Lordmonkus

Tagging @Jason Carr for this one. When I start seeing Fault Application messages that's usually a more serious issue and not one I can help with.

LOL, glad I am of some use to people bSetShell is an old favourite of mine from back in my "Custom Windows Shell" days back when using Windows 98 and XP. Back then you could actually gain a lot of extra performance and stability out of your system by swapping out to a light weight shell such as bbLean or Litestep. I only stopped using a custom shell with Window 8 because the custom shell scene died and Windows 8 borked the ones that were out there and the stability and resource reduction wasn't a big deal anymore.

That is very strange that a game would work in the stand alone but not in RA core unless maybe they were the PAL region ones since those were kind of problematic at first.

I have posted about this previously on the forums. bSetShell found here on this page http://bb4win.sourceforge.net/bblean/ This will allow you to change your desktop shell to another program and is completely free.Set your shell path to where you have your BigBox.exe located. If you decide you need to get it back to Explorer simply open your task manager with the keyboard short cut: Control + Shift + Escape, go to File > Run New Task and run bSetShell again and uncheck Set shell for this user and it should say explorer.exe again. Log out and log back in again or reboot your computer and you will be back to your normal Windows desktop. No mucking about with regedit or anything like that.

If you are new to Mame check out my tutorial I did, it should get you through the basics and get you up and running. It really isn't that hard once you learn a couple of basics with it.

Weird that Radiant Silvergun failed for you using the RA Beetle core, it works for me. Maybe you need a new image, Mednafen is pickier over the quality of the disk dumps than Yabause and SSF.

Unfortunately I won't be able to help you too much since I am not a RocketLauncher user myself but we do have some users of it that hopefully pop in with answers for you in those areas. I will try and answer what I can though. 1) During the import process you can Launchbox to not import any media since you have your own, you can simply tell Launchbox where each media type is located on your system using the Manage Platforms window. Double click a platform in that window and then go to the folders tab and set each location. Sorry there is no quicker way than one by one 2) No you cannot use your XML files, Launchbox does things a little differently. Launchbox does have the nice newish feature of playlists though which you can generate custom wheels much easier than the old Hyperspin method. I know that's not a good answer for you but it is the best I got. 3) Use the audit tool in the Tools menu when you have a platform selected. It will show you a whoel table of your games. Sort your games by Images and you will have all the games with and without images grouped. Click and drag your mouse to select all your games with no images and then right click and set them to hidden. Again I know it's not the answer you want since you ask for automatic hiding.

I might be wrong but I don't think NeoRageX supports command line parameters which is needed to launch games through Launchbox. If it support loading roms directly using command line parameters then you would need to find them. Personally speaking there is zero reason to ever use NeoRageX when we have Mame and Retroarch with both Mame and FBA cores which both have essentially perfect emulation.

Yes, though I highly recommend upgrading to 1.6.0 Retroarch. It is very good and stable and raw input is extremely nice for lower input latency.

Not really sure of the reason for the name change but my guess would be to differentiate ?? I don't know why the Retroarch guys do some of the things they do, I just accept it and deal with it, lol. As for your black bars, try turning off aspect ratio in the video settings if you have it set to on. If that doesn't work you may have to set up a custom aspect X by Y to get as close to the edges as you want. Personally I like aspect ratio on because it works best for CRT shaders and I have a 1440p monitor so the bars at the top and bottom are small and not very bothersome at all. At 1080p though the top and bottom bars can be quite noticeable. As for games not work but working before were they working in Mednafen before or another emulator like SSF ? If another version of Mednafen they should work in the new ones but if SSF you may need new disk images or repair the ones you got. I have posts on the forums on how to do it.

The Mednafen cores are now named Beetle.

This sounds like a weird bug or something else is going on here. My test install of 7.11 beta 5 doesn't do this at all. Tagging @Jason Carr in hopes he takes a look in here and maybe has something to add. For now I would suggest reinstalling the 7.10 stable build over top to see if it fixes the problem.

For NES use the FCEUMM core or Nestopia but you will want the nstdatabase.xml for it which sort of acts as a bios to provide better compatibility with the core. Mame, use the latest Mame core that doesn't have a year in its name. Anything with a year in it is an older build.

Open up a NeoGeo game, doesn't matter which one. Press F1 on your keyboard to bring up the Retroarch GUI, go to Quick Menu then Controls. Scroll a little til you see on the left "User 1 Button A" and so on. The left column is the actual NeoGeo controls and the right column is your controller buttons. Go to each button and push left or right on the d-pad til you got your buttons the way you want. Once you have the buttons the way you want scroll back up and little and look for "Save Core Remap File". Everything should be good now. Should.

If Launchbox itself isn't loading outside of required library dependencies I really don't know what to tell you. But if you do have Launchbox at least loading and your games imported but not launching any games then I can probably help out but I will need more details like emulator being used and some screenshots of your emulator settings windows in Launchbox.

It does require some GPU power but if you got a semi decent GPU it should handle it just fine. In my shitty HTPC I threw in my old Radeon 7850 which has 1 gig of GDDR5 Vram it handles any shader without issue. On board video chips will struggle with most shader effects though.

It is and also keep in mind that different shaders look differently on different monitors. Yeah that's a lot of differents in a single sentence but what are you gonna do, it's how it is lol. The curvature is actually a part of the shader effect being used and is something you can control. I don't like the curvature at all but again that's just me.

Scanlines just look right to me. Now I don't want my games to look like they are on some shitty 70s or 80s TV with all the fuzz and interference. When the artists did the sprite work for those games they took into account the scanlines of the TVs and adjusted the art to take advantage of those TVs characteristics to "enhance" the art. When you start scaling up the art for modern displays certain things just don't look right to me but once those scanline effects get added in the games just look right to me. Scanlines and shadowmasks were a part of the art. Just my personal preference though.

Ok, you can smooth out the sprites with shaders but keep in mind that the art style of the game may or may not work so well with it. A game with a cartoonish art style like Mario or Yoshis Island do look nice with the smoothing shaders but games that used an art style where they tried to pack in the details (Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger) do not look so good with those smoothing shaders.

Though not every single core supports save states, but most do.

The question is do you want to replicate a CRTs scanline effect ? Do you want to "smooth" out the sprites so they look something like a modern hand drawn type of art style ? Or do you just want clean crisp sharp upscaled sprites ?

1) Better is a subjective term. If you don't care about shader effects to recreate the look of a CRT then no. But if you do like the look of CRT scanlines or some of the other shader options (there are a lot) then the answer is yes. Some stand alone emulators do have some limited shader / effects suppport but it varies by emulator. 2) Stand alone Mame vs Retroarch Mame really is a personal preference thing. In the past the stand alone version was most certainly the clear and obvious choice because the Retroarch Mame cores were behind and had issues. But nowadays it really is pretty equal. Stand alones HLSL and BGFX shaders are very good so the Retroarch CRT shaders aren't any better but you may like the smooting shader but again that is a personal preference. Additional notes on Retroarch vs stand alone emulators. While many stand alone emulators are very good Retroarch does offer a "uniform look" to your games along with the ability to easily manage save states and disk swapping via the RA UI. Another thing that Retroach has over stand alone variants is it has things in it that reduces input lag dramatically. Hard GPU Sync and Frame Delay when using V-Sync and now the new raw input driver reduces it. Retroarch also has amazing audio sync. While some stand alone emulators can equal Retroarch in some of these regards not all of them can and Retroarch covers them all, so if you are going to setup Retroarch for 1 or 2 systems then you may as well do them all that you can.

You load up Spectabis, import your PS2 games and configure them in Spectabis. Spectabis is a frontend just for PCSX2 with the added feature of per game configs. You are just able to use Spectabis as your "emulator" LB.

What do you mean by "another option" ? There is the overlay options where if I remember correctly you can overlay a fake scanline effect over top but to me it is very much a garbage alternative to a shader when even the weakest of video chipsets out there can handle something like CRT-Pi.