Lordmonkus

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.

You may want to take a look at this forum post over on the Retroarch forums. http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5488 Hopefully this can give you some insight on what you are doing. Unfortunately that's about all the information I can point you to since I have zero experience running Retroarch on a real CRT but I did remember reading about others doing this. Edit: Here is another thread which may or may not have some more information for what you want http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4228&highlight=real

@spacegoathlz I had the exact same CPU before and recently upgraded to 8350 @ 4 GHz and it was a fairly noticeable increase in performance. I wouldn't say it was huge but it was the simplest and cheapest upgrade instead of replacing the motherboard and going with an Intel CPU. The 8350 is enough to drive PCSX2 and it let me bump up the graphics settings of GTA 5 and The Witcher 3. I also have a GTX 970 GPU which helps out a lot and does the does bulk of the work in most modern games.

eric said Q: about the shaders , how does one set up the shaders in RA so you can use the N M hot keys to try the different ones on the fly. also any links to good shader packs? thanks . I'm not sure how to easily cycle through the shaders other than the hotkeys, I have never bothered to try out the feature personally even though I know it is in there. As for shader packs the best packs already come from the Retroacrh guys themselves, just use the updater to update the CG and GLSL shaders. They update it in a fairly regular basis and if you really want to keep up on what they are doing head over to the Retroarch forums http://libretro.com/forums/ and check in the shaders section. Sometimes someone is working on something and you can download WIP versions of packs or individual shaders people are doing. In general though when something gets good enough to use it gets integrated into the official shader packs through the downloader. One place that I found to be an interesting read but no real downloads is the http://shmups.system11.org forums. This is where I found the Kurozumi settings for Royale which I used for a long time. The discussion is a bit technical at times but I found it really helpful to understand some of the inner workings of CRT shaders in particular.

LoL, awesome. Glad you like it now.

Ahh, I was thinking it was just looking for screenshots and box art from thegamesdb in the screenshot, it didn't look like any emumovies stuff in the errors.

Could be the server is down at that moment. I doubt you did anything wrong.

Right click the game you want to rescrape, click the red X in the far right to disassociate that db entry with that game, the re-enter the game name and click search for meta data. A drop down box should appear with all the matching choices, just pick the one you want for it.

It looks like the Retroarch Mednafen PSX core is getting support for PBP files. Just updated the core and I noticed when I loaded the core it says (PBP Test) in the core name. I haven't tried to merge any multi disk games to try this feature out yet. Edit: Ok I just tried this out by merging Lunar - Silver Star Story Complete. I merged the 2 disks into a single PBP file and it loaded just fine in Retroarch. So far though the extent of my test is just to load the image, I have no idea how it would handle the game further in once you get to the point where it would want to switch disks.

GLSL is the more cross platform set of shaders for use on Mac, Linux and phones. The CG is an Nvidia technology and is not meant for other systems other than Windows. According to the Admins over on the Retroarch forums they are working on a new shader architecture based around GL and the new Vulkan api. If you notice the CRT-Pi shader I mentioned above is not available in the CG format since it was written for the Pi specifically and of course that being a Linux based system it has no CG support and no need for CG rewrite. @Walrus13 As I was saying to Brad in another thread the old pixel are was designed from the start with full knowledge of the final output was going to be output to a CRT with the scanlines and shadowmasks. Because of this the artists took those qualities of the display into account and used those very scanlines and shadowmasks to creat illusions of smoothness and more shades of colour than were actually there. Whatever shader people choose is pure personal preference and for me all those other non CRT shaders looked neat to me at first but they grew old and looked better or worse depending on the game. Once I started looking at the good CRT shaders there was no going back. A lot of emulators have a simple scanline effect built in and it does achieve some of its goal to break up the pixels it is a cheap effect and not a very good implementation. When you get into the really good CRT shaders such as Hyllian and Royale these shaders really show what a good high quality CRT TV of the time could look like. Also keep in mind that the higher end CRT shaders such as Royale are not meant for 1080 and under resolutions. The pixel density just isn't there to show the effect properly, you need to have at least 1440 or preferably a 4k display to really see them shine. I made the jump up to 1440 recently and Royale just came alive compared to 1080. Also I am not looking to recreate the crappy old TV and RF connection we grew up with the early 80's. I am looking to recreate the high quality CRTs and RGB signal that were around before the modern displays took over. There is a reason that the real hardware guys are going for the RGB modded systems and Sony Trinitron TVs or dropping 300$ and up on 20" PVMs (other than for zero input lag as well).

For a decent CRT shader for low end systems look in the GLSL shaders under CRT for the CRT-Pi. Its designed for the Raspberry Pi so it's obviously meant for low end systems. I use this on my laptop with crap graphics and it runs well. The Hyllian-Fast is fairly performance friendly as well as far as CRT shaders go. Hyllian is probably the 2nd best CRT shader if Royale is looking like ass for you. Lottes and Geom are ok as well but not as good IMO. I am heavily biased towards the CRT shaders but if I Had to pick the best of anything that is not a CRT I would go with either Pixellate or one of the Scalenx stuff. Everything else is just way too out there and niche for every day use, again IMO. Pixellate is obviously gonna give you the best looking raw pixelart look but scaled up, it has a very sharp and clean look. The scalenx stuff is probably the best of the smoothing shaders if you want that look.