Lordmonkus

I cannot answer your Steam questions unfortunately because I have never tied my Steam account into Launchbox. As for your Retroarch and Emulationstation question you can use Retroarch with Launchbox without problem. You can check out a tutorial @SentaiBrad did which is designed for new people to Launchbox. Emulationstation though is not something you can use in Launchbox because it is merely a front end using Retroarch, using it with Launchbox would simply be redundant.

No problem.

Clear out the default command line parameters in the associated platforms windows. You are combining the stand alone mame with the retroarch core.

Can give us some screen shots of your edit emulator and associated platforms window for your Mame emulator in Launchbox ?

Do you like CRT scanlines but some emulators or retro pixel art games such as Shovel Knight or Axiom Verge just doesn't have any options for it ? Well there is a way to get the effect using SweetFX / Reshade which is a post processing injector. I am going to start with a disclaimer first though. This is something that is by no means as a good as Retroarchs or Mames shaders and is greatly effected by the resolution of the program using it and you may need to do some manual tweaking to suit your resolution and tastes. I am also no expert with this and I am only providing a tutorial on how to get this working but keep in mind it may not work with everything and there will be some leg work on your end. I am also going to be providing a zip file containing what you need and is a combination of SweetFX and Reshade. There are other versions of SweetFX and Reshade available on the net but this was the best version I found a while back that works best for retro gaming. SweetFX and Reshade are meant more for modern gaming and not really made for CRT effects on retro games so there is very little out there for this type of stuff. Download the attached zip file (bottom of this post) and extract it anywhere you want on your system. Inside the zip file you will see a ReShade SweetFX folder and in that folder you will see a bunch of files and folders.Before going further I highly recommend opening up 2 file manager windows, one for this SweetFX folder and the other for the program you are going to be injecting the shaders to. This will make it easier to see what files get copied over so you know what files to delete if you don't like the effect. You will want to run the ReShade Setup.exe and then you will see this window.Click the Select Game button and browse to the game or programs executable you want to use this on. It will try and autodetect which API the game / emulator uses but it is very unlikely that it will succeed and you will need to know if the game or emulator is using OpenGL or one of the D3D choices. If you pick the wrong one this will not work at all and you will need to try again with a different choice. If it does auto detect it will automatically copy some files to the folder of the program you are injecting the shaders into. The files that will be copied are: Sweet.fx ReShade.fx either an opengl or dx .dll file (this will depend on the api the program is using) and a SweetFX folder If you are unhappy with the effect simply remove the copied over files and folder. Now before moving on you should test and see if you picked the correct API. Run the game or emulator and if it did work you will see a bunch of text in the top left corner of your screen or window of the program. You may or may not need to actually load game if using this on an emulator. If you do not see any extra text in the top left you most likely picked the wrong API so delete the files that were copied over and rerun the ReShade Setup.exe and pick a different API and try the game / program again. If you try all the different APIs and you don't ever see any text on startup it may just be an incompatible game or program. One game that I could not get it work with was Volgarr the Viking. Once you do have it so you have the text showing it is working we now need to get the scanline preset put in. Go to your folder where you have your ReShade Setup.exe and then navigate to the CRT Presets folder, then sweetfx settings folder. In each of these folders is a SweetFX_settings.txt file, this is the pre configured pre set. I personally like the Jinx_Original but you can try out the other ones to see which you prefer. Just copy the SweetFX_settings.txt file over to the SweetFX folder that was created in game / program folder. Run your game or emulator again and you should now see the scanline effect in action. Keep in mind though that the exact effect will be affected by the resolution of the program / game. You can toy around with the SweetFX_settings.txt you copied over by opening it in notepad (or Notepad++) and scroll down to the Advanced CRT settings section. The line you will want to tinker with is: #define CRTResolution 1.5 You will want to make changes a decimal at a time so 1.6 to 1.7 to 1.8. You do not want to make relatively big changes at all. You can also make changes on the fly with the game / program running if you have a multi monitor setup or you can tab in and out. Make a change and save the txt file and you should immediately see it change in game. Remember if you don't like the effect you can always delete the files that got inserted into the game / emulator folder and you will be good to go again. Also before you even think of using this with the stand alone version of Mednafen it will be awful. It does indeed work but because of the resolution of the emulator there is an atrocious "melting pixel" effect that is caused by the "greeting" text of ReShade and there is no way of disabling the greeting text because the makers of it don't want people stealing and distributing it for money. If you have questions about the detailed working of all of this stuff you are on your own to do some research on it. I am not qualified enough at all to talk about it. I am only providing this as an option for people if they want to try it out. There are other SweetFX only and ReShade only packages out there but this combined package is the only one I found that was easy to get scanlines working with relative reliability. ReShade SweetFX.7z

That's good to hear. Up until recently it was a no brainer decision to use stand alone Mame over the Retroarch core but now like I said previously in this thread there is very minor differences between them. A case can be made for each and it's up to the users personal needs as to which to use.

If you can post exactly what you did to make this work that would be awesome Maybe someone else in the future will be looking for this.

You can do it, I suggest looking at the Mame documentation for info on how to do it.

I haven't updated my Retroarch Mame core in a little bit so mine is still based on 183.

I made a thread a little while back talking about Atari 5200 emulation. Mess is ok for it but not without some flaws.

Depending on the rom set you are using I would suggest using the the Final Burn Alpha core, the one that has no year in the name. It covers all the different systems that the stand alone FBA runs. If your rom set is an older set there may be some incompatibility and then the separated FBA cores with the year in the name may be more appropriate. The separated cores with the year are just slightly more tweaked for performance for use on lower end hardware like the RaspberryPi. Another thing to keep in mind is that depending on your rom set your CPS-2 roms may need updating. There was an update with those roms a little while back where there is a .key file requirement in the roms. You could also try out the Mame core, it will run pretty much the same rom set. If you are having problems getting the game to launch in Launchbox but they work in Retroarch outside on LB then you may have something incorrectly done in your Associated Platforms command line parameters window for Retroarch.

No clue, I don't use RocketLauncher at all. It mostly likely would mess with playlists changing the platform name but it shouldn't be anything too difficult to fix. You could open the playlist xml file and replace the "Arcade" value with "Mame"

No clue why that would happen, I just tested my Mame and my controls are good. I cannot think of any reason why Launchbox would even look at, let alone touch anything in your Mame folder other than the exe location.

Good to hear

I don't remember ever having that issue in stand alone Mame at all and I haven't touched a UI version of Mame since 164 I believe it was. Since getting used to editing the ini with the command line version I haven't even looked at the UI version. The UI version is really nice though for its rom audit feature and finding problematic roms and fixing them though.

Yeah that was one of the problems with the older versions. The latest core based off of 183 (I believe) fixes that. Nothing wrong with using the UI version at all

Version 7.10 - Released May 26, 2017 - New Feature: Plugins are now supported in LaunchBox and Big Box! If you're a developer, see documentation here: http://pluginapi.launchbox-app.com - Improvement: LaunchBox and Big Box updates are now downloaded automatically in the background so you don't have to wait for them; this can be disabled under Options > General > Updates in LaunchBox - Improvement: CRC checks are now used to eliminate duplicate images when downloading from the LaunchBox Games Database or EmuMovies on imports and metadata/media updates - Improvement: The Clean Up Images option from the Tools menu in LaunchBox has been modified to also remove duplicate images - Improvement: the Clean Up Images option from the Tools menu in LaunchBox has been tweaked to add a Cancel button and use all cores on your system in order to vastly improve performance - Improvement: Massive startup performance increases for both LaunchBox and Big Box; in some cases it is now well over twice as fast; used multi-threading and other strategies - Improvement: Significant performance increases when selecting platform categories in Big Box - Fixed: Titles are no longer duplicated into the Version field when importing games that don't have a Version

Yup Can you manually tweak HLSL settings in the UI version though without having to edit the actual raster.ini file though ? Because out of the box HLSL is shit but BGFX does a fine job if you don't want to muck about with tweaking. Personal preference here as well but I like tweaked HLSL over BGFX. Edit: Retroarch Mame controls work mostly out the box but for certain games like Street Fighter and twin stick shooters you will need to change them using the Mame "Tab" key menu.

The ini file takes me all of 2 minutes to edit. Turn sleep off, skip info on and put in my HLSL shader settings which is the most work but that's just copy / paste. I will add though that the only Retroarch Mame I would use is the latest if you have an up to date rom set. For older rom sets the older Mame cores are not as good as their corresponding stand alone versions.

Honestly, it's a toss up. I bounce back and forth between the two. Stand alone Mame has HiScore support while I couldn't figure out if Retroarch does and it's just you have to jump through some hoops to get it working or not. Stand alone also now has port audio which gives you 0 latency audio if you want it but that requires exclusive audio so you can't use the same system for other audio features. This may or may not be something you want to use. I don't use this on my main system since I like to listen to MP3 music while playing. Retroarch Mame is easier to get up and running since you don't have to fiddle with ini files or telling it where your rom folder is and it's shaders are better out of the box if you like (but you said you didn't so) To me it's a wash and it's just personal preference with neither having a distinct advantage.

I use the stand alone command line Mame or Retroarch Mame but using MameUIFX or Arcade64 as is it known as now will work fine as well. Whichever you are most comfortable setting up will be good.

Ah ok you are talking about a Mayflash adapter and real N64 controller. My apologies.

What ? Mario runs for me using a 360 controller, I can also tiptoe with a small movement of the analog stick.

Definitely an overkill solution when a simple AHK script works perfectly.

Hopefully it works out for you.