Lordmonkus

There is definitely a lot truth to that, the more expensive the system the less likely it is to sell and in turn less games get released for it. At the same time people do not like to have to buy add ons for their systems they already paid for. The Turbo Grafx itself did ok here in North America, not great but ok. It did amazingly well in Japan as the PC Engine. The CD add on itself did not do so well in North America and yeah Rondo of Blood is arguably one of the best Castlevania games ever made and made the add on worth buying in Japan. If they brought it out over here maybe it would have sold more CD units. The Sega CD and 32X are in a similar situation. People just did not want to pay for such a marginal upgrade in performance. Expensive price tags do hurt system sales, look at the Playstation 3 as prime example. Amazing system but until the price got down to a reasonable level it suffered in sales. The Playstation crushed the Saturn mainly due to its price, there were other factors but price was the key. The NeoGeo was a double curse, expensive system and games that cost as much as other systems on their own. Crazily enough though that system actually had the longest lifespan of just just about any system out there though that is partly due to SNKs arcade division. Sometimes price alone isn't the deciding factor though because based on price the Dreamcast should have beaten the PS2 but Sega burnt all of its good will and reputation in the gaming industry with the 32X and Saturn and were being run by idiots at the time and they just couldn't hold on. For a system to be successful it needs to meet certain criteria. It needs to be competitively priced, have the power to compete on graphic quality and have the backing of 3rd party devs. Obviously these aren't the only factors but these are the big keys to being a successful system. Sometimes timing and just plain having that one "MUST HAVE" game is enough to push sales just enough to make the system and big enough seller to bring the 3rd parties.

The TG CD games that really stand out IMO is obviously Castlevania Rondo of Blood and after that the list probably about as short as the Sega CD. Cho Aniki, Cotton, Gate of Thunder, Lords of Thunder, Sapphire, Rayxanber III, R-Type (for the audio), Spriggan and that's pretty much it for me though Dungeon Explorer II and Ys are pretty good. The 3DO and CD-I are definitely way better for FMV games if that's your thing, they had much better video quality. The 3DO definitely had the better games library than the CD-I but that's not saying much. The CD-I was an awful mess with no support. The 3DO at least had by far the best home port of Street Fighter for the time. Samurai Showdown was excellent, Road Rash and Fifa were also very good but got ports to the PS and Saturn. After those games there was maybe a couple more like Return Fire and Star Control II but the list is very short. In other words aside from a couple of exclusives the best games were available elsewhere and the rest were trash. The crazy thing is that one of the worst games ever made for any system, Way of the Warrior was for the 3DO and Naughty Dog made it. How's that for a mind trip ? LOL.

The Sega CD really was awful (I owned one when it was new) outside a handful of games. Android Assault, Keio Flying Squadron, Popful Mail, Sonic CD, Snatcher and the Lunar games are the highlights with a couple of others that aren't necessarily awful but nothing earth shattering or you couldn't get elsewhere. The Lunar remakes on the PS are actually better. As bad as the Sega CD was it was still far better than the 32X, 3DO and Atari Jaguar (also systems I owned when they were new) Yes I am allowed to say these systems really were that bad since I did buy them new back in the day damnit.

It's very much standard practice across all emulation discussion forums to not talk about where to get roms. You have to be hard asses about it.

The only reason I suggested looking into making the switch to proper CUE and BINs is for future proofing your collection. Some day you may decide to make the switch in emulator and it may not support the mp3 / ogg formats. Or you may decide you wish to actually get a real Sega CD and you can't afford the $300+ or find certain games you may have in your collection. You could then burn them and play them. Fusion a very excellent emulator Like I said above. I believe it is the best 32X emulator out there and only up until recently did Genesis GX pass it in terms of overall quality but it's very close just like how ePSXe 2 and Mednafen PSX are neck and neck now. Edit: Rom laws are like the marijuana laws in Canada, illegal but unenforced for personal use but if you are a dealer you will get in trouble.

I think you misunderstood me, I would never post publicly where to get games but if someone sent me a private message I would respond in private. If that is not allowed please tell me and I won't do that either. Don't want to get anyone in trouble. Rom legality is dependent upon your countries copyright laws. You do need to own a legit copy and you are legally entitled to have a backup copy for yourself. Again this is dependent upon your countries laws. The practical reality is that no one will go after you unless you are profiting from roms or distributing them. The sites that do host and distribute them are set up in countries that don't care for copyright laws and they have a server host that will just ignore any DMCA claims.

Not horrifyingly priced either considering what it is I was expecting it to be much closer to the 1000$ price.

Bios files are the one thing in emulation you cannot debate when it comes to legality. Emulators themselves are perfectly legal, roms are legal as long as you own an actual copy of the game, bios however are only legal if you dump them yourself and because of this distributing them is just opening yourself up to way too many possible legal issues. This is why they are so annoying and finding the right ones can be a pain in the ass due to vagueness. It's just something that has to be dealt with. The following stuff I will say is based purely on what I have read on the interwebs and I am in no position to say whether or not it is true or not. I will say though from my experience I believe to be true or at least very close to it. Picodrive is (again from what I have read) a decent emulator but does have flaws, especially in its 32X emulation. The Kega Fusion is a very good emulator and it's 32X emulation is extremely good, probably the best out there. It does however have some issues with frontends and exiting out of. Genesis GX is supposedly 100% accurate (or extremely close to it) for its Genesis and Master System (Game Gear is just a shrunk down SMS). CD based games distributed with MP3 and OGG audio files are rips and are not considered proper dumps and the audio quality can and often is of lower quality. Proper CUE and BIN dumps are pretty much guaranteed to be fully working and full quality audio. I highly recommend obtaining proper dumps, it will save you headaches in the long run. If you need some help getting proper dumps send me a private message and I will point you in the right direction (unless Brad tells me I am not allowed to do that).

Hopefully I can help you with your Sega CD issues. Check my video tutorial in my signature. It covers more than the Sega CD but that's ok. Be sure and check the video description for some extra info. I don't know if Retroarch supports separate ogg and mp3 audio. All my Sega CD stuff is in cue and bin. For Playstation it does support them as long as the cue sheet is written properly but I cannot say for certain for the Sega CD, never tested it myself. My video does cover the bios, where they go and how they should be named.

Lol, I hear that. The tinkering can get out of hand at times. No kids of my own but I do have a couple of younger cousins, 5 and 10 years old that when they come for a visit they love to hammer away on the X-Arcade stick playing TMNT and Gauntlet. Definitely do yourself a favor and get GrooveyMame and the Asio4all stuff working, you won't be disappointed. The amount of work to get it up and running is very little with huge pay off.

Mame is an amazing emulator and GrooveyMame with Asio4all is just that much better again. Mame handles everything arcade related beautifully and I do hope that one day it handles the console side of things just as well because that Asio stuff is truly amazing. The RA guys said they will never implement Asio because of licensing issues but maybe they will work on something else to do the same thing. Mame just has a ways to go to catch up on the console side of things. Maybe they can clean up their ease of use along the way. Are you using or have you tried GrooveyMame with Asio4all ?

Since Wolf wants to insist on calling me a fanboy I will say that right now there is one compelling reason to use Mame over Retroarch and that is for GrooveyMame and the Asio4all audio. That 0.1 ms audio latency is pretty killer and Retroarch cannot touch it yet. I am only a fanboy of what works best for the task at hand. If and when Mame becomes the better emulation platform I will be happy to make the switch.

Well to be fair, it isn't a real console, even though the Spectrum earlier wasn't one either. It was a one of those hybrid pseudo consoles, a dumbed down pc if you will. It was made by a company that everyone thinks just shits gold ;)

I cheated so I wont give away the answer but OMG I forgot that this thing even existed.

Version 2 really is nice and was a huge improvement in every way. 1.9 ran like crap on my laptop to the point I couldn't use it. Version 2 runs faster, I can actually use shaders with it and it handles loading and closing out through a front end better. I remember kicking out of 1.9 with a front end being an awkward mess. V2 was a huge improvement in emulation quality as well, it put it slightly ahead of Retroarchs Mednafen core ever so slightly.

I don't think there is a way to add the additional app to all the games in one go around unfortunately :( I had to do that for my Saturn games. Have you tried the new version of ePSXe ? It really is a huge improvement over the 1.x versions. It seems to handle loading and unloading much cleaner as well as running better.

Which version of ePSXe are you using ? On my laptop I use the 2.0 version and the "Default Command-Line Parameters" just has -nogui -slooboot -loadbin I notice in your post you don't have the -loadbin, no idea if that is causing your issue. I don't think I had to change anything within ePSXe itself. Edit: Are you loading the bin or cue ? Mine is setup to load the cue.

Good luck with your project.

I'm smelling a troll here in @Wolf_.

Yeah I saw all of that stuff and I understood the general idea of all of what was being said but not having a CRT and the need to actually do any of this stuff I never put in the effort to truly comprehend all of the details. I just spent 1000 bucks on a kick ass gaming monitor and called it a day, lol. The input lag is insanely low and with the CRT-Royale shader those old school games never looked so good.

The root shaders folder is the folder labeled "Shaders" in your Retroarch folder with the exe. Inside the shaders folder is the shaders_cg and shaders_glsl folders along with all the cgp files that created for each core as you load them. On thing you could do to easily cycle through the shaders you like is to load a core and the load a shader preset and this will generate a cgp file in the shaders root folder named something like "genesis_plus_gx_libretro.dll.cgp" as an example. What you could then do is rename that file to something that makes sense to you. Then load up another preset on the core and rename the core.dll.cgp file like you did before to another name. Once you do that several times for the shaders you like and want to be able to cycle through you should have a bunch of cgp files. For example "shader1.cgp", "shader2.cgp" and "shader3.cgp". I hope all that makes sense in text, it makes sense in my head lol.

Wolf_ said For some reason absolutely 0 documentation exists on the entire internet (seriously I've been through multiple pages of google and youtube results and no guides for it exist) This is the precise reason why we told you to use Retroarch, there is no documentation around to get stuff up and running outside of arcade games. There is plenty of documentation for other, better emulators so no one is gonna go through the extreme hassle that is console emulation through Mame. Now having said that I have spent some time getting some stuff running through the stand alone MESS and basically you need the right bios files in the right folder and you need to have the rom paths setup for your console games. Once you get that setup it should be good to go. Keep in mind this is just my experience with getting MESS to do the X68000 stuff. You dont "NEED" to emulate these consoles through Mame, you may want to but there is zero need for it since far better emulators for every one of the systems you mentioned exist.

Another reason to use Mame stand alone for the bulk is to disable the stupid nag screens when you load a rom. You can either use GrooveyMame and disable it in the cfg file or if you look around you can find 3rd party compiled versions of Mame with them disabled.

Well RA does do the NeoGeo and Capcom games as good or better than Mame but for everything else Mame is the better emulator for arcade stuff. The RA Mame core is alright but I prefer to use the stand alone Mame for a few reasons.

Only one simple answer, don't use Mame to emulate anything other than arcade stuff. Use Retroarch for everything in your list except for the CD-I. Sorry if this isn't the answer you are looking for but trust me when I tell you it is by far the best way to emulate all of these systems.