Lordmonkus

Are your roms in zip file or extracted into their bin files ?

Is it some games or all games ?

If someone can get MESS in Retroarch figured out that would be amazing just for the shaders alone.

Just out of curiosity, what is different about this fork ? For a standalone NES emulator I like PuNes http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6928 It has palette support and even supports some Restroarch (not all) shaders and supposed to be a very accurate emulator.

Yeah you plugged the Atari joystick into the end of the cable and then it all plugged into the system giving you a 2 button controller. Omega race was the only game I know of that used this. Unfortunately the Retroarch Atari 2600 core doesn't support the extra button but using Stella you can emulate it.

Cool, glad you got it working. Lol, yeah Decathlon is a controller destroyer. I can't imaging playing it with a d-pad though, I played it way back in the day on the 2600 with the joystick and surprisingly my joysticks survived it. Omega race actually destroyed controllers for me, it came with a slip over grip addon which put more leverage on the stick and broke the connectors inside. http://www.videogameauctions.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Omega-Race-and-Booster-Grip.jpg

It is super easy to setup when compared to Hyperspin and Rocketlauncher. When I started in on all this front end stuff about a year or so ago I started out with other frontends and eventually go to Hperspin because a buddy of mine was using it. With his help and tons of reading I finally managed to get stuff "working" but I was never happy with it and hated how much of a pain it was to add or remove games on the fly. Then I found Launchbox and haven't looked back, it blows everything else away in every way possible. It looks better, easier to setup, and is easier to maintain and change things as needed. I made the switch before Brad started posting all the tutorials and it was still very easy to get setup. Some emulators need some extra work like SSF for the Saturn but that needs work in any frontend.

It's been a couple of months since I set it up so I will try and remember exactly what I did. First when you launch Kat5200 you should have an ugly but functional UI. Go to "Machine" then click "Bios Files" and browse for the 5200.bin. Second click "Machine" again and under "System" make sure "Atari 5200" is checked. Under "Options" setup your controls and video options to your liking. There are some NTSC filters there if you want that look but I did not like them so I left them off. In Launchbox itself I did not have to do anything extra other than the normal stuff like setting the Kat5200.exe for the Atari 5200 platform and import games. To exit your games you will have to use your "close emulator" key (key combo) 2 times. The first time will just bring up Kat5200s UI. It's not the cleanest emulator to set up and use but from my limited 5200 emulator experience it is the easiest sine Mess is a massive pain in the ass and Altirra while it is a good emulator I had troubles with setting it up through Launchbox. The 5200 is a funky beast of a machine with awful controllers and poor game selection. Most games for it are modest upgrades from the 2600 or has better ports on the 7800 so for me personally the 5200 is just one of the sideshow novelties that is nice to have but You really won't put much times into playing it.

Getting it running under RA and MESS / Mame is a real pain but there is a thread around here somewhere with it working. I just used Kat52000 for it though, easier to get setup.

Well you have found a great balance.

It's the reason you got my money. If the free version was crippled and useless to me I would have just struggled along with some other front end. I tried out several and for one reason or another I just did not like any of them. I rarely even use Launchbox in BigBox mode so the free version is all that I really need but it is nice to have the BogBox mode there when I want to use it in that mode.

The free version is just too good for those who don't care about sitting on the couch and using a controller. Many people just want a nice mouse driven front end.

It's just really tough to be the quality that Mame and FBA have going for them. Both the emulation and shaders are top notch and give it the edge over anything even if the emulation quality itself is really good. Mame has Lottes which is perfect for arcade and the FBA core on Retroarch has all the shader choices that RA offers.

I agree with DOS76, WinKawaks was good for its day but FBA and Mame are both far better choices. Even if the emulation quality itself is as good, Mame and FBA have far better CRT shaders than the primitive scanlines in WinKawaks.

They really need to give the end user the option to turn off those silly nag screens instead of forcing people to either compile their own Mame, look for a pre-compiled build elsewhere or using GrooveyMame. At least give us the option to do like GrooveyMame and do it in the ini with a couple of switches.

Yeah Mame is different that way for some reason but then again Mame is the only emulator I can think of off the top of my head that needs a rom directory path. Glad you got it working.

Do your roms load when just loading through Mame itself ? Are you using MameUI or the command line version of Mame ? If the game is loading fine through Mame on its own then you have something wrong in your Launchbox setup. If not then check your rom path.

That error looks like you got something wrong in your setup. I will post a screen shot in a few minutes of what mine looks like. Mame can emulate all sorts of stuff but it's a real pain in the ass to set it all up. A couple of people here on the forums figured out a lot of it but unless you really feel you need to emulate those old computer systems I would just leave them alone. Launchbox will launch pretty much anything, it's just a front end afterall, it's not running anything directly.

The non UI version of Mame actually does have a UI in it now, it's been there since a couple of versions ago. Now it's not the same UI, it is a more DOSish looking UI and you can change most settings but it isn't quite as easy to use but it is there. My whole opinion of Mame and which version to use is that you really do not need to keep up to date with the latest versions of Mame and here is why. For now you are generally only using Mame to play older games (80s to late 90s) and pretty much any version of Mame that is 151 or newer is going to play all of those games just fine. If you are trying to keep everything up to date to the latest Mame you are spending more time trying to update all your rom sets to match the latest Mame than actually playing. The reason I picked 151 is because that is the easiest to find and download rom set without registering for some site or dealing with a torrent. Personally I have been sticking with 168 version of Mame and until a newer version of Mame implements something really crazy from out of left field that no one expected I won't bother updating just because some random 2000s arcade game no one ever heard of made it off the not playable to the now loadable but not really playable status. Sure, one day Mame will handle all the console stuff as good as Retroarch and other stand alone emulators but that day is not even close to being here yet. You also do not have to exactly match your rom set to the version of Mame you are using. As I said earlier I am using Mame 168 but my rom set is pretty much a 151 rom set with a handful of individual games I updated manually. If your rom set is at least moderately up to date you are fine with just about any Mame that is reasonably close in version number. You will drive yourself insane trying to keep everything up to date and matching. Just my opinion on it.

For general purpose I use an XBox 360 controller. But for more specialized tasks I have an X-Arcade Tank Stick which is pretty decent and I have a Hori Fight Commander which is amazing for pure digital control and fighting games, the d-pad on it is damn near perfection. I've been thinking of picking up a Qanba fight stick link just to have for single player games clamped to my desk though. From what I have seen and read about this stick is that it is pretty good for the price and the clamp comes off easily if needed.

Drybonz said I like the design on the filters pages. *edit* On a side note... I'm guessing the guys over in the original "all killer no filler" thread at BYOAC will be very interested in this now. Speaking of the BYOAC All Killer list the Classic list has been completed. At a quick glance it doesn't look like anything is in it that isn't already in the other lists but it is there and I have attached an up to date pack downloaded off the forums over there.

Yeah I didn't know either. Too bad it doesn't do anything to better the emulation at all like maybe using a more accurate core of the mednafen pce instead of the fast. From what I could find out the SGX core is just a port of the pce_fast core, there isn't a port of the accurate core yet.

I was just doing some reading over on the Retroarch forums and came across this little bit of information I found interesting. Apparently you can play your TurboGrafx / Pc Engine CD games using the SuperGrafx core. I believe there is no actual benefit to doing this in terms of emulation quality as of right now but it does help clean up a tiny amount of core / config clutter for those that may care about that. It will allow you to put all your TG16 / PCE emulation into a single core. Anyways the way you do this is go into Retroarch install folder and then the info folder. In there you should find a file called mednafen_supergrafx_libretro.info, open this file in notpad and change the following line supported_extensions = "pce|sgx" to supported_extensions = "pce|sgx|cue|ccd"

It should work for Mame as well. But you can look in the Mame menu (Tab key) > Input (General) > User Interface > UI Cancel. You can have it set to 2 or more different bindings so you have Escape as well as the 2 buttons on your controller you want.

That's the right approach to take Jason. CD Projekt Red and some other game devs out there have proven that DRM free is the way to go. Anti piracy schemes never prevent piracy and only piss off legit paying customers. Going full DRM free will gain the respect of people, no sense in wasting your time trying to prevent something you won't be able to. So far I love the approach you have taken with Launchbox. The free version is very feature rich and fully usable on it's own for a lot of people while the premium version just offers a couple more bonus features for convenience. I am normally a person that will go looking for the best free alternative over paid versions of software but Launchbox is so awesome I bought it and don't regret it one bit.