Lordmonkus

Just for confirmation I asked over on the Retroarch forums if the new PBP support in the latest PSX core worked with merged multi disk games and they said yes it does. So feel free to merge your Lunars and Final Fantasys and any other multi disk games into one nice and easy to manage PBP and enjoy the goodness. But as always keep a backup of your individual images just in case.

Very cool.

And it is precisely because of its inelegance that the RA team said they will never implement PCSX2 into RA while Dolphin is planned to be. For now though I am happy to accept PCSX2 for what it is and enjoy the fact that we have it.

Oh I agree that it would require an absolute beast of a system if it were 100% accurate. I guess hack job might be the wrong word for it. I meant it more as a massive patchwork of speed hacks and plugins just to get everything running the way it does. Many games require their own settings within the pile of different options to get things playing correctly. Compare it to the Dolphin emulator which just "feels" like a much more elegant emulator. I certainly didn't mean for it to insinuate they are dumb asses at all. The fact they have it running so well at all is amazing but it can be done better and one day will be. It's like how ZSnes used to be the go to SNES emulator for a long time but Snes9X and BSnes / Higan absolutely crush nowadays.

It is possible to see PS2 in Retroarch one day but not anytime soon since the only PS2 emulator really worth even talking about is PCSX2 and because of the horrendous patchwork hack job with all the plugins we won't ever see that in Retroacrh. The Retroarch team have even said this. Maybe some day we will have a better written PS2 emulator and incorporated into RA. Now don't get me wrong I fully appreciate what the PCSX2 does and I am more than happy it exists but it really is a hack job and not very accurate. Hopefully Retroarch gets their Dreamcast and Saturn emulation quality up sometime soon, the stand alone alternatives are not without their issues but I am not holding my breath for it to be on par any time soon.

Damn that looks uncomfortable to hold on to. I have one of the Ms Pac-Man plug and plays from years ago.

The one truly unique game on the Jag that actually is a good game if you can get past the terribly dated graphics is Alien vs Predator. For anyone who has never played it or know anything about it, from screenshots it looks like any other generic first person shooter clone of the era. It's uniqueness comes in the fact that you can play as a marine, alien or predator and they each play completely different from one another. The marine plays as a typical first person shooter. The predator can go into stealth mode and you start off with only your claw weapon. You have to earn honor points by killing people while killing while not in stealth mode. As you earn honor points you unlock your other weapons like the spear, the throwing disk and the shoulder cannon. If you kill while stealth you lose honor points and you can lose access to weapons you unlocked if you go below the point requirement to have those weapons. The alien essentially has unlimited lives. You make cocoons and you can have up to 3 cocoons, each acting sort of like a checkpoint. When you get killed you come back starting at the oldest cocoon. You don't have to re clear anything you have done but you do want to keep your cocoons rolling so if you do die you don't have to go back too far and try and remember how to get through the map. This game was never ported and all the other AvP games that came after do not have any of the unique qualities of this game. It probably is the best game on the system if the games graphics don't give you motion sickness while trying to play it, lol. For a good laugh load up Kasumi Ninja just to see what is arguably the worst fighting game ever made. It's a toss up between that and Way of the Warrior on the 3DO. These 2 fighting games are so bad they make Time Killers look great.

My bitterness towards the Jag stems from the fact I actually owned one back in the day :( I wish it had good games but it sadly did not. Though I guess AVP was decent for its time but it has aged terribly, Tempest 2000 was great but it has ports to the Playstation and Saturn.

Not to sound like a dick but the Jaguar itself is not worth the time and energy, the games are all either terrible or better ports exist elsewhere on better emulators / systems.

The CD will require a bios file. Are there even any Jag CD emulators out there ?

Yeah I only have 3 games, Tempest 2000, Defender 2000 and Rayman. Of the 3 Rayman doesn't work. I am in the process of grabbing the set and I will do some extra testing. If you do get working roms and want to play be sure to turn on "Fast Blitter" or else your games will probably run too slow. This system is a curse I tell you.

No Bios needed according to their Wiki, http://wiki.libretro.com/index.php?title=Virtual_Jaguar It can be a funky emulator though and you could have bad rom dumps.

Ok so I am fiddling around a bit more with this and I still cannot seem to figure what is going on here. For example here I am trying to scrape and import the metadata for the game "Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa" which is in the database http://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/details/40337 When I click the Search for Metadata the results in the dropdown menu are for the Famicom version and a Wiki entry that has no images. The Famicom entry obviously pulls the box art for the Famicom version which is not the same as the Disk System art. Since there is in fact an entry for the FDS version I would expect that to be one of the drop down menu choices after click the search button. My best guess from an outsider perspective is that for whatever reason Launchbox is not able to pull data from the "Nintendo Famicom Disk System" as a platform, just guessing here though. Edit: Another game, Bishoujo Control (that's how it is spelled in my LB) which is also in the database http://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/details/40333 just returns a "No games were found with the specified title." message.

Some of the file naming might be off a little bit no more off than any of my other systems. I will mess with it more in a little while. I did the re-scrape and it found nothing matching.

I imported the Famicom Disk System game collection and none of the data imported at all. I checked my platform and it is set to "Nintendo Famicom Disk System". At first I thought maybe there was nothing in the database for it so I checked the website and there is a database for it. I noticed there is no where near a full set of data and art at all but still the import should have found some of it but it found nothing. Is there something I am missing here ? This is the first time I have seen a zero art and data import for anything.

Good luck.

Ok, here you go. And here is a link to the original thread over on the arcadecontrols.com forums. The classics list is still being tested and finalized so once that is done all the lists should be done barring errors or other problems. http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,149708.msg1563036.html#msg1563036 This list is based on the Mame 170 rom set and I cannot remember if it is for the split set or merged set of roms. The user Badmouth over there on that forum board deserves all the credit for compiling this list.

Yeah I dumped the nightly exe in with the current 1.3.4 testing folder. I can load the shader while in Retroarch but if I try and load game through Launchbox with that shader a the active shader in the core config it just crashes RA. If I delete the config the game runs fine and I can load the shader while in RA again but again it will crash when I leave and try and load another game of using the same core.

I don't know if they made any changes on the audio side of things with 1.3.4 but it seems they made some improvements on the audio latency. I used to be able to only go as low as 32 ms on most systems and occasionally down to 24 ms, 16 was always a no go zone without getting massive sound distortion and crackling. But now it seems that 16 ms is doable and no distortion at all that I have come across yet, more testing needs to be done. Hopefully one day they will be able to implement a way to come close to matching GrooveyMame + Asio4all and its 0.1 ms audio latency. Makes me sad that CG shaders are so broken right now though. I cannot use my Royale-Kurozumi edit without making RA crash on start up. So for now in 1.3.4 I am using Hyllian-Multipass which looks pretty good.

Yeah I tried carrying over my old config and shader files but that caused some issues. I don't know if this is the problem or not but I think they made some fairly big changes in 1.3.4 and some of the files just don't carry over so easily. The shaders issue seems to be a known problem, http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5554 I managed to solve the save file problem by manually editing the retroarch.cfg file and making the following lines: savefile_directory = "default" savestate_directory = "default" This forces Retroarch to use the game roms location for the save files again. The same lines in the core specific config would have to be changed as well if a core config file was made before the default config was edited. I don't think that version 1.3.4 is riddled with bugs but I ran into a couple of big ones for me personally because of where I like my save files located and the fact I use a custom edited CD based shader. I think the GLSL shaders are fine. I kind of posted this as a reminder to people when they do want to update their emulators to do some testing first to make sure the new version is going to work the way they want and not destroy hours of configuring

Just a word of warning to anyone using an older build of Retroarch and thinking of making the upgrade to 1.3.4. Do not overwrite your older working version. Make a new folder for 1.3.4 and play around with it before hand. I have been messing around with 1.3.4 now for the last couple of hours and it has some bugs in it that for me make it near unusable as it sits right now. I am not saying the build is a total mess, I am only saying be very careful with it. The CG_Shaders menu is broken, as well as CG_Shaders loading in general though it can be somewhat worked around. They changed where it stores the games save files by default so if you load a game expecting your save file to be there it may not be. I have my older version set to store the save files in the same folder as the game itself and this newer version wants to store them in the saves folder in the RA install folder. Have not figured out yet how to get it back to the way I want it. Still gonna work on things some more to see if I can sort out some of these issues.

Yeah it's not quite done yet but it is close enough for now at least. Then again I don't think anything involving emulation is truly ever done, lol. On a side note for anyone interested there is a great sub forum over there for GrooveyMame which I highly recommend as the Mame build of choice. It's mainly designed for people running proper CRT displays but there are also enhancements in it that even modern non CRT display users can take advantage. It's the Mame I use in my Launchbox setup and I love it. If you are using a dedicated setup for your Mame you cannot go wrong with GroovyMame + Asio4all sound drivers. 0.1 millisecond audio latency is just plain awesome.

For possible no sound fix look in the Driver menu and change the audio setting. It should be Xaudio but you may or may not need something else. Also look in the Audio menu and make sure Audio Enable is set to "On", Audio Mute is set to "Off" and the Audio Volume Level (dB) is set to 0.0 which is the proper volume, you may have set it to a negative value at some point. For possible speed fix enable Vsync in the Video settings, this isn't an ideal fix however and should only be enabled if you have really bad screen tearing. You can also go into the Frame Throttle menu and set Maximum Run Speed to 1.0x, also turn Throttle Menu Framerate to "On" otherwise your Retroarch menu could be too fast. This may or may not work. I know I have had this issue of games running super fast before but I cannot remember how I fixed it. If these don't fix your issues you can try the Retroarch forums, they are generally very helpful and friendly.

First off let me state that this is not my list / lists at all. I am merely posting this to direct people to some very good and time consuming work done by someone else. I have been following this series of posts over on the arcadecontrols.com forums for a while and it's now to a point that it's near completion enough to point some people new to Mame and all the great arcade games. Basically a guy over there has been polling and compiling a list of each type of game into the best games that are actually worth playing without all the chaff that really isn't that good. So if you are looking at putting together a streamlined playlist of games without going through each and every game yourself to see what you like and don't like head on over to the thread http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,149708.msg1563036.html#msg1563036. He has included batch files to copy out the necessary roms from your collection but they may or may not work with your exact sets so be careful and read his info over there. It's at least a good starting point for people who are maybe new to the arcade classics and want a good guide on what to check out.

They will still be in tact. Launchbox is only a front end for launching the games. You still need to configure each emulator on it's own. You are good to go the way you want.