retroarch Zombeaver's Retroarch PSX and Saturn Overrides

[Zombeaver]

I've added the below games to my library, several of which required overrides. The download has been updated and the audit sheet has been updated with specific details. I also realized that the previous upload had the remaps in the wrong folder - it should be Retroarch\config\remap\Mednafen Saturn\[file].rmp and I was missing the Mednafen Saturn folder in the previous version. I also added some extra options to the overlay folder including a Panzer Dragoon Saga mapping overlay, and scanline versions of the previous mapping overlays. If you want to use one of these rather than the ones I have as the default, just copy them and replace the ones in the overlays\Zombs\ folder. The border image needs to be named SegaSaturn.png and the mapping image needs to be named SegaSaturnMapping.png.

Bug!
Bug Too!
Christmas Nights Into Dreams
G Vector
Galaxy Force II
Heir of Zendor
Hissatsu!
Hyper Reverthion
Manx TT Superbike
Prikura: Princess Clara Daisakusen
Princess Crown
Sega Rally Championship
Sonic Jam
Sonic R
Stellar Assault SS

[LogicalEgo]

On 9/11/2017 at 9:50 PM, Zombeaver said:

Okay, the first batch of Saturn overrides are now available. There is a new tab on the audit sheet for specific details on the Saturn overrides.

I did things a little bit differently this time - I made my own custom Saturn overlay to go with it (I've been in the process of working on a full set) and adjusted each game to that size. Press the right thumb-stick button to go to the mapping overlay screen.

It should also be noted that, currently, disc swapping via either .m3us or manually appending them in the quick menu doesn't seem to work in RA Mednafen Saturn. It works fine in standalone Mednafen, but it seems to be broken currently in RA. For this reason, for multi-disc games I included multiple .cfgs where necessary to cover each disc individually.

Some notes about the core override (Mednafen Saturn.cfg) for reference:

-Lines 1-8 must remain in order for everything else to work correctly. Do not change or remove these.
-Line 9 is for the shader. You can change this to a different shader or remove it if you so choose.
-Lines 10-14 are for the overlay. You can remove or change these if you so choose.
     *Line 10 enables or disables ("false") the overlay itself
     *Line 11 specifies which overlay you want to use
     *Line 12 specifies the opacity of the overlay. If you have one enabled, you want this to be 1 (completely opaque)
     *Line 13 specifies the hotkey button to change to the next overlay in a sequence. In this case, it corresponds to the right thumb-stick button on a 360 controller. I've setup the overlay to default to the border, but pressing this will change it to a second overlay screen that shows the controller mapping.
     *Line 14 moves the x position of Retroarch's onscreen messages (like those that indicate a controller has been detected). This specific setting moves it farther right than normal because with an overlay enabled, it will block some of the text in the normal position.

I've got a saturated and desaturated border, and two options for the controller mapping. Desaturated and Burning Rangers are the defaults. If you want to change them, just delete "SegaSaturn.png" and "SegaSaturnMapping.png" and copy/rename the one you want to use in their place - name the one that you want to use for the border as "SegaSaturn.png" and the one you want to use for the mapping screen as "SegaSaturnMapping.png"

I personally love this approach for controller layout ui, never even thought about doing something like this. If you plan to cover more systems could you make an alt of PS4 controller?

[Zombeaver]

25 minutes ago, keltoigael said:

I personally love this approach for controller layout ui, never even thought about doing something like this. If you plan to cover more systems could you make an alt of PS4 controller?

Yeah, I think I could do that, though it'd be long-term. I've got a long way to go at this point.

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

[LogicalEgo]

1 hour ago, Zombeaver said:

Yeah, I think I could do that, though it'd be long-term. I've got a long way to go at this point.

  Reveal hidden contents

  Reveal hidden contents

 

These are really impressive. No rush at all, trust me I fully understand. That Mame and super Nintendo <3

[LogicalEgo]

So I finally got around to adding in all your edits, I had to rename quite a bit but it was well worth it. Final Fantasy VII looks better than my Steam version and my PS1 going through scart to xrgb mini. Adding in all the other options like save state and its a no brainier. Mednafen PSX HW is all sorts of win.

[Zombeaver]

Okay, so major update this time.

Beyond adding quite a few games to my library (many of which needed overrides), I also went back and tweaked quite a few things.

First, nearly all of the custom AR/Resolution/Viewport overrides for PSX have been updated (the ones with a blue highlight in the AR Settings fields on the override sheet). Previously, I'd done these partially just by eyeball, finding the exact height that they needed to be and then adjusting the width until it "looked right" but it occurred to me that I really should be doing them pixel-exact to ensure that the aspect ratio wasn't getting altered at all. So I went back through all of them and since I'd already figured out the correct height, all I had to do was calculate the corresponding width necessary to maintain the exact ratio. So, for example, I might have had a game that had an adjusted height of 1120 - previously I might have used an adjusted width of say 1520 which isn't off by a crazy amount, but it's not pixel-exact, which would actually be 1493 (when you start with dimensions of 1600 x 1200). So basically all of those have been adjusted (and the only ones that weren't, were already correct). I also went the extra step of creating a guide overlay to make sure everything was correctly centered (also done purely by eyeball previously).

The games specifically affected by this are as follows:

Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare
Azure Dreams
Battle Arena Toshinden 4
Beyond The Beyond
Blazing Dragons
Chronicles of the Sword
Circuit Breakers
Darkstone
Devil Dice
Doom
Evil Dead: Hail to the King
Expendable
Fade to Black
Grudge Warriors
Heart of Darkness
Hexen
Hot Shots Golf
In Cold Blood
Iron Soldier 3
The Italian Job
Legend of Legaia
Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete
Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete
Metal Gear Solid
Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions
Nightmare Creatures II
The Note
Overblood 2
Pong: The Next Level
Project: Horned Owl
Psychic Force 2
R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 (Bonus Disc)
The Raven Project
Resident Evil Survivor
Riven
Sentinel Returns
Shadow Master
Silverload
Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels
Star Ixiom
Star Wars: Dark Forces
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo
Team Buddies
Tekken
Threads of Fate
Thunder Truck Rally
Time Commando
Tunnel B1
Vagrant Story

Secondly, I reworked my CRT Deinterlacing shader preset, which I wasn't quite happy with before. I've created two shader presets, each with 3 versions. CRT-Deinterlacing-Soft is similar to the one I'd uploaded previously, but is improved and not quite as blurry as before. It has zero interlacing jitter and is smoothed slightly. CRT-Deinterlacing uses the more traditional bob-and-ghost-deinterlace.glsl shader pass, which is sharper than the "Soft" version, but does have a very slight amount of jitter (more or less noticeable depending on the game). Each of these have 3 versions - 2X, 3X, and 4X. These numbers correspond to the scale of the first shader pass, which impacts how the scanlines look based on the resolution of the game (which varies). I've updated all of the relevant configs to use the best shader for each game. This impacts both PSX and Saturn. The preset used is listed in a new column on the sheet - "Deinterlacing Shader". If you do decide to change a shader from CRT-Deinterlacing to CRT-Deinterlacing-Soft or vice versa, be sure to use the same #X when doing so otherwise the scanlines will be wrong. The shader presets, as before, just need to be placed in the base Retroarch\shaders\ folder. You can delete the previous preset (CRT Deinterlacing v4.glslp) none of the configs use it at this point.

New games added to my library (override details on the sheet) are listed below. These are primarily Japanese titles, most of which are pretty playable without any Japanese comprehension. There's a great video showing short clips of 200 Japan-exclusive PSX games available here that I'd recommend if anyone's curious.

PSX games:

Disney's Donald Duck: Goin Quackers
Gex: Enter The Gecko (PAL) [has different voice acting]
Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko (PAL) [has different voice acting]
Titan Wars
X-Men: Mutant Academy
X-Men: Mutant Academy 2

70's Robot Anime: Geppy-X: The Super Boosted Armor
Aconcagua
Airgrave
Captain Tsubasa J: Get In The Tomorrow
Detana Twinbee Yahoo! Deluxe Pack
Fantastic Pinball Kyutenkai
The Firemen 2: Pete & Danny
Front Mission 2 (English translation)
Gamera 2000
Ganbare Goemon: Ooedo Daikaiten
Gegege no Kitarou: Gyakushuu Youma Daikessen
Groove Jigoku V
Gunbare! Game Tengoku 2
Harmful Park
Internal Section (English translation)
Jingle Cats
Jumping Flash 3: Robbit mon Dieu
Langrisser IV
Love & Destroy
Love Love Truck
Macross VF X2
Mad Panic Coaster
Milano no Arubaito Collection
Oh No!
Paranoia Scape
Pepsiman
Pop'n Tanks!
Racing Lagoon
Rakugaki Showtime
Salamander Deluxe Pack Plus
Samurai Deeper Kyo
Shaman King: Spirit of Shamans
Slap Happy Rhythm Busters
Stray Sheep: The Adventure Of Poe & Merry
Tear Ring Saga (English translation)
Time Bokan Series: Bokan To Ippatsu! Doronboo
Time Bokan Series: Bokan Desuyo
Wizardry - New Age Of Llylgamyn

Saturn games:

From TV Animation Slam Dunk I Love Basketball
Game Tengoku
Gebockers
Hi-Octane
Layer Section 2
Linkle Liver Story
Ninku - Tsuyokina Yatsura no Daigekitotsu!
Pro Pinball
Sega Worldwide Soccer '98
Shinobi Legions
Sonic 3D Blast
Steamgear Mash
True Pinball
Tyrush Deppy
Willy Wombat

Some additional adjustments:

Switched Chrono Cross from AR Setting 2 to custom because of slight vertical offset when using AR Setting 2 which led to a small gap at the bottom of the screen and some garbage graphics in that area while in menus    
    
Switched Final Fantasy 7, 8, 9, and Tactics from AR Setting 2 to custom because of slight vertical cutoff when using AR Setting 2

Whelp, there goes most of the weekend! Totally worth it though. Enjoy!

[Zombeaver]

This is just kindof a one-off thing but I figured I'd post it here since it's relevant. I made an override for Star Fox 2 (which also works for Star Fox) which includes a shader chain for switching between two zoom modes, because the gameplay (and title screen) and map screens use different amounts of overscan space. Specifically, the gameplay occupies a smaller portion of the screen than the map screen. You can't just crop the screen to the gameplay because you'll cutoff the map screen. So what I did was create a chain of two shader presets that include the image-adjustment.glsl shader, the first with a zoom of 1.0 and the second with a zoom of 1.15. You can press the "Next shader" hotkey to just switch back and forth between them. The default key is "M", but you can also assign it to a controller button. I use the left-stick button personally.

Unlike with my normal overrides which directly alter the resolution/viewport, a shader-based solution means that there's a certain amount of distortion because the image is being altered. This isn't ideal, but until they implement a hotkey for changing the aspect ratio setting on the fly, this is the best that can be done currently. I found that in motion it's not too noticeable.

Title Screen / Unaltered/Shader-1:

Title Screen / Shader-2:

Map / Shader-2:

Map / Unaltered/Shader-1:

This same issue is present in Star Fox, and the same override can be used for it as well. The overrides need to be placed in the relevant folder for the core that you're using for SNES. They need to match the names of your roms. The "game-specific" folder needs to be placed in your base shaders folder. There's also a core override named (core name).cfg that has the proper resolution/viewport/AR settings for this to work correctly. You can either copy these into your existing core override if you have one (if any of the lines are already present, replace them) or you can simply rename the .cfg to match your core name if not. The Star Fox overrides should also work if you're using "core provided" AR with integer scaling off - the custom lines in the core override are the equivalent size of "core provided" but give you the flexibility to quickly tweak them a bit when needed, whereas "core provided" is unchangeable.

Star Fox + Star Fox 2 Overrides.zip

[kmoney]

@ZombeaverGreat job on these as I have been incoperating these configs into my setup,saves me a ton of time. I noticed on the spreadsheet that you are using ePSXe on a few games due to issues with Mednafen. Playing around the last couple of nights I have learned the issue with one of the games which is "IS Internal Section". I have found out the reason it hangs is because of a bad english translated patch causing bad sectors. As soon as you remove the patch the game boots normal with Mednafen. Just wanted to let you know.

[Zombeaver]

I've made a few minor updates to the PSX pack.

First, I did a complete sweep of all the configs by hand as I ran into one override (The Book of Watermarks) that wasn't quite right and it got me paranoid. RA has this bad habit of not injecting "custom_viewport_x =" or "custom_viewport_y =" values into an override if they're set to 0, which can cause some issues. I went back through and verified that these were included where appropriate as well as cleaned up some of them a bit - mostly to remove redundancies. Most of these you won't even see any difference, but a handful of them did have the missing x or y values.

The configs updated are:

Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare
The Book of Watermarks
Chocobo's Dungeon 2
Cyberia
Duke Nukem: Time to Kill
Dynasty Warriors
Evil Dead: Hail to the King
Gekioh: Shooting King
Ghost in the Shell
The Guardian of Darkness
Lode Runner
Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Threads of Fate
Xenogears

Secondly, I added a new folder named "Mouse Support". These contain alternate versions of the configs for the relevant games that use mouse input rather than controller - this is something that was just recently implemented into the Beetle PSX and Saturn cores, so make sure your cores are up to date if you want to use them.

The games included are:

Elemental Gearbolt
Policenauts
Project: Horned Owl
Riven: The Sequel To Myst
Silverload
Syndicate Wars

There are a couple games that I have configs for that supposedly have mouse support that I did not create mouse versions for, either because I couldn't get it to work for those games or it was just awkward to use:

Alien: Resurrection - shows a mouse option in the options menu but didn't seem to recognize it through RA
Cyberia - works but felt extremely awkward to use (would probably be good for the rail shooter segments, but the puzzle/walking sections felt super weird with the mouse)
Sentinel Returns - doesn't seem to recognize mouse via RA

I'm going to be doing this for Saturn as well, but I need to get a better list of supported games first.

If you do decide to use these, something you might want to consider doing is setting up an additional emulator entry in LB for RA to specifically hide the mouse. This is a non-issue if you don't use overlays as RA hides the mouse automatically anyway, but if you do use an overlay (like I do with the Saturn overrides), this is a problem because the mouse is always visible when they're used. Normally this is a non-issue since I just use MouseMove to move it offscreen as soon as RA starts, but because you're actually moving the mouse around for these, it creates a problem.

My AutoHotkey section for my normal RA entry in LB just looks like this:

But for these I made a new emulator entry that looks like this (Arcade is included because this is handy for Lightgun games in RA MAME too):
The script, in text, is (obviously you'd need to update paths for NoMousy based on your own paths):

SetKeyDelay, -1, 110

Run, X:\Emulation\LaunchBox\Nomousy\nomousy.exe /hide
$Esc::
{
        Run, X:\Emulation\LaunchBox\Nomousy\nomousy.exe
    Send {Esc}
}

Then just edit the games in your library that you want to use this and change the emulator from Retroarch to Retroarch - Hide Mouse.

[Zombeaver]

Thanks @kmoney I'll take a look at that.

[Zombeaver]

Crap, I totally forgot about the Clock Tower games! I added in mouse support versions for them as well.

[orac31]

sorry but what setting do I use to get the overrides working on startup

[orac31]

think iv got it

[fromlostdays]

Hey Zomb, sorry to resurrect an old thread, but with or without your config I get horrible artifacting and weird bright boxes in Silent Hill if I use the Mednafen HW Core. Am I the only one experiencing this? Is there a workaround?

[Zombeaver]

9 hours ago, fromlostdays said:

Hey Zomb, sorry to resurrect an old thread, but with or without your config I get horrible artifacting and weird bright boxes in Silent Hill if I use the Mednafen HW Core. Am I the only one experiencing this? Is there a workaround?

Sounds like you're using a renderer other than Software in the core options. Hardware renderers and PGXP options can mess up some games. I use Software rendering at all times.

[WuTangDan]

I was reading through this as I really want to give all of my PS1 library some love. I have been tinkering with settings but I have nowhere near enough time to go through each and every game and configure it to work perfectly unfortunately, full time work plus four hours of commuting a day takes away from my spare time!

I sort of get what you are saying and it all sounds good, but what I couldn't understand fully is how I actually get these game configs to work.

Sorry if that's a dumb question, but I got a little lost in the technical talk in the OP, and I was wondering if I could have an 'explanation for dummies' on how I actually get this working, if that is possible to do? If it's not then I understand.

Is it just a case of downloading the configs you have made and putting them somewhere in RA, or is there more manual intervention than that required?

Also, is this purely just for the Aspect Ratio and additional shader for some games, or does it also tweak any other core options on a per game basis like resolution, filtering etc to make the games run better?

Again, thanks for all your help.

[Zombeaver]

All you need to do is download the Beetle PSX HW core in Retroarch, then download my configs and place them in Retroarch\config\Beetle PSX HW

You will, however, likely need to rename them to match your own filenames. That's how Retroarch knows to use them. If you have Tomba (USA).bin/.cue as your disc image, you'd need to rename my config which is named "Tomba!.cfg" to "Tomba (USA).cfg" for example. The full list of filenames vs game title is included in the spreadsheet that I have in the opening post.

As far as what they're for, they do a number of things:

1) They adjust the viewport so that games correctly scale to the top and bottom of the screen on a 1080p monitor. The aspect ratio itself is unchanged, they're just scaled completely so that there isn't empty space at the top and bottom.

2) They use the correct type of controller - between the d-pad-only controller, dual analog, and dual shock - based on what each game supports.

3) They apply a deinterlacing shader for games where it's needed.

4) They apply some additional miscellaneous fixes via .opt files - these are game-specific core option changes which are needed in a few instances.

[WuTangDan]

Awesome. That's what I was hoping, just got lost in the jargon and a bit confused.

I already have the core set up, so it should just be a case of grabbing the configs for me I hope

My screen is 4K not 1080p though, so I am assuming this will not look as intended for me?

Will I need to edit all of the files individually to work with my screen?

[Zombeaver]

1 minute ago, WuTangDan said:

so it should just be a case of grabbing the configs for me I hope

...and renaming them.

2 minutes ago, WuTangDan said:

My screen is 4K not 1080p though, so I am assuming this will not look as intended for me?

Will I need to edit all of the files individually to work with my screen?

I don't know, honestly. 4k is just double 1080p, so it might be fine. It might scale correctly or it might be half the correct size. "AR Setting 1" configs should be fine regardless. AR Setting 2 or Custom might not. You'll want to consult the sheet.

Green highlights in the AR Setting 1 or AR Setting 2 columns indicates it's one of those. If it's blue it's custom.

[Zombeaver]

If AR Setting 2 configs end up being half size, try editing the Beetle PSX HW.cfg and changing:

custom_viewport_width = "1600"
custom_viewport_height = "1200"

to:

custom_viewport_width = "3200"
custom_viewport_height = "2400"