Loading ePSXe with gui.

[Adik]

First of all, sorry if I posted in the wrong area. I'm new here. I've been using LaunchBox for a few months. And I'm loving it. Thank you sooooooo much for making such a great app. But my problem is, in order to load PS1 games in ePSXe from Launchbox, the game opens without any gui. So it's not possible to pause the game by pressing ESC or changing game disk. Can you tell me how to fix this? Sorry if this question was already asked.

[Zombeaver]

ePSXe won't load specified roms without --no gui as a launch command so getting to the GUI is not possible, unfortunately. You have a couple options for changing discs - you can either use the "additional apps" method (I explain how to do this here) or you can use RetroArch combined with the Mednafen (PSX) core and use the m3u method mentioned here. Additional Apps lets you still use ePSXe (or any other emulator for that matter) but it has limitations. Doing it that way means you're closing the emulator and then relaunching with a different disc. That sortof works, although it's a little inconvenient since that means booting the whole system up again and loading a save; but therein lies a bigger problem - most games will allow you to save for a disc swap, but some games don't (like Metal Gear Solid, for example) and that's where you're gonna have a real issue. Technically you can still get around it doing it this way - but you'll have to create a save state on the disc swap screen, exit the emulator, find the save state file and rename it to the file name of your second disc, load up the second disc, and load your save state. That's super inconvenient, time consuming, and not a good option in my opinion. The much better option is to use RetroArch with the Mednafen core and creating .m3us for your .cues - all you have to do is create a text file that has the name of each disc's cue file, one per line, and save it as a file called (whatever your game name is).m3u - then you tell Launchbox to load that "rom" instead of your normal .cue file. Then, when you're in the game, you can just hit the button that you assign in RetroArch to "open/close tray" and then the button for "next disc" or "previous disc" (and it shows you a prompt on the screen of what disc you're selecting) and then the "open/close tray" button again - you can now continue playing just like if you had physically swapped the discs. It's great! RetroArch has a bit of a learning curve, but it's great once you get passed the initial hurdle. I initially only looked into it to solve this very issue, but I've come to love it and use it for another of other platforms as well. It has shader support (CRT-Royale and CRT-Easymode are my personal favorites) and you can assign controls once in RetroArch and they carry through to any cores (emulator modules) that you add in. If you do decide to go this route and need any help getting things setup, let me know.

[Adik]

@Zombeaver Thanks for the reply and such great information. If this is the case, then I think it's much faster and easier to just run ePSXe and start a game :p

[Zombeaver]

@Adik You could do that, although you'd be losing your frontend functionality at that point, which would be unfortunate. The RetroArch method works beautifully through LaunchBox; no issues whatsoever. The initial setup takes a bit longer than the "Additional Apps" method in LaunchBox, but there are a lot of benefits to it in the long run. "Additional Apps" in LaunchBox will serve the necessary function in most cases and is actually really easy to setup, so you could at least try that out. LaunchBox/BigBox combined with RetroArch is pretty awesome though, and will work better for you in the long term if you invest the time and effort. I was skeptical at first and had some issues when I was initially setting everything up but once you get the hang of it the two combined are amazing.