Lordmonkus

Since Retroarch now has their Mednafen core I had to make a video demo playing some Darius Gaiden. There is a couple of minor performance and sound issues but that was because I was recording and the Saturn core is heavy enough on the resources that it caused some very slight hiccups that are not there when not recording.

Yeah Burning Rangers is known to have some issues.

3D pad analog controller settings aren't in the core just yet but are being worked on according to a libretro dev over on /r/emulation, should be added in the next couple of days. If you plan on using a relatively heavy shader turning on Threaded Video in the video settings looks like it is going to be a must. Even using a middle of the road shader like Easymode-Halation caused slight framerate issues and some audio static but turning on Threaded Video allows me to run Royale-Kurozumi again at a full 60 fps and I saw no perceivable input lag issues.

Ahh ok, so maybe it's my dump. Ill try and get a new one. Edit: I think fixed my copy of Astal by running it through IsoBuster. The dump I had was a Darkwater release and it froze at the same place in the stand alone and the RA core but after using IsoBuster on it it hasn't froze up.

Double check your Astal and see if it freezes after about a minute or so into playing it. Alberts Odyssey works for me. I haven't tried any of the other games you mentioned other than Battle Arena Toshinden URA which works for me as well.

CRT-Easymode-Halation shader preset.

Having played around with the Retroarch Mednafen Saturn core for a little bit now I wanted to give some of my first impressions. First off I am extremely happy to see this core come out so soon after the stand alone. But as of right this moment the stand alone emulator is the better way to actually play games. The stand alone has better controller setup for the 3D analog since you can map a button for the "mode" button on the controller to toggle back and forth on the fly. Retroarchs default button mappings are a little questionable and remapping them isn't terribly difficult but does suffer from Retroarchs typical remapping confusion. While you can switch from gamepad to 3dpad in the controller config this doesn't actually seem to work, or at least not for me with an Xbox 360 controller. Putting it on 3D controller remapped start to right on the d-pad and other buttons to other d-pad directions and the analog stick still did nothing even though further down in the controller remapping it looked like it should have been set correctly. Maybe I was missing something, I don't know. Now to the more important issues I have right now. Performance is not as good as the stand alone, there is a noticeable performance hit in a game like Nights. It is close though and will get better with time I am sure. There is also something funky with compatibility compared to the stand alone. I loaded up the game Panzer Dragoon II Zwei and it loaded just fine til I got to the start screen. As soon as I hit start it put me into the cd menu screen. I know this game works because I have played it on the stand alone emulator and even posted a video showing it. Anyways, I am glad this is out and being worked on, this is the most important thing but for now stick to using the stand alone emulator to actually play your games. PS: Heavy shaders really hit this emulator hard, Royale-Kurozumi drops my framerate into the mid 40s but something like Easymode-Halation is fine and looks glorious. For reference my GPU is a GTX 970.

No, it will work just fine with loading a cue sheet. If you are seeing the cd menu either your dump is bad or the game itself is not compatible yet.

The bios needed are the same ones the stand alone uses which are the same bios from the Mame / Mess bios. The NA region bios should be named "mpr-17933" and the JP region bios "sega_101.bin". You can rename your SSF bios if you like, I did this at first for the stand alone emulator and they worked but I replaced them with Mame / Mess bios just because.

You probably just manually typed it in when you imported your games. I think I did that when I did my TurboGrafx games.

Nice to know IsoBuster is an option as well.

This isn't a bug, the default platform name is Super Nintendo (SNES) in Launchbox. Somehow you changed your platform and in the "Associated Platforms" window it was using the default and if the name of the platform doesn't match it won't work.

@DOS76 I have fixed several cue + bins with the program CDMage link. Just load your Saturn cue in and then you can use it to test the rom for corruption and attempt to repair it. Not sure if the corruption repair actually does anything though. Then go File > Save as and spit it back out to a different location and test it out. This may not work for all dumps though but it did fix some of mine. If you go looking for a new dump if possible try and get a Darkwater release, those so far have been rock solid.

Oh there is no doubt that SSF overall at the moment is the better emulator but keep in mind SSF has had years of development and this is just the first release of Saturn support in Mednafen. And for being the first "experimental unstable" release as the devs called it I would say its right on SSFs ass and going to surpass is very quickly.

I did not. I have now. When I tried to vote before it was asking for login and password but I had all scripts blocked, enabled scripts and voila.

Yeah I did notice this in my testing. I forgot to mention it in my video.

Mednafen runs Battle Arena Tosh. URA. A guy asked in one of my youtube video comments to test it and I did and posted a video of it.

I posted a video around here a little while ago showing how to setup HLSL. If you are using MameUI setting up GLSL shaders is very easy. HLSL is a little bit more tricky and hands on but not so bad. The command line version of Mame is bit more hands on again since you are editing ini files by hand.

Having the ability to mount multiple disks simultaneously would be a great feature to have for emulating such systems as the X68000. Mess supports this feature through its command line, for example I made a batch file with the following in it and the Castlevania game loads perfectly. mess64.exe x68000 -flop1 "H:\Emulation\Roms\X68000\Akumajou Dracula (1993)(Konami)(Disk 1 of 2).dim" -flop2 "H:\Emulation\Roms\X68000\Akumajou Dracula (1993)(Konami)(Disk 2 of 2).dim" As you can see the -flop1 and -flop2 mounts each disk image. Split command line switches would make Daphne setup extremely simple for people. Right now it seems that Launchbox just automatically dumps the rom file at the end of the command line switches and this does not work for Daphne. Here is a batch file that loads Dragon's Lair on my system. daphne.exe lair vldp -framefile H:\Emulation\Roms\Daphne\vldp\lair\lair.txt -blend -ignore_aspect_ratio -blank_searches -precache -min_seek_delay 1000 -seek_frames_per_ms 20 -homedir H:\Emulation\Roms\Daphne -fastboot -bank 0 11011001 -bank 1 00100111 -nocrc -noissues -noserversend -sound_buffer 2048 -fullscreen -x 1600 -y 1200 If we could set daphne.exe as the emulator and maybe customize the way the command switches work for each game this would make it much easier. We would need to import the text file as the rom which in this case would be "lair.txt" and the path to rom needs to be in the middle of all the switches. We would also need the name of the text file parsed minus the .txt extension and be put as the very first thing after daphne.exe This splittling command line would be a very specific feature for daphne I believe. I don't know of any other emulator that does this but the multi disk mounting is uses in other computer emulators. I am not 100% certain but I think the Atari ST and maybe even the Amiga. If this is something you would like to see please vote for this on the Bitbucket feature request. https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/1416/multiple-disk-mounts-and-split-command I know this isn't a major or critical issue but I think they would be huge quality of life enhancements to Launchbox. Many people use Daphne and it is a real pain to get it working in Launchbox and the X68000 system while it isn't one of the more popular emulated systems but it has many amazing arcade ports and it is severely lacking in the easy to use emulators. With this Mess setup would be a a relative breeze and it actually emulates the system quite well, it's actually better than the dedicated X68000 emulators out there.

Having tested this out for a while now it is good that they allow the user to turn off the nag screens I still wouldn't use RA Mame over stand alone Mame. Mames HLSL and GLSL shaders just absolutely destroy any shader in RA for arcade games. RAs shaders are perfect and the best for consoles but for arcade games Mames shaders are still best. Mames shaders for the most part do not rotate properly for vertical games so you would have to set a custom config for vertical or horizontal. While in Mame you have to do that with GLSL it is much easier using MameUI and the vertical and horizontal filters and HLSL doesn't care about the orientation. Another thing is that there is something with the RA Mame core that requires more graphical processing power. I can throw any shader at any system in RA and my system will take it like a champ but in Mame the heavier shaders like the ones found in solid12345's analog shader pack make games unplayable dropping framerates down into the 40s. I can use shaders on any other system without issue.

I just haven't bothered with the Mame core for a couple of months now so I never even looked at it. I know people on the Retroarch forums have been asking for it and the answer that was given was to just compile your own core. Was even kinda silly to have to find a hacked Mame.exe when GrooveyMame had the option to turn them off right in the mame.ini file.

Oh very nice, they finally put this in the core options. I may have to look into going back to Mame again since this was one of the reasons i preferred standalone mame with a no-nag hack.

But you are here now You should find some people who will enjoy your shader presets a whole lot.

I don't normally use Retroarch for my N64 emulation but doing a quick test of it with 1.3.6 loaded Mario without issue. Your problem could be in a setting. Did you mess with the core settings at all ? try removing your mupen64plus_libretro.dll.cfg file in the configs folder. Sometimes a shader can cause problems or a core setting that your system doesn't agree with. Also are you using the standard version or are you trying to use the new Vulkan enabled core ? My test was with the standard version.

Name: Saturn Disk Image Convert Category: Tutorials Date Added: 2016-08-12 Submitter: lordmonkus In this video I show you how to convert and fix Saturn disk image dumps that come with mp3 or wav files which Mednafen does not like at all. In the video I use the audio program Foobar to quickly convert the mp3s to wav but @Zombeaver said he used http://media.io/ Saturn Disk Image Convert