Lordmonkus

Looks good. Are you planning on going with an SLI setup on your graphics ? If not why go with an 850w power supply ? Check this tower out. http://www.ncixus.com/products/?sku=75044&vpn=FD-CA-DEF-R4-BL&manufacture=Fractal%20Design&promoid=1130 I have this one and it was an absolute pleasure to build in with all the room to work and it is so nice and quiet.

Like I said one of those people :P Just teasing lol.

Yeah it's a clean upscale if that's your preference and it does that job excellent. But like I said up in my long winded post the original art work was done with the CRT characteristics taken into account as part of how the final look of the sprites was supposed to look. The scanlines and shadowmasks were meant to give the illusion of smoothness and blending of colours that weren't actually in the sprites themselves. The problem with a lot of scanline filters and shaders though is that they are either just simple basic scanlines which are just simple black lines which don't do anything but the black lines or they are a crappily done shader and darken the overall image which is bad too. The best CRT shaders are Hyllian which is good on lower end systems and Royale which is very hardware dependent and requires a higher resolution monitor and properly colour calibrated otherwise it looks terrible.

SentaiBrad said then on 2D games I use RetroArch's Pixellate Shader. It gives me bold lines and I can see the beautiful Pixel Art. It's the equivalent of turning up the internal resolution on PCSX2 or PPSSPP. You're one of "those" people :P I know it's all about personal preference and if that is what you like that is fine but I just cannot tolerate that pixellate shader at all. To me it doesn't look anything like cranking up the internal resolution on a 3D game and looks more like blowing up a jpg picture in photoshop and seeing all the giant pixels in all their jagged glory. I suppose it could worse though, you could be one of those people that try and emulate the look of an old 70s or 80s TV with RF hookup and all the fuzziness and crap.

Are you going to recommend the stand alone mGBA or the RA mGBA core ? My experience with GBA is very limited and I only use the RA mGBA core and have had no issues with it. No clue if there are better options when it comes to the GBA at all.

Hehe yeah there is a difference. Filters tend to just be overlays over the game image and that is what most emulators use like generic scanlines. Shaders work on more low level in the rendering and requires a decent GPU depending on the shader itself. To answer your question above though, Bizhawk does have some very basic filters like raw scanline and stuff but not the full blown shader effects like RA.

I have tried BizHawk in the past and it is interesting and once day could be the best but right now it simply is not any better than Retroarch at all other than maybe a slightly simpler to use UI. You still need to have the working bios files in the right place and BizHawk does have a nice window to tell you if you have the correct bios before you even try a game. But in the end BizHawks emulation is no better and no worse than Retroarch. They are both essentially working off of the same open source cores. For me and I am sure for a lot of other people too Retroarch has 2 extremely compelling reasons to use it, shaders and easy to manage save states.

If you simply ran the game in its native 240 resolution on a modern 1080 display without scanline shaders or adding lines through upscaling your would end up with a very tiny picture on your screen. So to answer your question about any emulators doing this and the answer is yes. Retroarch will do it by setting the integer scaling to on and reducing it to 1x but you will be playing on a tiny screen. Most every other emulator out there will stretch the image to fill a display whether it is a full 16:9 or top to bottom only with the proper aspect ratio. What settings and shaders people choose to use is all about personal preference and vary a lot which is why Retroarch has so many choices when you look in the shaders folder. Some people like the full stretched look to fill their full 16:9 ration screen, this distorts the image though. Some people prefer to keep the same aspect ration but fill the screen top to bottom with the downside of extra line being added in because 240 does not fit evenly into 1080 so the emulator will add line in there that do not belong and you will get some stretched looking pixels. Other people will use the integer scaling option which will eliminate the unnecessary stretching but does leave you with bars across the top and bottom. What I said above doesn't get into the shaders at all. When you get into the shaders now you get into the silly amount of options. Some people like to use the "smoothing" shaders such as the xBR shaders. The first time I saw this effect I thought it looked really cool but it got annoying to me really fast. While it looks very cool on extremely cartoonish looking games such as Mario and Zelda it looks really bad on more complex pixel art games such as Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger. Then you move into the CRT shaders which is where my personal preference lies. These shaders do their best to emulate the look of a proper CRT by breaking up the upscaling with artificial scanlines (and other effects depending on the shader itself). When you simply upscale an image on a modern display you are left with a very harsh picture which is not how the old school games looked on an old CRT TV. Some people like that look but many people like myself find it very distracting and not how the game was intended to look. When the artists on these old games designed the art they took into account the scanlines and the way the art would actually look on a TV and in essence used these scanlines and shadow masks to hide imperfections and give the appearance of more complicated art work. The one big downside to CRT shaders right now however is that most of them are designed to be on higher than 1080 resolution screens. 1080 just is not quite enough pixels to do the job the way it should be done. It can still look very good on a 1080 screen but it needs to have the integer scaling option turned on in Retroarch if you are using RA. If you don't have integer scaling on because of the uneven math of 1080 / 240 it can cause weirdness in the final output. If you have a 1440 display of better yet a 4k then the higher end CRT shaders such as CRT-Royale really starts to shine and look phenomenal. I recently upgraded to a 1440 monitor and 240 divides better into 1440 than 1080 and the pixel density is much better at showing off the effect of the shader. Supposedly it looks even better at 4k. I have done a lot of reading up on this subject over the last few months and even the hardcore purists are starting to come around on the modern displays. There is a lot of good reading over on the shmups forum boards about this stuff and they even agree that the newer high end gaming 4k low latency displays are pretty darn close to being equal to a good CRT. The pixel density is high enough to replicate the effect of a CRT and the response time and input latency are getting low enough to be imperceptible when compared to a CRT. Good quality CRTs are getting more difficult to find as they break down and are thrown away though some can be found still they will break down eventually. And the high quality PVM and BVMs are getting extremely difficult to find and expensive if you do find one but then you also have the added expense of putting out an image to that display through a specialized card for your PC or getting your original console modded for RGB. Bottom line is you either spend the money on real hardware and CRTs and console modding or buy a nice high end gaming monitor. I chose the high end gaming monitor ($1000 Canadian) and it was well worth the investment. Wow, this ended up being longer than planned lol.

It was either Pitfall 2 or Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600 when I was like 9 or 10 years old. These were the first games I played that actually had an end to the game.

Childhood ? I'm getting more scarred by games now in my old age. I'm looking at you Souls series games, so muc swearing at the TV.

SentaiBrad said Bsnes Balanced is also just as great, it's what I use and I've never had a problem with it. But to get perfect emulation there are some drawbacks. Speed hacks are just a necessity early on, not to mention Higan is still being developed. I don't think Higan ever differentiates accuracy vs balanced anymore. Emulation wise you should be great though. Correct, Higan is just all one now, no separated versions (performance, balanced and accuracy) it's all accuracy now, and it does other stuff like NES, GB and WonderSwan.

Should be fine, if it isn't 100% and you need a tiny bit more speed then the balanced core is available and is still better than anything else out there in Snes emulation and can do the MSU-1 stuff as well.

BSnes accuracy or Higan which is what the stand alone is called now by the author Byuu is pretty CPU intensive, basically it requires 3 ghz to run everything 100% speed. The video card only comes in to the equation when you start adding in shaders.

bSnes is by far the most accurate emulator out there. ZSnes' advantage is speed on very old computers. The bSnes accuracy core is 100% according to the libretro wiki. link If your system is not able to handle it then the balanced is a very good alternative with a very high accuracy %. The other extremely nice feature of bSnes is the ability to play the MSU-1 sound patched games so you can have CD quality audio in your SNES games (approx a dozen or so games have been done).

There is no bios files for the CPS stuff like the NeoGeo but the Qsound files may be needed like Mame requires. @Hydro May I recommend you try using the fb_alpha_libretro.dll core. I use this single core to handle all my NeoGeo, CPS-1, 2 and 3 games. One core to run all of them just keeps things neat and tidy and I have not run into any issues whatsoever with it yet. Edit: I just wanted to add for anyone thinking of using Retroarch for CPS-3 games. If you load a game and get a "No CD-Rom" message just bring up the Retroarch menu with the F1 key or Windows button on the controller and in the quick menu Restart Content. It will reset the game and won't give the "No CD-Rom" message. Not sure how other emulators handle those games. I only noticed this with Red Earth / Warzard.

My Launchbox game total is 4534 (small by many peoples standards) games but no way I have tested every single game. When it comes to systems like the NES, SMS, SNES, Genesis and Atari 2600 it is far easier just to grab and import entire sets than it is to try and think of and get each and every single game and test as you import. My Mame and other arcade games like NeoGeo and the Capcom CPS games are all individually tested since that collection is not that big. I only import the good Mame games after trying them out using MameUI first. What I do is import the set and then go through and make sure that all the games have at least the proper box art and stuff and then I will skim through and test the games I see that actually are interesting. I will play the games I know I like to make sure they work and I will try out some obscure game I never heard of just to see what it is, but I wont waste time testing Barbie or kids games but it is just easier to leave them in the collection. This is still fairly time consuming though. It would be much more difficult and time consuming to do it all for the PS and PS2 games where the libraries are enormous.

Yes, you need to test them all to see if they all work. It's all part of building your emulation collection, especially if you are one of the "must have it all" types of people.

Yay, I helped :P

Do you have all 3 bios files ? scph1001, scph5500 and scph5502 are the 3 you need, one of them is just another version but renamed but I forget which one exactly. Are your cue sheets set up correctly matching the bin the bin file name ? (I trust you but im just asking) I am trying to think what would cause a black screen, usually it either works or crashes and the 3 main causes of things not working are wrong bios or wrong folder path or bad rips of the game. Check out my covering PS, Sega CD and TG CD systems and getting all 3 setup. Be sure and check the video description for extras if you need them. https://youtu.be/jXSrVEU7cWc

It really is worth the effort for many reasons. Brad as done guides on getting up and running and several of us here on the forums can help out with any questions you may have. Also if you check the link to my blog in my forum sig scroll down and I got a guide there for some of the different general video settings.

Daytona is best emulated using NullDC and the Dreamcast port or the Playstation store port, not sure if there's an Xbox live port or not.

Which games specifically does it not work for ? I have never had the issue you are describing.

Input (General) > Other Controls Setting your keys for Coin and Start in there should set it for all games it does for me atleast.

Fusion was and still is a very good emulator but it has been surpassed by the Genesis GX core in Retroarch which handles SMS, Genesis and Sega CD games. It just doesn't do 32X games but PicoDrive handles that. Genesis GX is 100% or very damn close to it in terms of accuracy and is the only was to play PierSolar outside of MESS which is just awful to try and setup. I highly recommend making the switch as Retroarch is much better in many ways for the systems it supports outside of a couple of exceptions. RA handles keybinding better, it handles frontends better, it has by far the best shaders to get your old games looking just right for your personal tastes, save state management is better and the best reason to use RA over all else is the Hard GPU Sync option to reduce input lag drastically. Like I said, Fusion was and still is a very good emulator on its own but if you intend on using a frontend Retroarch is going to make your life so much easier and you don't lose any features of Fusion besides 32X.

Mame would be my second choice. RA is always gonna be my first choice for anything I can use it for other than a select few cores like PSP, Dreamcast, Saturn and non FBA arcade stuff. The reasons I stated above make it better than anything else out there.