Emulator and bezels

[Jabb3rJaw]

I use retroarch now with bezels and everything is good. I saw a post earlier talking about N64 in retroarch playing Mario Kart with graphic issues so I loaded mine up and there are some minor glitches. I then used Ares and it looked better but there isn’t bezel support. Will Launchbox ever support bezels or do I need Rocketlauncher? I’m trying to stay away from that since I left hyperspin. Are my options  use retroarch with bezel support but with graphic errors or use a standalone emulator without bezels? On a side note Retroarch is nice using a cab so I can use controllers and my control panel at the same time or change to either one when I want. 

[bundangdon]

You might want to try this:

It's a plugin designed for emulators which don't have bezel-functionality (unlike retroarch and mame). I've tried it with the emulator Citra and it works pretty well.

[Jabb3rJaw]

7 minutes ago, bundangdon said:

You might want to try this:

It's a plugin designed for emulators which don't have bezel-functionality (unlike retroarch and mame). I've tried it with the emulator Citra and it works pretty well.

Thank you! I’ll give it a try! Seems like if a plug in can support bezels that Bigbox could too? But I know nothing about coding so I leave it to the experts to know best. 

[bundangdon]

20 minutes ago, Jabb3rJaw said:

Thank you! I’ll give it a try! Seems like if a plug in can support bezels that Bigbox could too? But I know nothing about coding so I leave it to the experts to know best. 

No problem! It works with both Launchbox and BigBox as far as I know. But you'll have to set it up within Launchbox's plugin menu first

[damageinc86]

I'm still using Rocketlauncher specifically for the Bezels, because I don't use Retroarch for a few of my systems, and that way I can have a uniform look across everything.  Heck there's even a Switch Bezel for Rocketlauncher lol. 

It may take some tweaking, but once it's all set up, there's really no issues.  It would really be nice if the people over at Rocketlauncher would just donate their Bezel code to Launchbox to see if it can be integrated into the frontend directly.  But probably will never happen that way.

[JoeViking245]

6 hours ago, damageinc86 said:

It would really be nice if the people over at Rocketlauncher would just donate their Bezel code to Launchbox to see if it can be integrated into the frontend directly.

The issue with integrating something like that into LaunchBox is in your preceding sentence.  However, I think you downplayed it a little [a lot?] when you said "It may take some tweaking."  

Really, there's no way to just say "Ok bezel program, here's the path to the emulator and here's the path to the bezels. Make it work."  Even with the plugin that @bundangdon recommends, there's some manual setup that needs to take place.  Though from what I've seen compared to RL, it's a walk-in-the-park. 

My guess it that the LaunchBox team doesn't want to integrate something that, for a new user, will never work.  At least not until they (the new user) get some working knowledge of how to do 'some tweaking'.  For and about each and every emulator they wish to use this on.  

There's just too many logistics involved with making it end-user friendly in a plug-and-play world.  But again, this is just my guess.

[bundangdon]

It's also worth noting that there are a few other options available. I've also tried ReshadeManager for a few systems, and this one works nicely with PCSX2:

As for RocketLauncher, I gave up on that program years ago. It's great for what it does, but these LaunchBox plugins are way more simple to use

[skizzosjt]

@Jabb3rJaw there are multiple N64 cores available in Retroarch. the one you used is messed up for at least this one game (possibly more) and you should use another core, or different settings on same core at very least. you can assign cores and settings on a per game basis. using a different emulator all together is not required.

ParaLLIE N64 core works fine with GFX Plugin and RSP Plugin set to auto which is the default setting - I do have issues when using some of the other options for those parameters

[damageinc86]

5 hours ago, JoeViking245 said:

The issue with integrating something like that into LaunchBox is in your preceding sentence.  However, I think you downplayed it a little [a lot?] when you said "It may take some tweaking."  

Really, there's no way to just say "Ok bezel program, here's the path to the emulator and here's the path to the bezels. Make it work."  Even with the plugin that @bundangdon recommends, there's some manual setup that needs to take place.  Though from what I've seen compared to RL, it's a walk-in-the-park. 

My guess it that the LaunchBox team doesn't want to integrate something that, for a new user, will never work.  At least not until they (the new user) get some working knowledge of how to do 'some tweaking'.  For and about each and every emulator they wish to use this on.  

There's just too many logistics involved with making it end-user friendly in a plug-and-play world.  But again, this is just my guess.

Actually for the Switch bezel i just tried out for fun, it was only a matter of putting the image and .ini file in the folder, setting bezel enable to "true" in RL, and having the emulator run in windowed mode.  The tweaking is only daunting if you have to do the x,y coordinate stuff manually.  I struggled with that a lot in the very beginning.  But eventually there's enough people who make the bezel files (image and .ini) already and share them, that you can just plug 'n play.  Eventually it would all be covered.  It already sort of is covered on the RL side. I mean, if I donated everything from my setup alone it would cover at least half of new users who just want to play the most popular systems. 

I don't think it's a good idea to say things will never work.  Launchbox has so many features that I have no idea how to use or get to work.  I don't even know the first thing about them.  But they are there for some reason lol.  If someone can't figure out how to use a feature then it just doesn't get used I suppose. Heck, if Launchbox doesn't auto-fill the command line parameters I'm already lost as to what to do.  I have no idea what to ever put in autohotkey,...There's so much I don't know how to use.  But I've been using RL for the past 10 years for Bezels, and past the initial setup of a platform, it has worked on everything I have.  It seems like there must at least exist some sort of decent framework there for it to function.  I'm sure it could eventually be integrated.  I mean, look at everything launchbox has done since its inception.  Very impressive stuff.  I'm going to hold out hope that eventually it will be possible.  However, this plug-in does look like it can do a good job.  I may have to try it someday.  I guess I'm just so damn used to RL that there's no point for me to mess with anything else just yet.

Edited December 1, 2023 by damageinc86

[JoeViking245]

1 hour ago, damageinc86 said:

However, this plug-in does look like it can do a good job.

Of course it can.  

 

1 hour ago, damageinc86 said:

I guess I'm just so damn used to RL that there's no point for me to mess with anything else just yet.

Well, after a tenure of ten years of working with it, figuring it out and getting it to work, I'd probably stick with it too.  My issue was (granted this was about 5-ish years ago) I spent about 3-4 days attempting to set it up. I gave up, deciding "I don't need no stinking bezels." lol  Then someone came to me 6 months ago asking about creating a plugin to show bezels on emulators (other than MAME and RetroArch).  [For me,] that was way easier than I recall how setting up RL was.  But you're most likely correct in that with end-user support, it's become a lot easier.  BTW, I still don't use bezels for anything other RA and MAME).

Whether one uses RocketLauncher, ReShade (and the ReShade plugin) or my plugin above, if they get bezels to show the way they like and they're happy with it, then we're all happy.  

[Nixx]

Or if you want per game bezel and you already have them installed for retroarch with the bezel pack, you can use my plugin.

How to use : Check first if the bezel is working with retroarch, add reshade to your other emulator, it will add a bezel.fx shader, activate it and you are done. (at least for most emulators, some needs tweaking to adjust the bezel when the size of the rendering screen is not exactly the same as retroarch)
And as a bonus, it also greatly improve bezel matching for retroarch if you have file naming that are not exactly the same as redump name.

Edited December 2, 2023 by Nixx

[damageinc86]

On 12/1/2023 at 11:41 AM, JoeViking245 said:

Of course it can.  

 

Well, after a tenure of ten years of working with it, figuring it out and getting it to work, I'd probably stick with it too.  My issue was (granted this was about 5-ish years ago) I spent about 3-4 days attempting to set it up. I gave up, deciding "I don't need no stinking bezels." lol  Then someone came to me 6 months ago asking about creating a plugin to show bezels on emulators (other than MAME and RetroArch).  [For me,] that was way easier than I recall how setting up RL was.  But you're most likely correct in that with end-user support, it's become a lot easier.  BTW, I still don't use bezels for anything other RA and MAME).

Whether one uses RocketLauncher, ReShade (and the ReShade plugin) or my plugin above, if they get bezels to show the way they like and they're happy with it, then we're all happy.  

Yeah, I definitely beat my head against the wall in the first few months, because I was trying to find the coordinates manually for some stuff and it never seems to be drawing the bezel on top properly when I did it.  But with everyone else's .ini files it worked just fine.  So yes, thankfully there was a lot of end user support.  The same thing with MAME actually.  I couldn't ever figure out how to actually make a .lay file, so I'm glad I was able to find a huge pack years ago that basically covers every game I'd ever want to play.  The end-users have really filled in the gaps for so many things out there in the emulation/artwork realm.  It's pretty frickin' cool, and has helped out so many people get their collections looking graet.  I've done some photoshop to edit some bezels to align better with my mednafen setup.  But that was just altering the image and not the coordinates.  So that was easy.  What I was getting at, is that once it was set up, it hasn't just up and stopped working.  It's been going strong for that entire time-span.  But yes, you definitely have a point there.  If anything can help people get some cool bezels up there, then that's a WIN.

Edited December 4, 2023 by damageinc86

[skizzosjt]

8 hours ago, damageinc86 said:

because I was trying to find the coordinates manually for some stuff and it never seems to be drawing the bezel on top properly when I did it.

you can open the image in MS Paint, point your mouse to the corners you need to utilize for the game display area and make a note of the coordinates displayed to enter into the bezel ini. I found the system to be easy to use due to this.  if your bezel images are all the same dimensions and game display area then they can all use the same exact coordinates. like if they are all 1080p 16:9 and have a 4:3 aspect ratio for the game display area that goes to the edge of the screen then all games using bezels of that format can use the same coordinates. if the image dimensions change, maybe to 4K for ex, then coordinates would change. if the game display area changes, then the coordinates would change. but it's as easy as spending a moment in MS Paint and putting the coordinates into the ini

 

Their wiki explains it well at the #3 requirement

https://www.rlauncher.com/wiki/index.php/Bezels

[damageinc86]

2 hours ago, skizzosjt said:

you can open the image in MS Paint, point your mouse to the corners you need to utilize for the game display area and make a note of the coordinates displayed to enter into the bezel ini. I found the system to be easy to use due to this.  if your bezel images are all the same dimensions and game display area then they can all use the same exact coordinates. like if they are all 1080p 16:9 and have a 4:3 aspect ratio for the game display area that goes to the edge of the screen then all games using bezels of that format can use the same coordinates. if the image dimensions change, maybe to 4K for ex, then coordinates would change. if the game display area changes, then the coordinates would change. but it's as easy as spending a moment in MS Paint and putting the coordinates into the ini

 

Their wiki explains it well at the #3 requirement

https://www.rlauncher.com/wiki/index.php/Bezels

Oh yeah I know about that. I spent too much time with Ms paint and mouse coordinates.  I tried so many times and the emulator would get thrown all over the place under the bezel.  I threw in the towel on that pretty quickly.  Just found some community files and then worked off those, because they already were in a working state.