Emulator Settings for All Platforms

[spycat]

Hi mrmojoz I'm not sure if you can do this with WinKawaks running as an emulator in LaunchBox. Maybe with a script, but I don't know how to do this. What you can do is to use WinKawaks as an application (Use An Emulator To Play This Game box empty), and set the Application Path to the WinKawaks executable and set the Application Command Line Parameters box to the game romname (less extension) followed by the fullscreen switch - see image 1 below for an example. This will initialise the game in a window and then go to fullscreen. If you get desktop rubbish at screen bottom, you can fix this by changing the Correct Full Screen Setting to Stretch To Full Screen (Video tab within the emulator GUI). While this will let you launch games in fullscreen, WinKawaks seems to have an on-going issue when exiting fullscreen to close a game. I use Winkawaks in emulation mode with the emulator's Zoom Window set to open games in fullscreen windowed view.

[JJLR]

How to run Sammy Atomiswave games with Demul 07a ?

[Cebion]

SentaiBrad said

thunderchild said When you try to launch a game using Applewin, only the program pops up and then you have to manually select the game you want to load. Does anyone know how to fix this, or know of a better Apple II emulator for windows?

As for emulators we know work with LaunchBox and can emulate AppleII? http://www.mess.org/ As for trying to get this emulator to run: I did a bit of research and it seems this emulator has a few issues with getting to autorun from outside of the emulator. I did find a webpage that showed how to get it to run from a .bat file, which doesn't really help here unless you point LaunchBox to the .bat file, but you might be able to adapt the method to here and find proper command like arguments if the program accepts them. http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Comp/comp.emulators.apple2/2005-12/msg00057.html

They fixed the command line Issues in 1.25.04 https://github.com/AppleWin/AppleWin/releases/download/v1.25.0.4/AppleWin1.25.0.4.zip Add command lines -f -d1 in Launchbox --- For Sharp X68000 using MESS the command line option is x68000 -flop1 Works good =)

[mevlooo]

can anybody send me the link please?

[Cebion]

mevlooo said can anybody send me the link please?

The link for what?

[sagaopc]

anyone knows how to emulate Atari ST on retroarch? or in any emulator?

[DOS76]

I got it working in Steem but I haven't messed with it since the first day I set it up. I know I had issues with my BIOS at first it was sort of a pain for not that great of a reward at least as a first impression.

[weltall]

Hello there everyone. I love this list and love even more how LaunchBox suggests to the user a good Emulator choice, trying to help them with setting up the frontend even more. I do not know if this is still updated (I am guessing not), since last post on here seem to be 3 months ago, but if people use these as reference, I thought I would post some things here. Before though suggesting stuff, I want to ask about MESS. Is it suggested because it is better than MAME? With Launchbox's suggestion I am using MAME, getting myself ready to eventually use RetroArch for obscure or older consoles. Anyway, I want to share some personal choices, even though I am not really knowledgeable if there is a need to use a command line. I play everything windowed and only if I want at the moment to play fullscreen, I switch it. LaunchBox just seems to work out of the box with most emulators.. so awesome. Anyway first I want to suggest BGB (http://bgb.bircd.org/) for Gameboy Monochrome and Color. It might not have the greatness of VBA, but after a lot of testing, it seems that VBA (At least the latest M edition) ends up being glitchy and non working with some older game boy monochrome and color games. It might have been like me finding an exception, but the sure is that the games that were kind of glitchy with VBA, worked fine on BGB. Although, even if you do not count that, BGB has something even more awesome for me. For monochrome games, it lets you choose different color schemes. It has a green/black like the original old fat game boy, a couple of different black/white ones, the awesome warmed Super Gameboy color scheme and a couple of other ones, giving the option to the user to use what colors make his eyes feel more happy. On top of that, it has the ability to use the Super Game Boy borders, which at least to me have a high nostalgia factor. Finally it let's the user choose a combination of Super Game Boy border, but with Game Boy Color ... well colors XD. In the past when you chose borders, you would be forced to use the SGB color scheme, but with that option you use the best of both worlds. Another one I was to suggest is xBRZ (https://sourceforge.net/projects/xbrz/files/?source=navbar) . Well, this is not so much an emulator, as much a video filter for emulators. xBRZ is one of the best filters I have ever seen and I found it out while looking for custom filters for Snes9x. Like it advertises, it is the High Quality filter offered by emulators, but it actually makes the picture looks better and it seems to be more easy on resources. I use their version of the emulators they offer and I just love how everything looks so much better and if anything, especially on older games, they look as if they were drawn to look smooth and not just filtered from pixels to a smoother state. In their maine page they offer some picture comparisons, which after playing a handful of hours, I can tell that they are not lying about. If anything, on Snes9x after using the xBRZ, I even turned off the bilinear extra filtering, since it did not feel needed. That boosted the game FPS even more. For the NEC consoles, I see Magic Engine suggested, which for the CD is the only choice. I never used myself Magic Engine, since is offered as a demo version, but what I use is Mednafen (http://mednafen.fobby.net/). I always avoid Mednafen, because it does not have a UI and I have never really had the need to go for it, since for the consoles I would emulate, there were other choices. For NEC TurboGrafx-CD though, that was the only option I found that worked out of the box. Without LaunchBox, all the user needs to do is to drag the cue/bin/iso file on Mednafen and the game starts. If you hit F1, it brings up all the choices the user has to customize Mednafen and if anything all I used was Alt+Shift+1, which lets your customize the Player 1 controller. It was a bit weird it would ask me to push the button twice, to confirm I pressed it right, but it was really easy. For TurboGrafx-16 if I want a UI I use Ootake(http://www.ouma.jp/ootake/). I have to admit though, a normal user would be baffled with it. The main site is in Japanese, so it might be a bit hard to find the Emulator. What is more, in order to use zipped files with it, it requires the user to separately download an installer file, that includes an unzip32.dll(http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=06137316739152033050) that works with Ootake and then place the dll in the emulator directory. The reason I spent though time trying to find it, is because the development is active and by active I mean their last update right now is from 29/4 of this year. Definitelly fresh >.> The UI itself is not very good looking, but at least the emulation looks great with it. The UI has English, along with.. well whatever the other language is. For GBA you mention VBA, but not VBA-M. Is there a reason for that? Although I might be asking a bit too late, I still do wonder XD Now to time talk agaisnt Mednafen , lol. For Virtual Boy I use VBjin (https://code.google.com/archive/p/vbjin/). It combines the PCEjin emulator with the mednafen.9, giving a really awesome and great emulator. One thing I love from this Emulator, is the ability to use anaglyph glasses. Because the games are monochrome, awesomely enough anaglyph glasses actually work really well with it. There are no color for the glasses to mess up and it anything it gave me a nice 3D (lol well kinda) experience, enough to make me smile while I was playing. There is even an Oculus Rift version, where you can use it with these new VR glasses that are around. Personally I do not have these, so I can't say how well it works. Of course it does have the option to either play the left or right screen or use a combination of them, since I am guessing most people will not use anaglyph glasses like me. There is one thing I want to say for Kega Fusion. At least here as a suggestion, it would be nice for the Sega CD to suggest the older 3.63 version. 3.64 seems to have problems and glitches with Sega CD emulation and at times it can be sever. One example I can think is "Rise of the Dragon". If anything, on 3.64 it just would not start, which is why I looked around and found people mentioning that 3.64 introduced some glitches to the Sega CD emulation.

[DOS76]

I would definitely recommend RetroArch for any and all TG16/CD games there isn't anything better except Mednafen but the Mednafen core is what is used by RA so you get a UI and you get Mednafen (somewhat) as your emulator. Really for all of your suggestions I would just say use RA it is amazing and once you get over the small learning curve there is nothing better than it. It plays so many systems well, Most controllers are autoconfiged and one of the best features I know of is that you can launch your games and then start your controller and it is recognized a feat which is hard to come by with most stand alone emulators.

[orac31]

I hated ra at first it was unfriendly and a pain to use now I use it for many of my systems as dos76 says now it has the ui its a great emu. I took the time setting it up and having all the right files in the system folder zipped it up for whenever I need it. tho I don't use the mane or ps1 core

[weltall]

I have used RA in the past, before I learned about LaunchBox. I did it back then because RetroArch actually had the ability to use filters along with Emulators that natively did not have that. I am not mentioning RA, because it can be quite intimidating for people (to me it always felt like I am on a console, when using that). I am eventually going to switch to RA for most of the older consoles, since I definitely prefer 1 Emulator with many cores, opposed to many emulators. Not only that, but it is more reassuring to use RA, since you don't have to worry if every single sollitary emulator you have for any system got updated, since RetroArch is spoiling you by taking care of these things. But Emulators like the xBRZ variants, are sadly not part of it (yet >.>). But if anything, there are some emulators, usually for the more known system, that deserve to be stand alone, outside of RA, or just are not included in it yet. One thing I would love to find is a guide on adding cores to RA, if it is not included it it's list. I think last time I looked at it, which was before finding out Launchbox (around January) it lacked the Atari 5200 Emulator in it's list (kat5200) even if it had it listed in the site. Sadly I did not know how to add it manually. Whilst, I am trying to find out which console works with which Emulator, and whichever does not have one, I will move it to MAME and hopefully manage to make RA work with MAME.

[FistyDollars]

If you're looking for a solid TG16/CD emulator but don't want to deal with the hassle of RetroArch I'd recommend checking out BizHawk, it's got a TG16 emulator in it that in many ways is better than even Mednafen, and is fairly easy to use (you can just ignore all the TAS stuff in it.) I actually use it as my primary emulator for quite a few systems, it's worth checking out.

[DOS76]

If you go to the tutorial links in the heading of the website Brad has a lot of great tutorials that will teach you how to get everything nice in RetroArch. I use quiet a few standalone's when they are necessary (Atari 5200, Sega Model 2 & 3, MAME, PS1, PS2, Colecovision, Gamecube and Wii) but wish most of them had RetroArch cores.

[weltall]

FistyDollars Like I mentined for TurboGrafx-16 I use Ootake. I like it that it is updated a lot and it works in conjunction with LaunchBox. I use Mednafen for the TurboGrafx-CD, but not yet with RA. I will check it out though for sure, since I always like testing new things. I never heard of BizHawk before. I am also not sure what TAS are. Does BizHawk support applying filters on all the consoles it uses? This was the reason I loved RetroArch, since sadly on TFT monitors/tvs filters are needed for older games. If BizHawk can apply xBR filter on it's emulators, I will definitely like it. @DOS76 Yeah I have seen tutorials for it, but it was before even getting here. It was after I found about LauncBox and I was looking for tutorials that I have seen a handful of them on Youtube :) There is a possibility to use MAME as a core with RetroArch, although to be honest I would prefer to use HqMAME that uses again xBRZ.

[Lordmonkus]

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.

[weltall]

<.< ... I have been calling them filters, have I not? I meant shaders, which is indeed the reason in the past I forced myself to learn RetroArch's UI. Sorry I always call them filters.

[Lordmonkus]

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.

[SentaiBrad]

I am going to go through and update our Default Emulator list this week. It's safe to say we whole heartedly suggest RetroArch here, and we arrived to that decision on our own. A lot of my tutorials show case RA instead of the standalone's. What we recommend and the default RA command line parameters will be changing soon though. mGBA for the GameBoy line for example needs to replace VBA, and tons of others.

[Lordmonkus]

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.

[SentaiBrad]

I am going to suggest two for consoles that have RetroArch support. I fully recommend RA obviously, but I want to include stand alone's for users who are... more stubborn. As for mGBA in RetroArch: In RetroArch I use mGBA (or VBA-M... I honestly can't remember right this second) for GBA and Gambatte for GameBoy and GameBoy Color. I did a tutorial on this.