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Trying to get PS2 and Dreamcast working (what is BIOS?)


Tatts4Life

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So I recently found out from launchbox and have tried it with sea Genesis and SNES and it works great. I then tried adding a ps2 game and a Dreamcast game. The iso files loaded fine. But when I started my ps2 game it asks for a bios file. I googled and found one, I thought I installed it right but it won't start. Same happens with my Dreamcast game. If anybody can help me out that would be great.
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I feel obligated to say that NullDC is an atrocious, wildy inaccurate emulator. Do yourself a favor and look into Demul. @DOS76 is NullDC seriously the primary DC emulator that you use? You'll be hard pressed to find many games that don't have graphical problems. Even major games like Shenmue and Skies of Arcadia have huge problems in NullDC. Take a look at this. My only complaint with Demul is their sound emulation needs some work. Graphically, it's superior to NullDC in nearly every way.
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lol hey Derek I thought that might be you by your location under your username and a post I read of yours. I noticed there was a forum here so I figured I would get my help over here. What ever video you meant to post isn't in your post. @zombeaver the blog you posted isn't in English so I can't read it unfortunately.
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BIOS are what make certain emulators work. As a fore warning too, do not post a link to them in the forums. They are 100% illegal to distribute (unless someone reverse engineered and open sourced some BIOS... which I don't think has happened.). Since you are new to them I just wanna point that out. As for PS2, PCSX2, there should be a lot of BIOS for the system. There are Japanese, European and N. American BIOS based on the different regioned consoles. Some can be beneficial in some cases, but for the most part I've only ever used the latest American BIOS with a date of 2006. Unrar the pack of them in your BIOS folder under PCSX2. Go in to your plugin / bios setting menu and select a N. American BIOS. They should be labeled Japanese, Euro, N. American + a version number. As for Dreamcast, the emulators are so wildly bad I've mostly avoided them for so long. It's why I bought my real Dreamcast. There might be BIOS for each region, but there might just be one you need out there. It depends if Sega ever developed regional BIOS. I don't think they did... Anyways, in the Dreamcast emulator settings you just select the BIOS similar to how you did in PCSX2 but it will look different obviously. If you are using RetroArch, the BIOS to the systems will go in your System folder. Under path settings you will tell RA to look in your system folder so it knows where they are, or it will crash. The BIOS also need to be named something very specific. This has been covered on the forums a bunch before and I will be making videos for the LaunchBox YouTube channel regarding this in the future.
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SentaiBrad said BIOS are what make certain emulators work. As a fore warning too, do not post a link to them in the forums. They are 100% illegal to distribute (unless someone reverse engineered and open sourced some BIOS... which I don't think has happened.). Since you are new to them I just wanna point that out. As for PS2, PCSX2, there should be a lot of BIOS for the system. There are Japanese, European and N. American BIOS based on the different regioned consoles. Some can be beneficial in some cases, but for the most part I've only ever used the latest American BIOS with a date of 2006. Unrar the pack of them in your BIOS folder under PCSX2. Go in to your plugin / bios setting menu and select a N. American BIOS. They should be labeled Japanese, Euro, N. American + a version number. As for Dreamcast, the emulators are so wildly bad I've mostly avoided them for so long. It's why I bought my real Dreamcast. There might be BIOS for each region, but there might just be one you need out there. It depends if Sega ever developed regional BIOS. I don't think they did... Anyways, in the Dreamcast emulator settings you just select the BIOS similar to how you did in PCSX2 but it will look different obviously. If you are using RetroArch, the BIOS to the systems will go in your System folder. Under path settings you will tell RA to look in your system folder so it knows where they are, or it will crash. The BIOS also need to be named something very specific. This has been covered on the forums a bunch before and I will be making videos for the LaunchBox YouTube channel regarding this in the future.
lol of course I would be trying to do something some what illegal. I just found the video on YouTube talking about setting up retroarch and that seems easy to use. I have a question about where to place a bios when I do find one. You mention about putting it in my system folder. The way I have things set up is I have a C:\Games folder which has Steam installed in it. To make things easy for me to find I figure I would just use that folder for my Roms too. So where would I put the bios file then in that case?
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If you are going to use RetroArch we have a video on our YouTube channel that explains setting it up and it goes over a lot of stuff. I am currently in the process of expanding the tutorials on there. One is posting today about Updating RA for example. PS1 and PS2 are next. Some LaunchBox specific ones are also coming. www.youtube.com/UnbrokenSoftwareLLC In the RA folder there is a System folder. You tell RA to look there and the cores will load the BIOS as needed. In other emulators, you generally tell the emulator what BIOS to use, so technically they can be anywhere you want them to be, but I keep them either in the emulator folder or in a folder with the emulator called BIOS. Personally I have it set up that on one of my large externals I have an Emulator folder. In there I have folders for each system. In those folders are Emulators and rom folders. You can set it up how ever you want, but that is what I do. Also, Emulators them selves are not illegal. BIOS however are, unless you rip them your self for personal use, and even that is a very grey area. They're developed by the manufactures of the consoles or a tech company was contracted to create them. They were then imaged or "ripped" from the console. Since these are mostly dead consoles, its not that big of a deal but its still technically illegal. So to make sure we cover our asses here we just don't link out to them. When the PS3 was being cracked in to it was a fairly big deal because that was a console that was being sold, was having games developed for it. The guy who developed this stuff got sued hard because he distributed encrypted information. That and a few iPhone cases are now why I can tell you modding your console is not illegal. It is actually deemed legal. Geo, the guy who cracked the PS3, only had charges stick for distributed the encrypted stuff but not for the act of doing it ironically. You bought the hardware and you can do what you want. You might violate your warranty... but that's something different. I have a Softmodded PSP and Wii. Working on PS2, OG Xbox and Dreamcast next. What you do after can be illegal.
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@Tatts4Life It's not in English, no, and I can't read it either - but most modern browsers have a translation function. If you use Chrome it should prompt you to translate immediately. It doesn't matter if you can actually read it or not though... it has screenshots which is all you're really looking at there. You'll see "Demul" and then an image and then the same shot in "NullDC". NullDC is riddled with graphics problems (typically anything involving transparencies) that affect almost every game. It runs better on low-end PCs, yes. It's still garbage. I'm a huge DC fan and those games deserve better than what NullDC provides. You'll be hard pressed not to find something wrong in pretty much every game. About the only exception to that that I can think of, and literally the only games I use NullDC for, are Crazy Taxi 1 and 2. Those actually look and run pretty well in NullDC (and are the only the games I haven't managed to figure out good settings for in Demul). On average though, I'd say NullDC is barely above broken. Development for it is dead (and has been for some time) as they've all moved on to Reicast which is currently Android only. Demul is still in active development. Reicast is actually quite good (the games I've tried look and run great on my S6) so in the event they ever do a proper Windows port I'll definitely be giving it a go. I haven't used Makaron but have been meaning to try it out. Demul has most of the bases covered pretty well though.
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  • 2 weeks later...
I just tried out the latest version 1st it was missing MSVCP120D MSVCR120D and VCOMP120D .dll files after downloading the 2 MSVC files and VComp120 and changing it to Vcomp120d I can get the bios to run I choose a game but then it opens to the setup screen asking to setup the time and date the left and right arrows move the cursor no problems but if I press up or down the program crashes I don't know if it is just this build but I would say that this is a long way off from being functional for end-users. Also at this point it has no GUI at all.
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  • 1 month later...
I played around with Reicast a little more today and even with the latest 64x version it crashes when you press up or down cursor buttons however if you grab the x86 version this doesn't happen (you will also need to grab the x86 versions of the above mentioned .dll files unless they are already on your PC). From what I was able to tell trying any Windows CE game will crash the emulator. Also the config file allows you to set up widescreen but a few of the games I tried that leaves you with flashing black borders but the game remains in 4:3 some games however do stretch to wide screen. The emulator has no controller support as of yet and there is no documentation that comes with the emulator that tells you what keys you would want to map in X-Padder. Also it asks you to set the time and date every time you run the program which is very annoying. So all in all while I got a little further with Reicast today than I did the first time I tried it out it is still far from being anywhere ready to becoming a solid replacement to Demul or NullDC.
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