Lordmonkus

No, don't ditch Retroarch at all, it does an amazing job for most everything but Mess stuff is really awful to get working. You can use it for things like PSP, N64 and Dreamcast but I would recommend stand alones for that. I would also Recommend stand alone Mame for arcade emulation but for all other "normal" consoles Retroarch is arguably the best out there.

Yeah I got the 5200 working through stand alone Mess already but I am just gonna see if this even works this way.

I'm gonna go through the list of instructions and see if I can get it to work, I am not gonna spend an inordinate amount of time at it though.

I found this thread over on the Retroarch forums which is probably the best info you can find. http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5069&highlight=atari+5200 Here is the copy / paste of what to do. What you need: - The 'hash' folder from a MAME install - 'a5200.zip' bios file - Game roms that matches the ones listed in a5200.xml in the 'hash' folder precisely. For example, a Centipede rom must be called 'centiped.zip' and contain the file 'centiped.bin'. What you do: 1. Create a folder in the RetroArch system folder called 'mame' - so system/mame 2. Copy the 'hash' folder to the new 'mame' folder. So you now have system/mame/hash 3. Create a folder in the 'mame' folder called 'roms' - so system/mame/roms 4. Create a folder in the 'roms' folder called 'a5200' - so system/mame/roms/a5200 5. Create another folder in the 'a5200' folder called 'a5200' - so system/mame/roms/a5200/5200 6. Copy the 'a5200.zip' file to system/mame/roms/ or unzip the file in system/mame/roms/a5200/5200 (That's what the documentation says, I did both as well as having a copy of a5200.zip in system/mame/roms/a5200/ for good measure.) 7. Copy the game roms to system/mame/roms/a5200/ 8. Now it should work via the 'MAME' core.

Start with something easy like Genesis or NES. Atari 5200 through the Mess core is literally the worst place to start with.

Honestly the Mess core can technically work but good luck figuring it out, if you can figure it out you will be miles ahead of everyone else.

Can we get a screenshot of the Associated Platforms tab ? I also just noticed you are trying use it for the Atari 5200 and while that technically is possible with the Mame core it is extremely difficult. There is no 5200 core.

Yeah load up a game that uses the core you want to rebind. Then go to the cog wheel menu, then down to input, then Input User 1 Binds. Change the device if you want to use a different controller, the User 1 Bind All and just assign your buttons with the prompts, for buttons you don't have or want just let them time out and you are done.

Simply have per core settings on and it should work to rebind your controller for each core. I have certain cores setup to use my Xbox 360 controller and others setup to use my Hori FC4 controller. If you want to have different setups for different systems that use the same core like the Genesis GX core for Master System and Genesis, make a copy of the Genesis GX core dll and rename it. So for example make a copy of the core and rename it to something like Master_System.dll the set that dll in your associated platforms for the Master System. Then when you load that dll it will generate its own cfg file with its own bindings.

lol

Damn, that is crazy high. Here in Canada NES is around 60$, SNES is around 90 - 100$, Saturn is around 100$ as well, Genesis / Megadrive is 60$. Game prices vary depending on the game of course.

I actually like it, especially on the PC with some of the mods coming out for it to help enhance it. I think too many people got overhyped for it and had very unrealistic expectations of the game. I think people thought it was going to be GTA or Skyrim in space when they should have known it was just going to be a Minecraft type of survival and exploration game. It's certainly not a game for everyone.

Hmm, that I have no experience with, maybe @Jason Carrcan help you with that one.

Hard to say exactly but just out of curiosity where is your Launchbox install folder ? Is it on C: drive or another hard drive ? Sometimes having stuff installed to C: updates can run into troubles with permissions writing to the drive. I have my Launchbox folder on a separate drive, E: to be precise and have never run into problems with updates.

Try downloading and reinstalling just direct x first. If that doesn't work just reinstalling Launchbox over top without uninstalling should keep all your settings.

Mess is easy enough to get working, I have a tutorial for it around here somewhere. But just as a coincidence last night I was toying around with Mame 177 and 177 rom set and noticed that it has Crossed Swords 2 (hacked obviously) and Ironclad.

For those that do not know what BGFX shaders are in Mame, it is a new renderer which works with HLSL. What does this mean ? Well simply put it makes everything much simpler for the end user. Up until the BGFX renderer you had 3 options: 1) no shaders at all which look bad on a modern display 2) GLSL using CRT-Geom or Lottes shaders which required different shaders for vertical and horizontal games 3) HLSL which looked bad out of the box and required manual tweaking to suit personal taste and to suit your display. Straight up standard HLSL is still a very good option for those wanting to get their hands dirty and really customize the look. What BGFX does though is fixes all the problems above and gives a wide variety of shader options similar to some of the shader types found in Retroarch so if you like those smoothed out shaders you can have those there too. To take advantage of BGFX I highly recommend getting version 177 of Mame. For those of you that like to use MameUIFX sadly the last version that is available is 175 and has very limited options and not particularly useful. MameUIFX is no longer being officially updated but there are unofficial ways of getting the same UI in Mame and I will cover that further down. The standard install of Mame 177 has everything we need to get started. Just install it like normal and using the command line run your Mame executable with the following parameter: Mame64.exe -cc What this does is it generates a mame.ini file right in your Mame install folder which you will need to edit. Open this ini file in your favourite text editor like notepad or notepad++ and look for the following section: # OSD VIDEO OPTIONS # video auto edit it change the word auto so it is now BGFX, so now it should read: # OSD VIDEO OPTIONS # video bgfx Now we need to look a little further down the ini file for the section titled: # BGFX POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS Look for the following line: bgfx_screen_chains auto This is where we are going to set the default shader look. If you look in the folder \bgfx\chains within your Mame folder you will see a bunch of files with the extension .json, these are the actual shader files. You will also see several sub folders with more .json files, those are also shaders so as you see there are several options. Now if you have previously used some shaders in Retroarch or some other emulators you may recognize some of the names and have a general idea of what some of them will look like out of the box but you will probably want to preview how they look before deciding on which shader you want as your default. To make judging a little easier look in the mame.ini file for the following line: pause_brightness 0.65 Change the brightness to 1.0 so you can pause the game and scroll through the different shaders and see exactly how they will look at their correct brighness. Run a game of your choosing and get to a point you want to use as your judging point and press P on the keyboard to pause the game. Now press the tilde key (the key beside the number 1 that has the ` on it). You will see a bar at the bottom of the screen, press the down arrow key until that changes to: Window 0, Screen 0 Effect: Default Now you use the left and right arrow keys to scroll through all the different shader effects. Once you find one that you find appealing take note of the name of it because this is the name you are going to put in your mame.ini file. Edit the line: bgfx_screen_chains auto replacing the word auto with the name of the shader you found that you liked, for me this was the shader crt-geom. You are now done and all you had to do was edit 2 lines in your mame.ini file. The one downside to BGFX for now is that you cannot easily save and load configuration files for these shaders. You can edit them while in game using the "tab" menu within Mame but you cannot save them out, once you close the game those changes are gone. Hopefully in the future this will change. Note: For games with multiple displays being played on a single monitor such as Punch-Out or Darius II for example you need to add to the bgfx_screen_chains line. In my mame.ini file since I am using the crt-geom shader mine looks like this: bgfx_screen_chains crt-geom,crt-geom,crt-geom This handles 3 the 3 screen version of Darius II. If it was left with just a single crt-geom one of the screens would have the shader effect but the others would have no effect. Here is a link to the documentation for all sorts of stuff you can do with BGFX shaders, especially if you have a multi display set up. http://docs.mamedev.org/advanced/bgfx.html Now for those of you that do not like to get dirty with editing .ini files by hand and wish they had a new version of MameUIFX which unfortunately is now discontinued there is an option. Head on over to EmuCR and search for a program called Arcade. Download the appropriate version that matches your Mame version and drop the .exe file into your Mame folder and run that as your emulator, it will probably be called arcade64.exe. It will work along side your mame64.exe. When you run it it will look and function identically to the MameUIFX you are accustomed to. Here is a link to version Arcade 177 over on EmuCR http://www.emucr.com/2016/09/arcade-v0177.html Here is a screenshot of DoDonPachi in action using the crt-geom preset bgfx shader. It actually looks much better full screen and in motion than the static screenshot.

I did a whole bunch of tinkering last night and I now have BGFX shaders in a usable state. Though still not 100% but it is a very viable option and a very good one at that. I am going to write up a short tutorial in a separate thread on it.

Unfortunately I cannot help you with Raine because I don't use it. Hopefully someone can pop in here and help you with it. But I did delete your 2 duplicate threads you accidentally created for this

Here's a screenshot of my vertical game make sure to view it full size.

Not sure what to tell you then other than it is possible that it is resolution related. These types of shaders are meant more for higher resolution above 1080 but they should still work.

That's in the mame.ini

Hmm it shouldn't look like that. I wonder if maybe resolution is messing with it. Or maybe one of the following settings: # # CORE RENDER OPTIONS # keepaspect 1 unevenstretch 1 unevenstretchx 0 intoverscan 0 intscalex 0 intscaley 0

Which game is that ?

HLSL should look good in vertical, that's one of the best reasons to use it. You don't need to have a separate setting for vertical and horizontal games like you would with Retroarchs CRT or Mames GLSL shaders. I don't know what if any settings to adjust for vertical because to me they look great.