PSX Emulation via Retroarch Cores

[strigoimare]

Hello, folks

I am currently delving into PSX emulation on PC, and I would like to know your experiences with the current PSX emulators in Retroarch (Beetle, Beetle HW and PCSX ReARMed).

The word on the street seems to be that Beetle HW is the best of the bunch, but for some arcane reason, I apparently cannot run it successfully. I am currently using RA 1.7.1, and everything is updated neatly. When I try to load content with the Beetle HW core loaded up, all I get is a screen pop and bam, back to desktop/Launchbox. So, I would like to hear from you about your experiences with it, while I try to fix this problem somehow.

Thanks!

EDIT 1 - Well, for some reason, my RA had the wrong folder for BIOS... now I can load the core, but the PSX games hang at startup, black screen. I'll now try to use the Quick Menu to fiddle with options and see what works.

Edited April 19, 2018 by strigoimare

[Abwezi]

What format are the games you are trying to run in? The PSX Retroarch cores don't support some file formats that other emulators do

[strigoimare]

2 minutes ago, Abwezi said:

What format are the games you are trying to run in? The PSX Retroarch cores don't support some file formats that other emulators do

Mostly .pbp, but I also have .bin/cue games, which are producing the same results (frozen in black screen at launch).

[Abwezi]

1 minute ago, strigoimare said:

Mostly .pbp, but I also have .bin/cue games, which are producing the same results (frozen in black screen at launch).

Are you running any shaders? Some Retroarch cores are only compatible with certain kinds of shader formats

[Lordmonkus]

The mednafen_psx_libretro.dll core is the most compatible and least buggy core, HW is decent but there are some minor bugs.

[strigoimare]

3 minutes ago, Abwezi said:

Are you running any shaders? Some Retroarch cores are only compatible with certain kinds of shader formats

Nope, no shader setup yet. I'll do some research about Beetle_HW in this regard. Thanks for the tip.

1 minute ago, Lordmonkus said:

The mednafen_psx_libretro.dll core is the most compatible and least buggy core, HW is decent but there are some minor bugs.

Yeah, this is good to know. One question, though: aren't the Beetle cores branches of Mednafen?

[Lordmonkus]

20 minutes ago, strigoimare said:

Yeah, this is good to know. One question, though: aren't the Beetle cores branches of Mednafen?

Yeah

[strigoimare]

Hm, looks like the issue here was that my BIOS names were capitalized, and these cores are very particular about that. Renaming them apparently did the trick =)