to it because I like it better.

[Make Mame look as good (hi-res) as AdvanceMame for Vector roms?]

No but it will impact performance if you have a bad on board graphics chip.

[SNES MSU-1 Cover Art]

No idea if or when R-Type MSU will get released but it is being worked on.

https://www.zeldix.net/t1742-last-one-r-type-3

 

[SNES MSU-1 Cover Art]

Super Double Dragon

https://www.zeldix.net/t1740-super-double-dragon-msu1

There was very little good fan art I wanted to use for this and this was the only thing I could find that I thought looked decent with the clear logo. The other stuff available looked very busy with the logo.

 

["Scan for added roms" not working as expected]

You have to point your rom path in the edit patform windows of the platform the games are to where your roms are stored.

[Exiting game and quitting Mupen64plus script help]

No problem, glad it was helpful.

[Exiting game and quitting Mupen64plus script help]

Try the command line:

--nogui

That's what I have in my setup and it works, no AHK needed.

[Make Mame look as good (hi-res) as AdvanceMame for Vector roms?]

I did some tinkering to see if I could get the thinner lines and changing the beam intensity to a higher setting made them thinner so you can try that to see if it's closer to what you like.

I set it to 1.0 which is the max.

beam_intensity_weight     1.00

vector.ini

Here is a screenshot of it in action.

[Make Mame look as good (hi-res) as AdvanceMame for Vector roms?]

For reference here is a video showing how Asteroids Deluxe should look.

I'm toying around with some settings now to see if I can find something better.

[Make Mame look as good (hi-res) as AdvanceMame for Vector roms?]

#
# CORE VECTOR OPTIONS
#
beam_width_min            1.00
beam_width_max            4.00
beam_intensity_weight     0.75
flicker                   0.15

#
# DIRECT3D POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS
#
hlsl_oversampling         0
shadow_mask_tile_mode     0
shadow_mask_alpha         0.5
shadow_mask_texture       shadow-mask.png
shadow_mask_x_count       12
shadow_mask_y_count       6
shadow_mask_usize         0.5
shadow_mask_vsize         0.5
shadow_mask_uoffset       0.0
shadow_mask_voffset       0.0
distortion                0.0
cubic_distortion          0.0
distort_corner            0.0
round_corner              0.0
smooth_border             0.0
reflection                0.0
vignetting                0.0
scanline_alpha            0.0
defocus                   0.0,0.0
converge_x                0.0,0.0,0.0
converge_y                0.0,0.0,0.0
radial_converge_x         0.0,0.0,0.0
radial_converge_y         0.0,0.0,0.0
red_ratio                 0.0,0.0,0.0
grn_ratio                 0.0,0.0,0.0
blu_ratio                 0.0,0.0,0.0
saturation                1.0
offset                    0.0,0.0,0.0
scale                     1.0,1.0,1.0
power                     1.0,1.0,1.0
floor                     0.0,0.0,0.0
phosphor_life             0.2,0.2,0.2

#
# NTSC POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS
#
yiq_enable                0

#
# VECTOR POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS
#
vector_beam_smooth        0.0
vector_length_scale       0.5
vector_length_ratio       0.5

#
# BLOOM POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS
#
bloom_blend_mode          0
bloom_scale               0.30
bloom_overdrive           1.00,1.00,1.00
bloom_lvl0_weight         1.00
bloom_lvl1_weight         0.48
bloom_lvl2_weight         0.32
bloom_lvl3_weight         0.24
bloom_lvl4_weight         0.16
bloom_lvl5_weight         0.24
bloom_lvl6_weight         0.32
bloom_lvl7_weight         0.48
bloom_lvl8_weight         0.64

That's all the settings in the vector.ini, so it looks like it has some control over the thickness.

[Make Mame look as good (hi-res) as AdvanceMame for Vector roms?]

I don't know what AdvanceMame looks like with vector games but you can adjust the vector settings if Mame when using HLSL by editing the vector.ini in the \ini\presets folder.

Below are some screenshots of how mine look but of course you can adjust to your taste and hopefully find something to your liking.

[Mame BGFX Shaders - Tutorial]

The guide is still perfectly valid, nothing is changed on how to use it.

2 hours ago, ItchyRobot said:

sn't this a huge downside, and deal breaker? It seems that if I have to set up each game before playing, it just would not be worth it.

You don't have to set BGFX per game, all what I said was you cannot easily tweak the look of BGFX, you take what you get from the presets and you either like it or you don't.

2 hours ago, ItchyRobot said:

Do you have a preference over one or the other, HLSL/BGFX, now that both have evolved?

I prefer HLSL myself and I have uploaded my settings here:

 

[Sound issue in Namco games in MAME....]

F9 is frame skip so it seems that you were having a performance issue and by skipping frames you make the emulation easier to run on your system by cutting the frames being rendered.

[(Retroarch) Flickering graphic on snes games.]

Off hand if I had to guess at this one I would say it is a v-sync issue, it forces the game to run at 60hz which could make shadows look like that if the game itself ran less than 60 fps. A prime example of this happening is in Samurai Shodown in Mame with V-Sync enabled, the shadows beneath the characters do the exact same thing because NeoGeo games ran at something like 55 or 56 hz.

You should check over on the Retroarch forums though since those are the people that make the emulator.

[Emulator too fast without sound in LaunchBox]

This is extremely weird and makes no sense because Launchbox only launches with the config or setup that is setup in Retroarch unless you tell it to load a specific config file. Launchbox does not change or add anything to any configs on its own.

[No Filler Mame Rom Set Version 2]

I appreciate the comments and if there are games missing there generally is a reason for it, either I didn't think it was worth adding, had funky controls or I just plain missed or forgotten about the game.

For example, Outrun and Paperboy have funky controls and don't translate well to playing with a regular controller.

Commando I probably could have added but I did not think about it and I probably will with the 200 release.

Contra should have made the final list, it was on the main post so I must have just missed adding it.

NBA Jam is in the set but I did not include NFL Blitz, no one suggested it and wasn't a game I cared to ever play back in the day so I didn't think to add it.

Now to address your shooter comments, yeah, there are a lot of shooters and even though you may find them to feel like clones of each other the Shootemup genre is probably the one genre of old arcade games that get the most play and have the biggest following for gamers today. For that reason there is so many but I did try to keep the games in the set to a tleast "good" games rather than put "everything" in it.

Anyways, comments are always welcome and I can add games that people suggest if they make sense to add.

The following games will be added to the 200 update:
Commando
Contra

Edit: Removed NFL Blitz again since it requires a CHD and it was stated originally that I would not include anything requiring CHDs. If anyone knows of a non CHD version of the rom like the Street Fighter III ones.

[No Filler Mame Rom Set Version 2]

There is no question that Asteroids is a classic and one the most well known arcade games of all time but Deluxe is the superior game.

The original Asteroids has a serious bug in the game where the player can position their ship "inside" the score at the top of the game and become invincible. This bug was fixed and the "homing asteroids" were added to the game to make the game more challenging.

2 hours ago, Fwiler said:

And if you were old enough to be in the arcades

I am more than old enough to be in the arcades. I spent many hours in the arcades as a kid while my mom shopped at the mall back in the late 70s and early 80s, I even own an Asteroids Deluxe cabinet.

One of the nice things about my batch file is it's really easy to add any game you feel you want in your list. All you have to do is add a new line to copy out the precise game rom you want, this is also part of the reason I based this off of the Non Merged rom set, each game rom file contains all the necessary bios files that might be needed for the game to work.

If you wish to add the original Asteroids to yours simply copy and paste the following line into the the batch file I have provided here.

copy asteroid.zip NoFiller

 

[No Filler Mame Rom Set Version 2]

Asteroids Deluxe is in there which is the superior game.

[Game hover menu missing?]

 

[Don't like volume knob (and bug?)]

LOL, nope. I don't even have them set to auto-play, I have to click them to play. I only have videos for some platforms because a buddy of mine gave them to me, i've even contemplated deleting them all together.

[Where's Brad?]

Not that I am aware of.