General Emulation Discussion

Inviere · 25-06-2018 6:19pm

Tom Mann Centuria wrote: »

hopefully it'll appear online to buy here. Definite Christmas present.

Because $30~ €50 :rolleyes: - https://www.odroid.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=838

Tom Mann Centuria · 25-06-2018 6:36pm

Inviere wrote: »

Because $30~ €50 :rolleyes: - https://www.odroid.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=838

D'oh. That's annoying.

guile4582 · 27-06-2018 11:01am

rubadub wrote: »

I think you can put N64 roms in a N64 folder and then associate that folder with that core.

I am only new to it myself. I have all the roms (all arcarde) just on the root of a USB key, when I go into "Load Content" and select one it brings up a choice of cores I could use, and I pick one of the MAME ones. So if you go to load conent and click on the N64 rom it might do the same.

Neither of my MAME emus seem that good though, I am wondering what the best is. One is MAME 2000 can't remember the other. Maybe I should be downloading a 3rd?

Some games (e.g. splatterhouse) do not load at all. The rom works fine on mame on a PC.

Retroarch doesnt recognise the N64 content in my folder - so its an empty folder

Inviere · 27-06-2018 3:05pm

guile4582 wrote: »

Retroarch doesnt recognise the N64 content in my folder - so its an empty folder

It seems N64 on the PS3 isn't a runner, hence no Retorarch core for it - https://www.reddit.com/r/PS3/comments/8idqh3/n64_emulator/

guile4582 · 28-06-2018 10:44am

Inviere wrote: »

It seems N64 on the PS3 isn't a runner, hence no Retorarch core for it - https://www.reddit.com/r/PS3/comments/8idqh3/n64_emulator/

:mad:

all i want it for is Mario Kart 64
playing Mario Kart on the SNES just doesnt cut it

Inviere · 28-06-2018 3:20pm

guile4582 wrote: »

:mad:

all i want it for is Mario Kart 64
playing Mario Kart on the SNES just doesnt cut it

Pi3 as a solution? Skip to 11:30

Doge · 01-07-2018 11:27pm

Man the Vita hack was an absolute pig to do but I got there in the end despite no sleep from partying the night before!

Lots of faffing about with the command line, no more is it a simple case of visiting a website.

One obstacle I had was that I have windows 10 N installed on my laptop which doesn't have the old windows media player and the Sony Vita content management assistant wouldn't install without it.

One limitation of Retroarch on the Vita is that it doesn't support shaders for CRT emulation, only overlays and the one CRT overlay I saw for the system darkens the image and doesn't look good.

Very happy thought to have a fairly inexpensive retro gaming portable with decent controls. Just waiting on sd2vita and a 128gb Microsd card next.

eddhorse · 02-07-2018 12:26pm

Nice work well done

Inviere · 04-07-2018 8:20pm

Doge wrote: »

Man the Vita hack was an absolute pig to do

There's some automated tools coming out now it seems, to take the work out of it. Reminds me of when the Nes/Snes Mini's were originally hacked, they were quite labour intensive to hack, but not long after there became automated/easier ways to do it. Anyway - http://wololo.net/2018/07/03/auto-h-encore-automate-most-of-h-encore-hack-installation-on-your-ps-vita/

2ndcoming · 05-07-2018 2:24pm

What's the most painless route to a little portable emulation machine?

I had been considering a 1st gen 3DS XL with R4 card for Nes/Snes/MD emulation, anyone got an opinion on these?

Ideally I'd like to be able to do it without hacking or hardmodding the machine ie still have access to Nintendo shop for 3DS / Virtual console titles and access to online play etc.

Gamer Bhoy 89 · 05-07-2018 11:33pm

I have always wanted to ask this question....

When it comes to emulating games, does anyone here actually sit down and play the roms for a significant length of time - maybe even finishing them?

I have attempted it a few times but something consciously hits me on the back of my mind telling me "you're doing it wrong" and I often won't bother playing the game properly because it doesn't feel right...........

I often use emulation as a way to mess around and try a bunch of games I never heard of for no longer than 5 minutes, mostly for the novelty.

Is it just me??

2ndcoming · 06-07-2018 1:16am

Gamer Bhoy 89 wrote: »

I have always wanted to ask this question....

When it comes to emulating games, does anyone here actually sit down and play the roms for a significant length of time - maybe even finishing them?

I have attempted it a few times but something consciously hits me on the back of my mind telling me "you're doing it wrong" and I often won't bother playing the game properly because it doesn't feel right...........

I often use emulation as a way to mess around and try a bunch of games I never heard of for no longer than 5 minutes, mostly for the novelty.

Is it just me??

I've played through Super Mario World, Super Metroid and A Link To The Past on emulators once every year or two since about 2006. Aside from that it's mostly messing around trying different stuff for me as well.

Inviere · 06-07-2018 9:41am

Gamer Bhoy 89 wrote: »

I have always wanted to ask this question....

When it comes to emulating games, does anyone here actually sit down and play the roms for a significant length of time - maybe even finishing them?

I have attempted it a few times but something consciously hits me on the back of my mind telling me "you're doing it wrong" and I often won't bother playing the game properly because it doesn't feel right...........

I often use emulation as a way to mess around and try a bunch of games I never heard of for no longer than 5 minutes, mostly for the novelty.

Is it just me??

I find you need to have a proper library interface, in order to avoid the feeling you describe. If it’s a case of opening an emulator, clicking load, selecting a rom, and maximizing the screen, I’ll definitely agree it feels like an incomplete, disjointed experience.

How I’ve handled it, is to have all my emulators set up and running under Launchbox. This way, it’s presented to me as a much more polished experience. It scrapes artwork like box art, cart images, gameplay pictures, emumovies previewsif you choose, and so forth. It also scrapes metadata for all the systems and games. Personally I browse my games by system, and then it shows the box art for the games for that system.

It’s akin to browsing games on a Snes Mini, or browsing digital titles on any modern console, etc, the polished GUI makes it feel more complete. As a result, when I play a given game, I don’t get that “this isn’t quite right” feeling. Setting up Launchbox and Retroarch can be a bit of a time investment, but for me, it’s been wholly worth it to avoid that feeling you’re talking about.

Edit - I meant to add, it also helps hugely to be using a tv (with some of the gorgeous RetroArch display options) instead of a computer monitor on a computer desk. Couple that with a decent controller like an 8bitdo or Xbox One controller, and it goes from “not quite right”, to, “this is actually pretty cool.”

Doge · 06-07-2018 10:43am

Since I modded the Vita I've been playing the **** out of Total Drivin' from the PS1. I think the PS1 emulation is excellent on the device, no slow down. Just having a portable device you can play on the go or in bed means I probably end up playing more than k would on a console!

The emulator is within the psp emulator which you can access via Adrenaline, it even has the PSP XMB screen so it fully emulates a psp.

I think it uses an official Sony emulator or something for PS1 games, I have to look into it.

Inviere · 06-07-2018 10:46am

Doge wrote: »

The emulator is within the psp emulator which you can access via Adrenaline, it even has the PSP XMB screen so it fully emulates a psp.

I think it uses an official Sony emulator or something for PS1 games, I have to look into it.

As far as I know, Adrenaline is an extension of the Vita’s inbuilt compatibility with PSP....I don’t actually think it’s emulation. I could be wrong, but I think it’s hardware based

Gamer Bhoy 89 · 06-07-2018 11:06am

Inviere wrote: »

I find you need to have a proper library interface, in order to avoid the feeling you describe. If it’s a case of opening an emulator, clicking load, selecting a rom, and maximizing the screen, I’ll definitely agree it feels like an incomplete, disjointed experience.

How I’ve handled it, is to have all my emulators set up and running under Launchbox. This way, it’s presented to me as a much more polished experience. It scrapes artwork like box art, cart images, gameplay pictures, emumovies previewsif you choose, and so forth. It also scrapes metadata for all the systems and games. Personally I browse my games by system, and then it shows the box art for the games for that system.

It’s akin to browsing games on a Snes Mini, or browsing digital titles on any modern console, etc, the polished GUI makes it feel more complete. As a result, when I play a given game, I don’t get that “this isn’t quite right” feeling. Setting up Launchbox and Retroarch can be a bit of a time investment, but for me, it’s been wholly worth it to avoid that feeling you’re talking about.

Edit - I meant to add, it also helps hugely to be using a tv (with some of the gorgeous RetroArch display options) instead of a computer monitor on a computer desk. Couple that with a decent controller like an 8bitdo or Xbox One controller, and it goes from “not quite right”, to, “this is actually pretty cool.”

RetroArch does seem to have eliminated aforementioned disjointed sensation. I also think getting it built into a Pi would be ideal for me but I'm not close to buying something like that for a while so I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I also have Launchbox but I haven't got a clue what it's really for or why I would need it as opposed to RA as it still looks like a lot of clicking around to open things.

Thankfully I use a 32" Sony LED for everything, including the PC so I always have a good experience display-wise.

Doge · 06-07-2018 11:07am

Inviere wrote: »

As far as I know, Adrenaline is an extension of the Vita’s inbuilt compatibility with PSP....I don’t actually think it’s emulation. I could be wrong, but I think it’s hardware based

Looks like you're right!

Found this post on gbatemp and the guy seems to know what's hes taking about the most:

https://gbatemp.net/threads/how-accurate-is-psp-emulation-on-vita.412851/

You're both wrong as there is MIPS hardware in the Vita. Of course nobody has delayered the main SoC to prove it (there are reports behind expensive paywalls though). However, the main RAM in the psp hardware is shared with the Vita, and kermit is used to implement many of the devices (memory card for example). DMA is used for the screen buffer and a shared sram is used for other things like control input and such. A simple heuristic for reasoning that it's not emulated (but not the only reason): consider every file in the vita os0: vs0: dump that relates to the PSP. Of course we can't decrypt them, but looking at the sizes, if you remove the flash0 files (which of course takes up a lot of space), the "emulator" is ~100kb total; that's impossible without some hardware. You can compare this with the size of PSP emulator on the PS3

Doge · 06-07-2018 11:14am

Gamer Bhoy 89 wrote: »

Thankfully I use a 32" Sony LED for everything, including the PC so I always have a good experience display-wise.

I think Inviere meant the CRT emulation options which make it look like an old TV. PS1 games and earlier look horribly pixelated and blocky on modern led/LCD TV's.

Once you see the difference between them there's no going back to no scanlines or shadow mask wether it's emulated or not!

Inviere · 06-07-2018 11:16am

Gamer Bhoy 89 wrote: »

I also have Launchbox but I haven't got a clue what it's really for or why I would need it as opposed to RA as it still looks like a lot of clicking around to open things.

Launchbox is in essence a frontend, for whatever you want to run underneath it. It definitely goes hand in hand with RetroArch in my opinion, because you can very very easily browse your library with a controller, one button to run a game, one button to close the game, browse to a different system, etc etc. It completes the experience with artwork, metadata, preview vids, and so forth. Using RetrArch without LB is fine, but again you’re back to loading up RA, loading a particular core, and then loading a rom...it’s back to being somewhat disjointing.

I basically sold off my collection in favour of an emulation setup, so for me, the experience had to be fulfilling. Were it not for Launchbox, I may not have gone this route because none of the other frontends gave the feeling of polished completion that LB does. I’ve come to actively dislike Hyperspin, it’s a flashy garish mess

Steve X2 · 06-07-2018 11:25am

Inviere wrote: »

I’ve come to actively dislike Hyperspin, it’s a flashy garish mess

I agree to a certain extent. To me running Hyperspin on a PC screen or TV just looks and feels crappy. But when running it on a nice Jap candy cab I think it looks "right". As in it looks tacky and garish, just like it should, on a arcade machine

I paid for the full Launchbox premium thingy, but haven't got around to setting it up properly just yet. I really must get on it as otherwise its wasted money.

Inviere · 06-07-2018 11:40am

Steve X2 wrote: »

But when running it on a nice Jap candy cab I think it looks "right". As in it looks tacky and garish, just like it should, on a arcade machine

Its 15Khz support is its primary ‘selling feature’, definitely. I do find it quite annoying with the barrage of colours and sounds after some time though.

I paid for the full Launchbox premium thingy, but haven't got around to setting it up properly just yet. I really must get on it as otherwise its wasted money.

In its free guise, it’s a very effective, clean, and has the whole “does what it says on the tin” thing going on. In its Premium guise, it opens up Big Box mode which is akin to what Hyperspin does. The thing is, depending on how you like to configure things, you can have it as clean or as garish as you like with the various themes and config options available. I don’t think it has 15Khz support, but if it did it’d be a no brainer to replace HS given how simple it is to add systems and games to it.

It has Dosbox support and a nice little wizard to install Dos games, which I played around with yesterday. Got some old Star Trek games running, which are now just one click to run just like everything else with it. Very very convenient and easy

Gamer Bhoy 89 · 06-07-2018 11:46am

Inviere wrote: »

Launchbox is in essence a frontend, for whatever you want to run underneath it. It definitely goes hand in hand with RetroArch in my opinion, because you can very very easily browse your library with a controller, one button to run a game, one button to close the game, browse to a different system, etc etc. It completes the experience with artwork, metadata, preview vids, and so forth. Using RetrArch without LB is fine, but again you’re back to loading up RA, loading a particular core, and then loading a rom...it’s back to being somewhat disjointing.

I basically sold off my collection in favour of an emulation setup, so for me, the experience had to be fulfilling. Were it not for Launchbox, I may not have gone this route because none of the other frontends gave the feeling of polished completion that LB does. I’ve come to actively dislike Hyperspin, it’s a flashy garish mess

Okay I got Launchbox Premium and I already love how it's displayed but I have a lot of work to do here, so I'm gonna have to tinker with it and get it all set up properly. Is there any reliable tutorials around?

Inviere · 06-07-2018 11:50am

Gamer Bhoy 89 wrote: »

Okay I got Launchbox Premium and I already love how it's displayed but I have a lot of work to do here, so I'm gonna have to tinker with it and get it all set up properly. Is there any reliable tutorials around?

My advice is to create a brand new RetroArch folder and installation, one that’ll be dedicated to working with LB. Always best to start from a blank canvas when it comes to potentially detailed and intricate setups like this. I’ll try find the tut I used, bear with me...

Inviere · 06-07-2018 11:53am

Launchbox actually have their own tut vid, this is the one I used (albeit this is an updated one) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6LYInn8xOI

Inviere · 06-07-2018 12:19pm

^^ also, my advice would be to approach it in the following order:

Set up a stock RetroArch installation
Follow to tut above to set up RA in Launchbox
Set up the systems you want, leave handhelds until last
Set up handhelds, you’ll want to use config overrides for these (if you want to use overlays for them that is, like pic of a Gameboy with your screen positioned where the real screen goes. This is far better than just stretching out the image given how low res these games are. If you need help with this just ask).
Then set up display niceties like shaders etc.
Then and only then bother with Big Box and other Premium features.

Gamer Bhoy 89 · 06-07-2018 12:42pm

Inviere wrote: »

^^ also, my advice would be to approach it in the following order:
Set up a stock RetroArch installation

Follow to tut above to set up RA in Launchbox

Set up the systems you want, leave handhelds until last

Set up handhelds, you’ll want to use config overrides for these (if you want to use overlays for them that is, like pic of a Gameboy with your screen positioned where the real screen goes. This is far better than just stretching out the image given how low res these games are. If you need help with this just ask).

Then set up display niceties like shaders etc.

Then and only then bother with Big Box and other Premium features.

Noted -- That tutorial was very easy to follow. I just wish my CPU was as quick as his lol Everything loaded really fast for him - I had to pause every so often so I could catch up :pac:

Gamer Bhoy 89 · 06-07-2018 12:46pm

I think I can do the rest on my own now - I've a fair idea what I'm doing now and I can always chime back if I get stuck.

Cheers Inviere you didn't have to go through that effort to help me out. Much appreciated

megaten · 06-07-2018 12:50pm

I just use this to add emulated games I wan't to ply to steam.

https://frogthefrog.github.io/steam-rom-manager/

Inviere · 06-07-2018 1:55pm

Gamer Bhoy 89 wrote: »

I think I can do the rest on my own now - I've a fair idea what I'm doing now and I can always chime back if I get stuck.

Cheers Inviere you didn't have to go through that effort to help me out. Much appreciated

No worries at all, any questions just ask. It can get a bit confusing when it comes to core overrides and using custom commands in Launchbox. For example, the Gameboy core runs Gameboy, and Gameboy Colour roms. So you need to tell LB how to differentiate between the two, so it loads the correct overlay on screen (basically which Gameboy image it puts on screen, the original type or the GBC). You can of course have them all mixed in together but I prefer everything sorted in the correct way. Then you need to tell LB to tell RA which shader to load for handhelds, for instance Gameboy has a lovely one which replicates the dot matrix of the original screen, but you want your SNes core to have a different shader when that loads, so it’s all done with different configs.

megaten wrote: »

I just use this to add emulated games I wan't to ply to steam.

https://frogthefrog.github.io/steam-rom-manager/

Interesting, I was half considering adding my Steam library to Launchbox

Inviere · 10-07-2018 9:44pm

Nice vid here on turning your PS TV (and by extension, your Vita), into a half decent emulation machine for PSP, PS1, & several others

General Emulation Discussion

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