Lordmonkus

Retroarch is actually quite easy to set up. It's just that the UI is confusing at first. Here is something else though. There is always gonna be some point where the end user is going to have to get their hands dirty. Once the end user wants to emulate any sort of system with a "bios" file such as the Famicom Disk System, Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Saturn, TurboGrafx CD they will need to source their own bios. No one can provide those for them. Brad has made videos on setting up Retroarch and I plan on doing my own in the near future. I want to make a video walking people through the whole process and getting it running the best it can be.

I use Nestopia personally but Fceux is just as good. I don't think either is better than the other, they both are excellent and each have different extremely minor emulation flaws. Many NES games came with their own custom MMC type chips and no NES emulator to date emulates them all perfectly.

OpenEmu is using libretro cores is it not ? If it is not then please forgive my error, I don't own and never will own a Mac so I do not care to know about its software. Now having said that everything I say here on out is based on what little I may or may not know about OpenEmu. What you are proposing is a nice idea but you are now locking yourself into one single choice of emulators for each system and those are all governed by the cores that Libretro provides. Libretro does not support Gamecube, Wii, WiiU, Playstation 2, (Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 when those emulators become useful). Launchbox as it is right now is the frontend and launcher in one. There is no need for RocketLauncher for Hyperspin (unless the user chooses to use it). Not everyone wants to be locked into using a set emulator such as the libretro cores. For example while they do have N64 and PSP cores I will not use those cores. I use PJ64 for custom texture packs and the stand alone PPSSPP is far better. Another example is performance, while on my main gaming rig I can use the Playstation core and it's great but on my lower powered laptop which I have hooked up to the TV it cannot even look at the libretro PS core. For that I use ePSXe and it runs like a champ. Now that's not to say Jason doesn't doesn't need to update the recommended emulators within Launchbox. Of course he does and he knows this and it is planned. Maybe though he could talk to the libretro guys about somehow integrating libretro into Launchbox and have it come pre-packaged and set up with it ready to go out of the box. This would be a great idea but I would certainly not sacrifice the option to use other emulators as I see fit.

Set your Aspect Ratio to Custom then adjust the Custom Viewport Width and Height accordingly.

Yeah I always load the core first and then load content like DOS76. CG and GLSL are just 2 different shader architectures. Think of them as sort of like programming languages. It's just 2 ways of achieving the same effect. CG is an Nvidia technology and GLSL is based on OpenGL. CG is going to be phased out of Retroarch at some point. As far as setting up custom viewport goes. This really is only useful if you plan on using overlays that have a specific "hole" that you will see the game through. What I always do is set my Aspect Ratio to core provided (though you can adjust it manually if you prefer). Then you have a choice of Integer Scaling On or Off. On will scale it at a round number like 3x, 4x or 5x, not fractional like 3.5x. With it set to On you will see black bars at the top and bottom of the screen and with a 1080 screen those bars can be fairly noticeable. Most older games are 240 pixels high which means on a 1080 screen integer scale on will scale it 4x leaving 120 pixels divided by 2 which is a 60 pixel gap top and bottom. There are 2 ways to get rid of the black at the top and bottom and both have a drawback, you just have to decide which one you prefer. Option A is You can set a custom resolution and bump up the numbers til you no longer have gaps. You can set your Y resolution to 1200 which now means you are cutting off 60 pixels top and bottom. Option B is turn Integer Scaling to Off and Retroarch will automatically fill the screen to 1080 pixels high. The side effect of this though is you will get stretched pixles. A 240 pixel high game fit into a 1080 screen is 4.5x so every so many rows of pixels the renderer is going to essentially double up and repeat a row of pixel. Depending on the shader you are using this is either not going to be noticeable at all or it can be very noticeable and off putting. CRT scanline type shaders are the most sensitive to this stretching because when you get rows of stretched pixels it messes with the shaders scanlines so you will see odd spacing in the scanlines. My personal preference is to just leave Integer Scaling set to On and live with the black bars, I don't even notice them. Setting your custom resolution to 1200 will cut off some pixels but depending on the game and how it's UI elements like score and other info it will more or less noticeable. You could always get a higher resolution display, 1440 / 240 is a nice even integer of 6

Ok, I wasn't sure if that tool could pull them off or not. I don't have a Wii and never used that tool to know what it could and couldn't do.

Ok so what we need is some sort of tool that will recognize the file system and read it and be able to pull files off it to a normal hard drive in your pc. Correct ?

What file system is the hard drive ? fat, ntfs or some other weird file system ?

I just dragged them in from my file manager and followed the Launchbox import process from there. I don't know if this would make a difference or not but I don't use the file manager built into Windows, I use a program called 2xExplorer and have done so for many years. Though I cannot for the life of me see how that would matter but maybe there is something to the .wbfs extension than the Windows file manager hates for some strange reason.

Ahh I get it now. Just trying to get caught to speed on this issue. Was out all day with doctors appointments.

WBFS files work just fine through Launchbox and Dolphins, or at least the 3 games I do have in that format do.

The additional apps method was an old and terrible way of doing it.

No problems. Also check out the Retroarch Mednafen Saturn core now that it is out as well. It's not quite as far along because it lacks 3D pad analog controls but other than that it is just as good.

Yeah I generally don't like xBR filtering either. I normally use Royale-Kurozumi but I thought 2xbr-hybrid-crt-hyllian had an interesting look and being a shader preset tucked away in the CGP folder which tends to get overlooked I thought I would share it.

Game development studio work is hell unless you get really lucky with a select few developers. I knew a couple of guys that worked at Silicon Knights as 3D artists years ago during the N64 era and they worked long brutal hours and all they got was shit on. Then again I guess it was Denis Dyack, who is known to be ummm, how to put it nicely, let's just say a real piece of work.

I was checking out some different shaders tonight and looking at some that I have never really looked at before (it's tough to go through all of them) and I came across this interesting shader in the CGP folder, its the "2xbr-hybrid-crt-hyllian" preset. I think this shader is an interesting balance of CRT scanlines without being thick but also giving a little bit (but not over doing) smoothing. Now I don't know if this is going to be a shader I will use all the time or will it be just another short term until I get tired of it like many of the smoothing shaders. I thought I would share a screenshot of Guardian Heroes for the Saturn because it is a game where it scales sprites in a weird way and sometimes scales them a bit large and pixelated. This shader actually smooths it out a bit, I also tried this shader on Genesis, SNES and Playstation games and it looks pretty good. It also doesn't overly darken the picture like many CRT scanline shaders. There is another interesting one in the "denoisers" folder called "crt-fast-bilateral-super-xbr" that has a simlar effect but I did not screen shot that one. Anyways enough of my rambling, here's the screen shot.

These guys got their first album out in a few days. The singer is from the band 4Arm which is the first video I linked above.

For anyone wanting to play this, keep this in mind. While it is using Skyrim as a base and there are things in here that are like Skyrim, it really is a totally different game. Take your time to explore the world and read things in game. Many of the systems like leveling, spells and crafting are completely overhauled. This isn't just a mod to change how Skyrim plays, this is a total conversion, think of something like the old games Heretic or Hexen, while they used the Doom engine and played somewhat like doom they were their own games on a fundamental level.

Ok.

Well again keep in mind I don't have a preference one way or they other but if I were to decide to get into the whole ScummVM side of things I would want to have it setup as its own platform and have all of those games under it. And having a platform for it in the DB just makes things that little bit simpler on imports. If it were a case of should we add it as a platform and go through that work then I could see an argument against it but since there is no work to leaving it and no downside from having it then I see no reason to go through the effort of removing it. Now if I am missing something here then please point it out.

Well if it's already in the database then I don't see any reason to remove it.

Just my thoughts on it and keep in mind I really don't care one way or the other since I do not use ScummVM at all and only use DOSbox a very small amount. I say keep it. It is an emulator platform that some people know and use for what ever reason they have. Many of us have specific emulation and platform choices just because we want to use those emulators and platforms. Is it really that much of a burden to have a platform section for ScummVM ?

Yeah officially it doesn't support PAL but one night in chat with Zombeaver he mentioned the SRP and we messed with it with mixed results. Examples being Keio Flying Squadron worked perfectly, while Discworld loads but at the screen where it says to "Press Start" the game doesn't recoginise that the button is being pressed so you can't go beyond that. Discworld II loads and plays but everything is pink.

You made that post 2 times though

You can "fix" pal games with the Saturn Region Patcher tool but the results of that are 50/50, some games work fine with it others sort of work with weird side effects.