Lordmonkus

I always love Jim Stirling and this video is no exception, he nailed it on the head with his take on emulation. My big thing with emulation and debating its legality is the more often than not the very people who bitch and cry about it being illegal are the same people who buy repro carts and think those are perfectly fine when the vast majority of those are illegally using fan translations to profit from while the translators see nothing. But oh look we put a nice sticker on it and put it in a nice box, pay us 40-60 bucks for something we stole. The people who complain about emulator illegality are either the corporations or some jerk off who thinks their physical retro collection is gonna pay for their kids college in 20 years. It's like the comic book and sports card people back in the early 90s when everyone jumped on that bandwagon. These people out there now jumping into the retro collecting are just dumping all their money into something that is only going to lose value. Now having said all that if people are buying because they genuinely want to have and play these games that's great. But if they think they are making an "investment" they are making a huge mistake.

Just a couple of screen shots from Ghouls N Ghosts to show what my settings look like. I may have to make some adjustments since it seems the reds might be a little high but that's something easily tweaked. Click and view in full screen, also keep in mind I play on a 27" 2560 x 1440 monitor. http://i.imgur.com/2EoxdEg.png http://i.imgur.com/oxyzZGl.png

Yes, you could do that but honestly I think that a good HLSL setup actually looks better. You can fine tune it to get get the look you like a lot easier and custmize it for your specific monitor. I was a GLSL Lottes shader fan up until the Mame devs fixed HLSL and now I am a convert :)

I didn't bother trying to.

I had a look into the latest build and there is some stuff in the settings that requires a bios dump of a chip other than the system bios. Still no sound effects in Darius Gaiden however so this emulator still has work to be done. Nice to see it progressing though, some day we will have good Saturn emulation :)

I have done some tweaking to the settings in the video and I think they are better. There are 2 files you need to edit, the first is the mame.ini, here are the settings: # # DIRECT3D POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS # hlslpath hlsl hlsl_enable 1 hlsl_oversampling 0 hlsl_write hlsl_snap_width 2048 hlsl_snap_height 1536 shadow_mask_tile_mode 0 shadow_mask_alpha 0.0 shadow_mask_texture shadow-mask.png shadow_mask_x_count 6 shadow_mask_y_count 4 shadow_mask_usize 0.1875 shadow_mask_vsize 0.20 shadow_mask_uoffset 0.0 shadow_mask_voffset 0.0 curvature 0.0 round_corner 0.0 smooth_border 0.0 reflection 0.0 vignetting 0.25 scanline_alpha 0.50 scanline_size 1.0 scanline_height 1.40 scanline_variation 1.0 scanline_bright_scale 1.0 scanline_bright_offset 0.0 scanline_jitter 0.0 hum_bar_alpha 0.0 defocus 0.8,0.0 converge_x 0.0,0.0,0.0 converge_y 0.0,0.0,0.0 radial_converge_x 0.0,0.0,0.0 radial_converge_y 0.0,0.0,0.0 red_ratio 1.0,0.0,0.0 grn_ratio 0.0,1.0,0.0 blu_ratio 0.0,0.0,1.0 saturation 1.2 offset 0.0,0.0,0.0 scale 1.0,1.0,1.0 power 1.0,1.0,1.0 floor 0.0,0.0,0.0 phosphor_life 0.0,0.0,0.0 The 2nd file to change is the raster.ini file located in the "mame\ini\presets" folder: # # DIRECT3D POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS # shadow_mask_tile_mode 0 shadow_mask_alpha 0.25 shadow_mask_texture shadow-mask.png shadow_mask_x_count 12 shadow_mask_y_count 6 shadow_mask_usize 0.5 shadow_mask_vsize 0.5 shadow_mask_uoffset 0.0 shadow_mask_voffset 0.0 distortion 0.0 cubic_distortion 0.0 distort_corner 0.0 round_corner 0.0 smooth_border 0.0 reflection 0.0 vignetting 0.0 scanline_alpha 0.50 scanline_size 1.0 scanline_height 1.0 scanline_variation 1.0 scanline_bright_scale 2.0 scanline_bright_offset 0.0 scanline_jitter 0.0 defocus 0.75,0.0 converge_x 0.0,0.0,0.0 converge_y 0.0,0.0,0.0 radial_converge_x 0.0,0.0,0.0 radial_converge_y 0.0,0.0,0.0 red_ratio 1.05,0.00,0.10 grn_ratio -0.10,1.00,0.25 blu_ratio -0.25,0.25,1.25 saturation 1.20 offset -0.30,-0.20,-0.05 scale 1.15,1.05,0.90 power 0.90,0.90,1.15 floor 0.0,0.0,0.0 phosphor_life 0.0,0.0,0.0 # # NTSC POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS # yiq_enable 0 # # BLOOM POST-PROCESSING OPTIONS # bloom_blend_mode 0 bloom_scale 0.20 bloom_overdrive 1.00,1.00,1.00 bloom_lvl0_weight 1.00 bloom_lvl1_weight 0.64 bloom_lvl2_weight 0.32 bloom_lvl3_weight 0.16 bloom_lvl4_weight 0.08 bloom_lvl5_weight 0.06 bloom_lvl6_weight 0.04 bloom_lvl7_weight 0.02 bloom_lvl8_weight 0.01 If you watched the video and saw the person using the sliders to change settings you would be led to believe that those settings are automatically saved to an ini file but they are not. You have to go into the mame.ini and / or raster.ini file and manually make the changes. The one complaint I did have with the settings in the video was that the blacks were not black, they were a dark grey. Simply changing the "floor" setting in the raster.ini to 0.0,0.0,0.0 made the blacks black again. There were a few more minor tweaks I made as well but they were based on personal preference and my monitor.

Lol, yeah Dos the 5200 is one of those systems for me now im just tinkering with the emulation of it just because of..... well just because. It's really not a system I care enough about to play the games on because like I said earlier the vast majority of games are arcade ports and I would rather play the arcade version, like Moon Patrol. There really is only a small handful of games that I would play on it like H.E.R.O. which is the better version compared to tehe 2600 version. Pitfall would be nice to get it working though, it is a graphical upgrade and a classic.

Yeah there really isn't a whole lot to configure. I just meant it more in terms of I haven't really spent any real time at looking at everything yet and maybe there could be something off. The 5200 is a system I didn't own or even play ever so my knowledge on the system is extremely limited so I have no clue how certain games are supposed to look and play.

Quake is a good choice but it was kind of right on that switch over from Dos to Windows where Doom is the iconic Dos game. If not Doom then Wolfenstein or Monkey Island. No matter what you use though your artwork looks great :)

Dude for DOS it has to be Doom :)

Added the 5200 roms folder to my rom paths and that got it working, thanks DOS. Jump button still doesn't work in Moon Patrol however :(

Maybe, maybe not. It could just be a case of setting up the controls better for games that have control problems. As for the non loading games they could just be rom dumps that Mess does not like.

If you are just using the default rom folder withing the Mame installation folder you do not have to set anything. But if you are keeping your roms in a different location you need to set this folder within Mame. If you are using MameUI you can set the folder or multiple folders using the drop down menus at the top. If you are using the command line version of Mame (like I am) then open your mame.ini and look for the line rompath near the top and just to the right of that you will want to type the full path to the location of your roms enclosed in quotation marks. For example mine looks like this: rompath "E:\Downloaded Games\Emulation\Roms\Mame Full" You do not need to point to any bios files, the bios files for arcade games just go in the same folder with all your game roms.

Hmm after reading some of the responses and further testing yeah certain games like Moon Patrol the jump button does not work for me either. Hero and Kangaroo work just fine while Joust and Star Wars just go to a black screen after the initial splash screen. Pitfall loads but the start button does not work while Pitfall 2 works perfectly. I tried a handful of other games with varying degrees of success, some work while others have either funky controls or just don't work. I am using the 174 version of Mess Brad linked to. I tired to use my Mame 174 but I had no luck getting it to work, I will try again later.

So here it is after 4am and of course I have to tinker with stuff and like last night around this same time I decided let's have another go around with Mess (my arch nemesis of emulators). This is an emulator I so desperately want to love but for one reason or another it just doesn't seem to want to be the emulator for me. Progress has been made however, small but progress none the less. Last nights goal was to get the Atari 5200 working since this is a system that really has no great options. Sure there are some serviceable options such as Kat5200 but it's still rather meh with it's funky UI, the way you kick out of game and the way it forces all my background windows to my second monitor. Well my goal of getting the 5200 emulated with Mess was a success and even better I was able to transfer over my HLSL settings from Mame and they actually look really good with the 5200 games. I can safely say now that Mess is my new Atari 5200 emulator of choice. Tonight's adventure took me to the Sega Saturn, another system where the choices of emulator are all far from perfect with SSF being the best but with the major drawback of mounting disk images or having actual game disks to put into your cd drive. There was some success in that I was able to get it working and loaded up Darius Gaiden (my go to testing game). Game looked great with my HLSL settings. Some very minor sound glitches but overall a very enjoyable experience. Problems did come up however when trying out Guardian Heroes which had some speed issues but playable. My next game to test was Nights which works really well in SSF but sadly is very broken using Mess. One last and final major problem is the control configuration using an Xbox 360 controller. There was no option to set up an analog stick for Nights, or at least I couldn't see any option and there is the option for it for the 5200. Also button bindings would not allow for using the L and R analog triggers for the L and R buttons of the Saturn controller. My final verdict on Saturn emulated through Mess is that while it is better over all than Yabause and Retroarch's Yabause core it is not a replacement for SSF yet. I am hopeful however since Mess / Mame is such a heavily developed emulator, we should see progress made eventually

Well you know what you need to do then ;)

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

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

***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

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.

I like it.

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.

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

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

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.