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PS1 for Retroarch / Launchbox Can't Get the Games to Run


Palitus

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Hello, I followed your tutorial on setting up Retroarch with Launchbox. I have been using emulators for years and decided to try this out instead of just using them individually. The tutorial really was easy and I had no problem setting it up, importing the games, and setting up my controllers. I actually have all of the different controllers for each system I use and have USB adapters for them. I have one problem that I think you could help me out with. I asked in the comments section of the Youtube tutorial and you said to hit ya'll up here. The problem is that I cant get the Playstation games to run. I normally use ePSXe and I have collected and imaged games over the years using a couple different formats and they always worked fine. I have: .IMG .CCD .ISO. I also have the BIOS that I've used for years (scph1001.BIN) and to be honest I'm not even sure where to stick it. I saw in the comments someone asked about SEGA CD and you said to put the BIOS in the main Retroarch folder and then I saw someone else said to stick it in the SYSTEM folder. In your reply you said it could be a little complicated to set up in Retroarch and that it only uses .CUE files. I guess in short I am asking: where to put the BIOS and are my games totally useless with Retroarch or can they be converted in some way? I did do a little search while at work and didn't get much about coverting them. Thank you for your time and look forward to your response. Palitus
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RetroArch is daunting at first, but easy once you get the hang of it. The BIOS need to go in to your system folder, and you need to tell RetroArch where your system folder is in the Path Settings. In the latest RA go to your Settings Tab (second from the left) and go down near the bottom to Directory. In there the first line should say System/BIOS directory, change that to your system folder. Once that is done the BIOS need to be named something specific for every console that requires them, and in the PS1 case there are 3 1000 serie BIOS that get renamed to the 5000 series. It's just a name change though, this part confused me for a while. I found 2 of the 3 BIOS and no one said anything about renaming it. I renamed a 1000 series BIOS to 5501. I dont remember which 1k BIOS though. http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Using_RetroArch#BIOS This site helps a lot with Emulation in general, hence the name. Right below it talks about CUE sheets but the way I did it was... different. A lot of games have CUE sheets with them, and as long as they do just open it up in Notepad++ and make sure the name is correct to the name of the image wether it be an ISO or BIN file. If there is a file path included you can remove it and just leave the name of the image. When a game didn't have a cue sheet I used IsoBuster. It is not a free program, but you can find it. In IsoBuster load up an ISO, BIN or MDF image file. Once the image is loaded (for any system that requires cue sheets) the left pane will load it up. You should see the name of the image at the top of that tree in bold, right click it, select Extract CD . In that sub menu select RAW (.bin .iso) option. It will then ask you where to save it and the name. I suggest leaving it as "CD" because after it does its thing it will ask you to create a CUE sheet and will default to the name of CD in its file name. When you edit these CUE sheets it will also say CD.iso or CD.bin in there too. So if you rename the image file you need to rename the CUE sheet and what the sheet says internally. This isn't a problem since LaunchBox has an option to use the folder name as the name of the game, so for PS1, Saturn, Sega CD etc I use this option for that reason. The reason why cue sheets exist is because it can tell the emulator information that the image can not tell it. Like where a song starts and stops, etc. If there is anything else we can help you with just ask.
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I concur with everything Brad said, although you can also use Imgburn for ripping (or converting), which is free. I've used it quite a bit both for ripping my own discs and converting rips from other formats (mounting an image via Daemon Tools and then using the DT virtual drive as the source for Imgburn and converting to bin+cue) and have had great results with Mednafen. Another thing to note is that Mednafen does support ccd+img+sub in addition to bin+cue. Be aware, however, that it's much pickier than ePSXe when it comes to acceptable rip quality, even if your sheet is correct, and there are no small number of bad rips floating around the interwebs. If a game won't run, first verify that your cue sheet is correct as Brad mentioned. If it isn't, it's possible that you have a bad rip. I've had a number of games that didn't initially run in Mednafen (even with correct cue sheets) that run fine in ePSXe, but worked fine in Mednafen when using a good rip. ePSXe isn't nearly as accurate as Mednafen, however, which is why Mednafen is still better, in my opinion.
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