[MAME Initializing but not launching.]

Do you have your rom path set properly for your Mame.exe in the ini file ?

[Playstation ECM and APE files guide]

I'm trying to be safe about it, I know that in the past even mentioning the site as been a bit touchy. I sent Brad a pm with the link to the guide I followed so if he wants to he can edit the main post and add the link himself. That way i'm not getting myself into any trouble :D

[Playstation ECM and APE files guide]

***Disclaimer*** I did not figure any of the following out on my own. I do not take any credit for any of the following information. I simply found a guide on a site that we are not allowed to link to. If Brad allows me to link directly to the guide itself I will do so but not before he gives me the go ahead. Full credit goes to Zorlon the forum admin of where I got this information. ************************ So I finally got a game into my collection today for the Playstation that required some work before it would work in Retroarch. I have had to do some work in the past to some games but this one was really beyond any other. I got a game that came in both with a cue sheet, a 7z file and a bunch of APE audio files. Inside the 7z file was an ECM file. I have dealt with ECM files in the past using the unecm tool but never had to deal with APE files. After using unecm I then had to rename that file to match that of the first file the cue sheet was looking for. I then noticed all the following tracks were looking for bin files and not ape files so I renamed all the extensions from .ape to .bin which caused a whole lot of static in place of the proper audio. To fix the audio you need to use Monkeys Audio (link) to convert all the ape files to wav. After converting you will have both the ape and wav files, you can delete the ape files. You will then need to rename all the files with the wav extension to have a bin extension. You can either do this manually or use a simple bat file in the folder with all the wav files with the following command: ren *.wav *.bin To convert all the ape files using Monkeys Audio: Run it, now you will see on the left there is a big monkey head that says compress under it Hit the down arrow button on the right of the monkey head and hit Decompress, the Monkey head should change into what looks like a box with arrows pointing away from it Now drag and drop all ape files into the big space under "File Name" Now you can hit that Decompress button (picture of a box with arrows pointing away from it), just wait for it to complete Now not only should you have ape files in the folder but now there should be a wav version of every ape file you ran through the proram the ape's can be removed now and you can close the software. Now we have a cue sheet and bin files, depending on the game and how many audio track it has it can be quite a few. In this specific case I had 29 bin files. This will now work just fine as long as the file names match up with everything in the cue sheet but it is messy so let's tidy this up a bit and make it just a cue sheet and a single bin. Go get and install Isobuster (link), you do not need the paid version to do what we need to do next, the free version does everything we need. Run ISO buster Hit File then Open Image File Select the cue file (or ccd file) This should now show a list of tracks on the left Hit File then CD then Extract CD then RAW (*.bin *.iso) Change the Save Type from *.iso to *.bin In the File Name: text box, rename the output file (do not forget to change .iso to .bin on the end of it) Change the destination folder if you like then hit Save After this has completed you will then be asked to save a cue file, just hit Save A little nag screen may pop up but it's nothing major and you won't be using this tool all the time. Now you should have a nice simple working cue and bin of the game and you are good to go. Again, I take no credit for any of this at all. I just wanted to share this so that when someone comes along with the same problem they can fix it themselves

[Zombeaver's Platform Clear Logos]

Yeah the platform names need to be a higher contrast colour to make them easier to read but overall I really like the design and look a lot.

[Zombeaver's Platform Clear Logos]

I like it.

[Confused - Using retroarch but LaunchBox won't run the emulator]

jon said I think it does contain all regions, however so does my SMS folder and that works oK.

Your SMS roms may have the right (or working) rom first alphabetically where your Genesis ones may not. I believe when you load a zipped file with multiple roms in it through Launchbox it loads the first file it finds and that file may or may not even be a rom file, it could be some sort of other file. Try extracting one of the actual rom files out and tell Launchbox to load that rom instead of the zip file. I can tell you without question the the Genesis GX core will load every single rom file you can throw at it as long as the file itself is not corrupt. I have 777 Genesis roms and every single one of them works flawlessly but I also do not keep my roms in zip files, all my roms are extracted. The only thing you should be using the Pico core for is the 32X games.

[very new noob]

Mame is easy, SSF is the tricky one but it's very doable, there are some threads around here about it.

[Fusion fullscreen]

Just look for CRT-Royale-Kurozumi in the CGP preset folder, there's a CG and GLSL version.

[very new noob]

Yes, updating the romset and Mame version would be best but if that isn't an option for whatever reason then the Mame 2000 core for the romset asked about is my advice.

[Fusion fullscreen]

Theoretically yes but you would have to go in and manually edit all those absolute paths for each shader pass because more than likely the folder structure would be different. Plus all I am using is the default non edited CRT-Royale_Kurozumi preset so if you load that you would be using the exact shader I am using.

[very new noob]

billbo said Thanks very much guys up and running on what I have tried , can I please ask what would be best to run mame 0.37b5 roms ?? Thanks

This would be the Mame4all rom set if I am not mistaken which is an older Mame used on the Raspberry Pi and other lower end devices. You can run these through Retroarch using the Mame 2000 core which is designed for that specific rom set http://wiki.libretro.com/index.php?title=MAME_2000 or you can use an older build of Mame http://www.mame.net/oldrel.html, scroll down til you find the 0.37b5 (0.41) version and download the binary. Outside of using this rom set on a Pi which I have done I don't have any experience with it otherwise. I would normally suggest using Mame over Retroarch for Mame emulation but in this case I think I would actually recommend using Retroarch. Being such an old version of Mame there are a lot of features not implemented and Retroarch brings a lot of great extra functionality like shaders. Maybe others might have a better suggestion however.

[very new noob]

You don't need an EmuMovies account. I don't have one and all I miss out on is the game videos but I don't care about that stuff. Just wanted to clear up the wording of "needing" and EmuMovies account.

[Fusion fullscreen]

Ok good, I am glad what I typed out made sense somewhat to someone other than myself. This is one of those things I am by no means an expert on but I think have a basic grasp of the main concepts of how it all works. I think I understand it in my head and I try and put it all down in words as I think of it and it makes sense as I type it. I will try and answer your latest questions. You can add more passes to a preset but the problem there is that can only easily add them at the end without some extensive hands on dirty work. After you have loaded in a preset if you look in the Quick Menu > Shaders you will see a list of all the different passes that make up the preset. You will see the number of total passes, if you highlight that and press right on the controller you can add more total passes. Then scroll down and you will see the passes you have added but there will be no shader shown, it will say something like Shader #13 N/A for example. The last number will be different depending on how many passes the preset you had loaded in had before, I used 13 because the Kurozumi preset I use has 12 passes so adding one more gives it 13. Now to actually add another pass you go to the new pass you just added and press B on your controller and you will then dig into the shaders folder structure til you find the shader (not preset) that you wish to add. This is where you are looking for either a .cg or .glsl file (not .cgp or .glslp) Simply adding more passes to a preset may or may not give you the desired effect you may be looking for. Most presets are actually extremely good and the people who have created them have done a very good job of fine tuning to get the desired look. Further tweaking them and actually knowing what does what is well beyond my scope of knowledge. I simply know enough to edit them and make them look shitty. When you use the cycle hotkey to change shaders you are simply cycling through the presets that are currently in the Retroarch > Shaders folder and not the ones in the shaders_cg and shaders_glsl folders. I'm not quite sure I understand your question about me copy pasting here. What is it you are asking me to copy paste ? I was just pointing out something you could do within a preset to further tweak certain settings to customize a shader preset to your liking. This is actually how the Kurozumi edit of CRT-Royale came about, he just used Royale as a base and then further tweaked the values in the preset folder. Just to reiterate here. Shaders themselves are actually somewhat complicated code (sort of like a programming language but not as complicated) that directly modifys the image output on the screen. Dig into the shaders folder structure and open one of the .cg or .glsl files in notepad and take a look at it, you will lots of programming code in there. Presets are simpler and easier to understand and they are just what their name implys, they are presets of shader combinations to achieve a desired look. Think of the shader itself as something like the actual source code of a program and the presets are like the settings menu in a program or an .ini file where you can easily tweak settings. Edit: You can build your own preset using the shader files themselves. Simply load up a core and if you already have a preset loaded just set the number of passes to 0 and then Apply Changes, you should now have no shader effects at all. Now you can start adding passes and for each pass load up a shader file, again these are .cg and .glsl files not .cgp and .glslp. Each shader you add will change based on the shader that is in the pass above (in the list or lower in pass number). Like I said in my previous post, think of each pass like a Photoshop layer or like sheets of transparent plastic and each sheet has a different effect. Some combinations will look good and some will look terrible. Any further information on this stuff is way beyond my knowledge base.

[Any current advice on PS1 disc change handling?]

Hmm, I have version 1.4.2 but I don't have any of the Final Fantasy games but I can load in 5 images using Lunar and Lunar 2. I did not try combining them obviously but they do load into each of the 5 slots.

[Fusion fullscreen]

I just wrote it all out as a general guide / primer for people who just happen to read it. I just let my fingers hammer the keys while I thought about it rather than try and pick it all apart for anyone specifically

[Fusion fullscreen]

I will try my best to explain this, it's something I understand in my head but I have a hard time putting it into words. In the shaders folder there are 2 folders, 1 called shaders_cg and the other called shaders_glsl. For the most part in these folders they contain all the same shaders with the difference being the framework they were built on. The CG stuff is built off of an Nvidia framework and GLSL is built off of OpenGL, the OpenGL is more compatible across systems. Other than that i'm really not sure what the differences really are. I just tend to use CG stuff since I have an Nvidia card. Anyways back on topic. In the shaders folder you will over time as you load up presets for a core you will find new preset files created with a name like "genesis_plus_gx_libretro.dll.cgp" for example. These are essentially the same preset file as the one you loaded in the first place but if you open it up in notepad you will see all the shader pass paths as an absolute path like: shader0 = "H:\Emulation\Emulators\Retroarch But if you were to go into the actual preset you loaded in the first place and open the preset in notepad it would look like a totally different file. If you dig into the shaders folders you will see files with the file extentsions of .cg, .cgp, .glsl and .glslp. The first obvious difference is that one is a CG shader and the other is a GLSL shader. The biggest difference though is the ones that ends with "p" is a preset which is a combination of shader passes to give the desired look. These presets can have as few as 1 shader pass and something like Royale or the Kurozumi edit of Royale can have as many as 12 separate passes giving a very complex but amazing look while at the same time can be being very taxing on the system. The best way I can think of to describe how shader passes work is to think of them like transparencies like you used to see in high school (depending on how old you are I guess, I don't know) or Photoshop layers. Each pass is a different shader effect applied to the one below it and each one of those passes is an actual .cg or .glsl shader file. The .cg and .glsl files are the actual shader files, these are the files where the real work is done where the presets are merely instructions to package a group of shaders together with some settings and the order to load them. Now that all that shit is explained to the best of my ability what I would suggest you do is load up a core and generate that core preset in the shaders folder like the example I showed earlier "genesis_plus_gx_libretro.dll.cgp". Rename this file to something that makes sense to you like "Testing1.cgp". Now load in a different preset and generate a new preset file and again rename it something like "Testing2.cgp". Obviously name these to something that makes sense to you so that you know which shader it really is. Once you have a few shaders pulled out that way you can then cycle through them on the fly and see the differences in them very quickly and clearly. One other little side benefit of all of this is these presets you have now in the "shaders" folder is that you manually edit values in the preset file using notepad or you can actually edit them within Retroarch itself by opening up the quick menu and where you load presets there is an option there called "Menu Shader Parameters". After you make changes be sure to apply changes and it will be changed in the preset file located in the "shaders" folder. Anyways I hope all of this made sense. If not just ask and I will try and make it a bit more simple and easy to understand.

[Fusion fullscreen]

The presets buried a folder or 2 deep are slightly different than the preset files saved out in the parent tree. The ones down in if you open it up in notepad and look at it are looking for a relative patch to the different shader effects where the ones saved out in the parent folder are looking for a hard path for the different effects. I really need to do a video tutorial on this stuff some time, would be so much easier than trying to explain it in text.

[Any current advice on PS1 disc change handling?]

The PBP format was used for convert PS1 games to play on the PSP but it's a format that emulators now support and Retroarch recently started supporting it. I used this method to compile the 2 Lunar games, 1 game was 2 disks and the other was 3. I compiled them into a single PBP file and they load through the PSX core, not the PSP emulator (though they may work on the PSP emulator, I never tried).

[Fusion fullscreen]

Saving presets is more for your own custom combinations of shaders by applying layers and tweaks that you want. When you use an already existing preset there is no reason to save it again as a preset. But what you can do to save some time once you find a shader preset you do like for one core it will save it as a preset in the parent tree with that core in the name and you can just load that for any other core you load. You can then go in and copy one of those system presets to a name you want like "Favourite Preset" or whatever you wanna call it.

[Any current advice on PS1 disc change handling?]

There are a couple of ways of doing this. The best emulator to use for it is Retroarch and the PSX core. RA supports the use of playlist files where each disk image is listed in the playlist file. Another option and is the one I use is with the recent addition of support for PBP files so you can merge multiple disk images into a single file and simply load that file. The program I use to merge images is PSX2PSP. Maybe someone else can pop in here and share their way of doing it because I am sure there is at least one other method to handle multi disk PS games. I only have experience with the merged PBP files and it works for me. If you want to go the play list route then google on how to make a play list, it isn't too difficult to do but I have never done it.

[Fusion fullscreen]

I assume you have your RA set to per core settings. Load a game for the core you wish to have the shader you wasnt. With a game loaded bring up the RA menu then "Load Shader Preset", then navigate to the CG folder then CGP folder and it should be in there. Retroarch should then appear to stall for a second or 2 but it is fine. Then you can exit back out of the RA menu back to your game and the shader should now be in effect. If it is not try repeating the process but click "Apply Changes" before going back into the game. You may also have to update your shaders using RA's updater, make sure to update the CG shaders. If it still does not work you just may not be able to use CG shaders for whatever reason and you will the be forced into the GLSL shaders. In GLSL try out the Lottes or Hyllian shaders, they are really nice. You could try out the standard Royale but in my experience results with that shader vary wildly from looking pretty good to downright awful, it all depends on your monitor and its settings and colour calibration.

[Fusion fullscreen]

CRT-Royale is in the CRT folder but the Kurozumi version is tucked away in the CGP folder. Weird place for it since it is a CRT shader and just an edit of Royale. Also there is only a CG version and not a GL version.

[Fusion fullscreen]

Yeah I just use the Kurozumi edit of Royale, it was designed to replicate a high quality Sony PVM which is what many of todays retro enthusiasts consider the best CRT display. It is also generally what the game developers at the time designed their games on. Though when it comes to shaders there is a lot of personal preference in what people like. The CRT look is just the look I like, I know Brad like his upscaled sharp pixels so he uses the Pixellate shader which does have an interesting look but not one I like. One thing to keep in mind though if you do go with one of the CRT type of shaders is to make sure you enable "integer scaling" in the video settings. With it off the scanlines may look off because of the oddball scaling of non integer.

[N64 Emulation Revolution! Holy crap!!!]

I thought it was in the "experimental" section. "When RetroArch 1.3.5 gets released Download the new RetroArch 1.3.5, go to ‘Online Updater’, go to ‘Core Updater’. From there, go to ‘Experimental’, and download Mupen64plus HW. This will download the Vulkan-enabled Mupen64plus core." Quoted from their website, I haven't tried it yet myself.

[Fusion fullscreen]

If you want just a straight upscaled and shardp image try the pixellate shader, for a great CRT shader look in the CG/CGP folder for CRT-Royale-Kurozumi shader, that's the one I use and I love it.