Lordmonkus

At this point I would rather just see the Retroarch builds of BSnes support it, at least they can have a standard and develop it. But some of it does lie in the hands of the patch makers to follow the same structure. I think some of the more messed up ones like Mario might be older and done before people really started in on this stuff. Still odd that the Mega Man 7 one is being so temperamental with RA BSnes though. And of course if you question the patch makers they just use the excuse of "its made for the SD2Snes carts and not emulators"

Hehe yeah I know you are but at this point for Mario I just don't care. The good games like Chrono Trigger, Metroid and MegaMan X series are all good and working perfectly fine. This whole MSU hack stuff is cool and all but until the patch makers and emulator people get on the same page for file structure it's just a mess. I'll accept what I have and be happy with it I think the asm and xml files are for the actual music converting but I don't know.

I don't think the .asm, .ips and .xml files are needed at all. The ips is just the patch file for the rom when making your own and some of the games I have that work don't even have have an xml or asm file with them. I think I am basically done caring about this beyond wanting the ability to load Higans "rom folder" as a rom file.

Mario just black screens with that bml, and that is changing the program.rom to match the .sfc rom file.

Yeah I have checked the 2 things you have high lighted red. I will go back and re-check them again though even though I have checked and changed it several time. The problem I am running into with Mario is there is no bml file whatsoever. I have 2 different Mario World ones and neither have the bml file.

For whatever reason Mega Man 7 is a no go in Retroarch, it just black screens. I have tried downloading a pre done rom and I have even patched my own and they are both the same. They load just fine using BSnes or Higan but not through RA. I tried editing the manifest.bml file but nothing works. The list of my games that work in RA are Chrono Trigger A Link to the Past Mega Man X, X2 and X3 Rock N Roll Racing Secret of Mana Super Metroid TMNT Games that work in BSnes DKC2 Mega Man 7 Mario World That's all the MSU games I have.

Yeah, just import the game exe or shortcut lnk files like any other windows game.

Watch this if you haven't seen it @Drybonz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYxt7cwDk4E

Interesting, I will have a look and see if I Can find the missing .bml files. Not sure how well your idea of generating your own from the base one will work. Looking at other .bml files it looks like there are some specific memory addresses that need to be assigned and they can vary.

There is something extremely messed up with the Donkey King Country one. I don't know if you have the same one as I do but in mine in the .bml file all the .pcm files are labeled alttp_msu- which obviously are A Link to the Past files but somehow running the actual dkc.sfc file through BSnes works. I don't get it. After editing my TMNT .bml file that now works through Retroarch so that's good. I have 2 Super Mario Worlds but neither of them have a .bml file at all. MegaMan 7 doesn't work when editing the .bml file yet either, but playing the actual rom file in BSnes works and so does running the game the way it is meant to be run through Higan works.

Yeah Zelda was a game I had working through RA using the .bml file. Cool you got TMNT working, that was one I have but never got around to messing with it at all. I had it working through BSnes. DKC2 works though BSnes using the rom file. I found BSnes 0.88 to be the most reliable when needing to run the rom straight up and not the .bml file. --fullscreen only works with the newest version (maybe 1 or 2 versions before) of Higan but not the older BSnes, they need to be full screened using F11. I tried using the AHK feature in LB but I don't know enough about it to get it to work.

Getting a working set of roms is the single biggest hang up with Mame and getting individual roms very rarely works and that is why I covered that in the tutorial by saying it is best to get a full set. I am not going to get into a debate about control set up because it is easy once you know to press the tab key to bring up the menu which I covered. It's no more difficult or easier than any other emulator to setup.

Changing controller settings is easy enough. Navigate the menu with the keyboard, press enter and press the button on the controller. When you start talking about multiple joysticks and an x-arcade joystick that is getting into the advanced part of mame and well outside the scope of this tutorial. Going through the effort of figuring out the bios from the game roms is also very advanced and not for new users. Bios will always come with full rom set packs and if you stick to full rom sets not something that needs to be worried about. Sound files while they are good to have they are not necessary to getting a game that uses them to run.

If you feel you need to have a UI version of Mame such as MameUIFX which is no longer being updated there is a program simply called Arcade. It is just a simple exe file you drop into your Mame folder and you run that instead of mame64.exe. Get the version appropriate to the version of Mame you are using over on EmuCR. Here is the link for 0.177 http://www.emucr.com/2016/09/arcade-v0177.html

Importing an entire Mame rom set is kind of insane and for a new person to Mame it is going to be huge especially if you import everything including all the mahjong and video poker games. For that reason I recommend a stripped down rom set to just a "best of" set. A user over on the arcadecontrols.com forums was kind enough to make a series of batch files to copy out an "all killer no filler" set of roms. I have packaged them into a zip file and uploaded them here on the forums.

Tutorial done http://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/33619-mame-tutorial-for-n00bs/

Obviously from the title of this thread this tutorial is going to be geared towards people that are new to Mame. I am going to keep it short, simple and focused on getting things up and running easily. I will not be getting into updating your romsets either, that is more advanced and often it is just easier to redownload a new full rom set than mess around with updating. The first and most important and most troublesome part of Mame is the roms. Mame roms are not simply 1 file like cartridge based consoles and because there are so many versions of arcade games based on region and hacks there can be a ton of different versions of a game, Street Fighter II: World Warrior alone has something like 27 different variations of the roms when hacks and clone files are included. Because of the way the roms are the easiest place to start is by obtaining a complete rom set. Now you do not NEED to have the latest version of the rom set to match whatever version of Mame you are using. So if you are going to use Mame 0.178 you do not need a 0.178 rom set. You can very easily use a 0.151 rom set which is extremely easy to find. I cannot tell you exactly where to find it but using google there is a certain paradise that should prove useful. EDIT: While you do not have to have a matching rom set and Mame version to have some games work you will want to have your rom set and Mame version matching as closely as possible to ensure maximum compatibility. For example if you tried to use a 0.151 rom set with the 0.221 Mame version your Capcom games that require the qsound.zip bios will not work at all because of changes made. Also the Capcom CPS games will need updated roms that have the key.txt file in them, this is an encryption key the games actually had and got implemented into the emulation. I am going to cover the basic non ui based version of Mame because the ui I found to be kind of useless after getting used to editing the mame.ini file. Download the version of Mame you are going to use and run it. It will ask you where you wish to extract it, just put it where you want. For me this is: H:\Emulation\Emulators\Mame 177 If you wish you can dump your roms right into the \roms\ folder that is in the Mame install folder but you do not have to do that if you do not want to. In fact I recommend you actually keep them separate, this way you can have multiple installs of Mame to try out new versions without having to have duplicate collections of roms eating up drive space. For me this folder is: H:\Emulation\Roms\Mame 177 The first thing you want to do is to generate a mame.ini file. To do this open your command prompt (dos looking window) and navigate to your Mame folder. Now run the following command: mame64.exe -cc You should now have a mame.ini file. If you have no idea how to actually use the command prompt make a shortcut file to your mame64.exe, right click it and then properties. In the Target box you will see a full path and exe just put -cc at the end with a space after the exe or quotes if there is a quotation mark. Run the shortcut and it will generate the mame.ini file. If the ini file did not generate you will need to fix your shortcut path. If you are unfamiliar with either of the above methods here is a simple batch file that you can drop in the same folder as your Mame64.exe and double click the bat file, it will generate your mame.ini file for you in the same folder as mame64.exe. Use this on a fresh install. Mame Ini Generator.bat *****Important: If you let Mame generate a mame.ini file on on it's own it will generate it in the \ini folder and for whatever reason this causes issues when loading a game from Launchbox. You will have to move the mame.ini file out from the \ini folder into the main Mame folder where the main executable is located.***** Now open your mame.ini file in notepad or notepad++. The first thing you will want to do if your rom files are located somewhere other than the \roms\ folder in your Mame folder is to edit the line: rompath Put the full path to where you have your roms located, for example mine looks like this: rompath "H:\Emulation\Roms\Mame 177\" You can have multiple locations by separating the paths with a semi-colon. Now this is all you need to do to have your mame setup and will run as long as your roms and your rom paths have no mistakes. You can do a quick test if you still have your command prompt window open by typing in: mame64.exe sf2 If your paths and roms are correct this will load up Street Fighter 2: World Warrior. Setup Mame like any other emulator in Launchbox. Noting should be checked in the emulator details tab of the edit emulator window and in the associated platforms tab make sure you have Arcade for the platform and nothing is needed in the command parameters. See picture below. Here are a few extra recommended edits of the ini file: sleep 0 skip_gameinfo 1 Sleep 0 will make sure your cpu doesn't throttle down when not under load which can cause some stutter when it needs to ramp back up. Skip_gameinfo just hides the info window that shows up when you load a game. There are other settings you can toy around with like the aspect but I recommend leaving those at default and there is the shader stuff which I have covered here: To setup your controller when you have a game loaded simply press tab on your keyboard and this will bring up a menu. In here you can set up all your different bindings for controllers and other Mame shortcut functions. Anyways this is the end of my basic tutorial and it ended up being longer than I expected but it really is a pretty simple emulator to use. If you need more advanced information don't forget that there is documentation for Mame. Here is the link the website where you can read the web version or the pdf version which you can download for offline reading. http://docs.mamedev.org/ Port Audio: Port Audio is a new feature that came in with version 0.182 and allows for much lower latency in the audio which means things like sound effects are heard much closer to when you are supposed to hear them. Things like punches, menu selection sounds and rhythm games are the most noticeable places for this. To take advantage of Port Audio you will need to edit your mame.ini file and look for the sections to make the following changes: # OSD SOUND OPTIONS # sound portaudio audio_latency 1 # # PORTAUDIO OPTIONS # pa_api "Windows WASAPI" pa_device default pa_latency 0.003334 WARNING: There is one drawback to this new feature however. Mames sound will take over all audio from your computer so if you like to play music through your system while playing Mame games at the same time you won't be able to do it. Maybe there is a workaround to this. Romsets: Merged vs Split vs Non-Merged, what's the difference. In your search for rom sets for Mame you will come across those terms and here is a straight copy paste of the difference from a certain "dome of pleasure". A non-merged set is one that contains absolutely everything necessary for a given game to run in one ZIP file. This is ordinarily very* space-inefficient, but is a good way to go if you want to have very few sets and want everything self-contained and easy to work with. We do not recommend this for most users.* A split set is one where the parent set contains all of the normal data it should, and the clone sets contain only what has changed as compared to the parent set. This saves some space, but isn’t quite as efficient as a merged set. A merged set takes the parent set and one or more clone sets and puts them all inside the parent set’s storage. To use the existing Pac-Man example, combining the Puckman, Midway Pac-Man (USA) sets, along with various bootleg versions– and combining it all into ((PUCKMAN.ZIP**, would be making a merged set. A complete merged set with the parent and all clones is the most common format MAME sets are stored in as it saves the most space. * obsolete for current standards, as it's based on ancient disk space usage and costs http://choccyhobnob.com/articles/demystifying-mame-roms/ This image should help explain the difference in a visual way.

Yeah of course it would be nice to have one of Brads tutorial videos.

Im in the middle of typing up a text tutorial right now, should be done soon.

Mame is actually very easy to get running. There are some settings for personal configurations but getting it running is very easy. Either dump your roms into the roms folder which is in your Mame folder, or edit the mame.ini file to put the path to where your Mame roms are. If you use the UI version of Mame just use the UI to add your roms path. No boxes checked in the emulator settings > details window. The biggest thing to worry about with Mame is having a good working set of roms with bios. You also got to be careful you aren't trying to run a clone file without having the parent rom in the same folder. Edit: I will throw together a quick text tutorial though.

Looks like it from the picture.

no problem

Setting the custom commnad line parameter to "E:\Downloaded Games\Emulation\Roms\Super Nintendo\Super Famicom\megaman7_msu1.sfc" does work. I haven't gotten around to trying any of the others out that way yet, I would have to import them and then copy the .bml and .pcm files over. I agree Byuu can come off as a dick and he may very well be a dick in real life. Like I said I just leave him be in his little corner doing what he does, I will check in once in a while and see what he's doing

Version 6.10 - Released September 28, 2016 - New Premium Feature: Big Box now has separate volume controls for videos, music, startup, navigate, select, back, and attract mode navigate; volumes are available under Options > Sound in Big Box. - New Premium Feature: Big Box now supports proper sound packs! The LaunchBox\Sounds subfolder now contains folders for different sound packs and you can switch between them under Options > Sound in Big Box. Big thanks to Clavius for all the new sound packs. Additional sound packs can also be downloaded from the forums: http://forums.launchbox-app.com/files/category/3-big-box-sound-packs/ - New Premium Feature: Big Box now has a new Default Startup View setting under Options > Views. This will allow you to change what view comes up when you first start up Big Box. - Improvement: The singular LaunchBox.xml file has been replaced with separate XML files in the Data subfolder; this allows for better performance for external integrations like RocketLauncher and LEDBlinky - Improvement: The LaunchBox rendering, data population, and caching engines have been revamped to vastly improve performance - Improvement: LaunchBox and Big Box startup time has been significantly reduced by delay loading certain metadata items - Fixed: The back button in Big Box was not registering properly in some situations (such as after Attract Mode was running or while games were animating) - Fixed: Several issues with the selected game getting out of sync when entering and backing out of filters in Big Box - Fixed: Image types were not switching properly for CoverFlow views in Big Box - Fixed: The emulator field was sometimes being reset back to empty when changing the platform or metadata in the Add/Edit window - Fixed: Paths were not being saved relatively when importing games and copying or moving files - Fixed: Games and platforms in the CoverFlow and wheel views in Big Box can now be selected with the mouse

I will try and explain this as best as I can but it's weird. The way Higan works is that you have to import your actual roms. Higan then generates a database plus it sort of "copies" your roms. By default this goes to the "C:\Users\User Name\Emulation\Super Famicom\" folder but can be changed. In this folder is where it generates the "game name.sfc" folder / rom file. I know it's weird but it is how it's done. in each "folder / rom" there is a file called "program.rom" along with certain other special roms like cx4.rom files for the MegaMan X games. When you import your SNES rom collection you need the special roms in the folder with your SNES roms because for each game that needs them it copies those files to the "folder / rom". Higan emulates those chips on a low level and requires them like a bios file. Higan loads the "folder / rom" and not the "program.rom" or the actual game rom that we are used to loading like a normal emulator. Launchbox does not like the "folder / rom" as a rom file even though it has the extension .sfc like a rom file would have. I hope the way I explained it made some sense, it's one of those things I have finally wrapped my head around how it works but asking me to explain it is tough. I know it's all crazy but this is just how it is done because of Byuus quest for 100% accurate emulation. I cannot disagree with your opinion of Byuu, he can at least come off as a total prick but I will respect him for what he is doing and the way he wants to do it. I don't agree with the way he goes about it but I do respect his quest for perfection. I will simply accept his "quirks" and do what I have to do around him. There is no compromising or reasoning with him. More than a few people have butted heads with him and he is just one of those people you just have to leave him be.