Confessions (and Questions) of an Emulator Newbie

[CadetStimpy]

As I mentioned in some other Thread, I'm a late starter in Emulation, 'cause I had an early Xbox modded with an Xecuter chip. So, there were hundreds of Emulated games from other Consoles built right in, so all I had to do was find the game I wanted to play. The GUI is really cool, too. Unfortunately, it, as well as my Intellivision and NES, don't seem to like my new TV. Rather than fight with those problems, I figured LaunchBox could come to the rescue! Since my first Console was an Intellivision, I decided to start with that. I went with Nostalgia for the Emulator. I found a ROM Set (about 150 games) that seems to have just about every game the Intellivision ever had. Anyway, Questions #1/2: When you import some huge ROM Set, do you test every game? How would you know if any of 'em will work, until you actually launch each game? It doesn't seem feasible to test them all, with the size of some of these sets. Note: The above pictures are Links. P.S. Should this be in the Emulator Forum?

[DOS76]

I don't test them all personally but if I run across one that doesn't work I try to replace it right away. Intellivision is a tough one to start with because I don't really like any of the emulators. One thing for sure is that you need bios files to get Intellivision to work so make sure you have those files or you won't get far.

[Lordmonkus]

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.

[CadetStimpy]

DOS76 said One thing for sure is that you need bios files to get Intellivision to work so make sure you have those files or you won't get far.

Yes, I did get those, and I've been launching the games, but I can't get past the Title Screen on many of them. That's part of it - most of 'em get to the Titled Screen, but many, no further. Doh! 'Course, it may be because I'm not pressing the correct key or button that would allow me to enter the game ('Enter the Game' - the premise of the TV show ReBoot. Back in it's day, it was awesome, IMHO. With villains such as Megabyte and Hexadecimal, how could ya not like it? Graphics were really good for CG on weekly TV back then, too, I thought). Anyway, that'll be another topic. How do I control those games ('cause an original Intellivision had a lot of buttons on it's controllers)?

[fromlostdays]

I don't know of anyone who tests them all besides the emu developers, people on certain ...sharing... sites, and maybe big rom camps like Tosec or No Intro. However, you can be reasonably confident about a set if it has all the correct CRCs. I use a program geared for another front end for CRC checking, but I also think Clrmamepro has a CRC checker? I mean for more than just MAME. I'm not actually sure, but IF you're so inclined, and IF CRC information is in Dat files, you should look up CRLMAMEPRO and the website Dat-O-Matic. Alternately you could get a bonefide Tosec or No-Intro set, as those dudes don't play around. Or you could just not test (most people don't) and just replace any roms you come across. The problem is... most emulators do not have 100% compatibility, and I'd be surprised if older ones like Nostalgia give you a compatibility list. So if you go to launch a rom and it doesn't work, you should try it in another emulator first before tossing the file. Nostalgia, MESS, newer MAME, and RetroArch MAME/MESS cores are the only emulators I know that'll emulate intellivision. Edit: In terms of control its been years since I used Nostalgia, but just open the emulator and look for the control options. I assume you're using a keyboard. I'm pretty sure if you want to use a controller with that emulator you're going to have use Xpadder to Joy2Key to map the keystrokes to the controller buttons.

[CadetStimpy]

lordmonkus said 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.

Really? But don't you have thousands (or was it tens-of-thousands) of games? That's some Gaming integrity there! No 'posing' in LaunchBox with a pretty piece of artwork, that when clicked-on, doesn't do anything. Bravo! But still, the time required must be quite formidable.

[DOS76]

That is my main issue with the emulators that are available they have shitty controller support If you still your controllers I believe there is a a USB adapter that is available

[CadetStimpy]

fromlostdays said [Insert everything fromlostdays said here]

This Emulation stuff is more complicated (for me, anyway) than I realized, but I suspect it's good exercise for my aging brain to [attempt] to figure this stuff out. But, I must say, without the help from the Internet, and especially this Forum, I believe I would have eventually given-up because of the difficulty. But everyone's willingness to readily share information makes it possible for me to get at least some of these things working. Thanks muchly!

[Lordmonkus]

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.

[CADScott]

If you stick to known lists like the previously mentioned No-Intro dumps, and use a rom manager like Clrmamepro to check the integrity of your roms, then you can be very sure that the games will work. The No-Intro ones especially are verified and checked by a huge online community, and if there are any issues they are redumped to correct. The disc based systems are much more difficult, as there are very few good dump collections. The Darkwater group are one of the only ones I know that do proper checks on their releases. I have their collections for Dreamcast and Saturn and have not had a single issue with any game.

[SentaiBrad]

I've had failing discs images from certain sites but never a problem from No-Intro or Tosec, ever. So I agree with the above, as long as you get those sets it should be great. I'm also shocked MAME is recommended for Intellivision, but Nostalgia looks great. I honestly haven't bothered with systems that far out yet, but I might soon for a Tutorial on them.

[CadetStimpy]

I don't suppose some tricky sucker has made an auto-tester, that would at least launch every game in a set (consecutively) and report at the end which games successfully launched and which ones didn't? 'Course, even if that were possible, it would still take a heck of a long time to do that with 40,000+ game collection, as most of them probably don't start in the blink-of-an-eye.

[SentaiBrad]

The closest you can get to that are CRC checks from a release group. They've pre-verified that games work and the best you can do is hope the CRC checks pass for every file and just assume / hope it work. When you come across a game you just fix it. I had to deal with that pretty majorly with my TurboGrafx CD set. Every single game needed to be replaced.

[CadetStimpy]

SentaiBrad said The closest you can get to that are CRC checks from a release group.

So, I don't manually perform the check myself? I just want to ensure the 'release group' has done it? I'm assuming we take their word they did it, but that their reputation makes that a safe bet, or not?

[SentaiBrad]

Yea, there's a reason why you hear about No-Intro, Tosec and eXoDOS releases a lot. They just have the reputation behind them, and when something does slip through the cracks they're honest about it and fix it. I mean at the end of the day it's one passionate gamer trying to help other passionate gamers and certain websites get a reputation for bad rips. The site I got my bad rips from is notoriously bad with disc rips. I knew that but I never ran in to that brick wall. With proper rips they started to play all perfectly. We even had a user recently who used that same site for PS1 games and RetroArch more or less denied them. He got new rips from a different site and he was golden, it magically started working. You'll notice with No-Intro or Goodsets / Full sets that games will have a [!] attached to the file name. This generally means that the rip is good to go. In Good Sets you get a lot of extra junk though. With No-Intro sets you get just the good version of the games instead of 3 bad rips, 2 good rips, 5 hacked / trainer rips, etc etc.

[fromlostdays]

With No-Intro sets you get just the good version of the games instead of 3 bad rips, 2 good rips, 5 hacked / trainer rips, etc etc.

Exactly, which also makes the naming scheme much more pleasing and easy to read. No Intro - Super Mario World (USA) Tosec - Super Mario World (1991) (Nintendo) (US) [b] or [h] or [!] or like 30 other possible tags. Somewhere on the net there is a full list of what they all mean. I think Brad is right though, [!] means good. Haha. So if you download a Tosec set, you'll wind up with 5-15 of the same rom. The lesson, go No Intro when you can. The only problem is, there are far fewer No-Intro sets than there are Tosec sets. Still, can't hate on Tosec too hard. They put in work.

[SentaiBrad]

I've found No-Intro for everything not disc based. Also, I've gotten 1 Tosec, but it was disc based and didn't have duplicates. I also only had massive duplicate problems with GoodSets. As for what each thing means, it's in the GoodSet readme's. [b] mean Bad or Incorrect Rip, [h] means hacked (either rom hack, translation or otherwise), [t] means trainer... I forget what p and o are. There might even be [t] for Translated and [h] doesn't quantify Translated. Yea... unless you wanna sift through all of that. I also recently got the eXoDOS set... it was huge. It was however A LOT of DOS games... like 600GB worth.

[fromlostdays]

Yeah Exo is a monster. Nice guy too. Put a post up on another forum and helped people troubleshoot with his set. I messed up, though haha. I got the EXO set and only kept the games since I have a launcher. I was reading somewhere on this forum that you can use Meagre or one of the other programs that comes with the set to autoimport the Exo set into LaunchBox. Now, it looks like I'd have to redownload the entire set to get that program haha. I honestly wasn't considering importing the entire set into launchbox until I saw some of the DOS box art people have been posting here. Its awesome. No Into does have most of the staples at this point, but if like me you're a system junkie, you'll be hard pressed to find a No-intro set for the Elektronica BK.

[gamerforhire]

Jumping on the bandwagon here, but No-Intro is the be all, end all for ROM sets. Each and every ROM is tested and maintained by a large community and, as far as I know, only official games are allowed within the sets. "Official" being no ROM hacks where you play as Sonic in the Mushroom Kingdom or something. As for having a script or application that loads each ROM and verifies if it loads or not, there was an option built into GameEx (another gaming frontend) that would record the first 5 seconds of every game and save it as a title snap. Essentially, this was doing exactly what you're asking for: it loaded the ROM, ran a screencap, then saved the video file, and moved onto the next ROM. As you can imagine, it took forever, haha. But, as long as you ended up with the same number of video files as you do ROMs, then you know that each ROM loaded and ran. BUT It's not always that cut and dry. Take for example the game Speedy Gonzales: Los Gatos Bandidos for the SNES. In a lengthy article written by arstechnica in 2011 about the preservation of gaming and building the "perfect emulator" (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/), it was noted this one particular game was literally unbeatable on every emulator (except one at the time, bsnes) because of one particular bug that occurred during one of the last levels, which locked the game and crashed the emulator. So, even if you had a script or an application to open and run every ROM to check its integrity, there's no way to know that it will be a perfect, 100% emulation from start to finish. Moral of the story? If you want true, 1 to 1 simulation, then purchase the original console and game. Barring that, use No-Intro sets and sleep well knowing that there's a 99.99% chance that every game within a No-intro set will work flawlessly. The next caveat is the emulator itself, but that's an entirely different topic.

[CadetStimpy]

Okay, it seems clear that No-Intro is the best place to start for 'reliable' ROM Sets. Thanks for your thorough replies! This Emulation stuff to me, is the epitome of the ol' adage: The more ya know, the more ya realize how much ya don't know.