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RETROARCH - The all-in-one emulator dreams are made of, son

Knurek

Member
It saves just fine, the remappings under controls save when you select "Save Core remap file" or "Save Game remap file"

Ah, you're right, I did not save the actual remap file, I thought it was done automatically.
Thank you.

That's a shader I recently wrote, going for a PVM-style, bold scanline look for my 1440p monitor:
It's available through the online updater.

That's actually pretty amazing, how are the requirements when compared to crt-easymode-halation?
 
From my testing, It's a bit faster than my halation shader.

So crt-aperture + 4k down sampled to 1080p + integer scale + core defined ratio = basically the best I could hope for in terms of a quick and dirty setup that just works full vertical resolution. I suppose you need a decent PC instead of a little android box or pi to make it happen but it sure is nice. Damn.

Crt-Royale was a slideshow for some reason. Crt-aperture worked no hitches on a 750 ti. The difference to my eye is insignificant at couch distance.

What a time to be alive.
 

alr1ght

bish gets all the credit :)
Anyone launching this from Steam (beta) with Dualshock 4 connected? It just completely wigs out as soon as it launches, no way to bind keys, etc.
 

Radius4

Member
I just tried with SCP and steam bp under win 10 and it's fine.
Steam is doing something weird with inputs lately. It's really not our fault.
 

Radius4

Member
1. So you come to a thread full of people that appreciate RetroArch with actual devs involved, call it shit then expect help? I will never understand this kind of attitude
2. Because no-one has implemented it? Pull requests are accepted.
What's terrible about the navigation? It's just as anything else you have an option to go one folder up and the current folder list....
Just configure a game directory...
3. I have ALL the MSU1 roms working you're just doing something wrong. Just load the BML as is.
 

Iced

Member
Textbook entitlement. Disgusting.

Retroarch devs: thanks for all the hard work you've poured into your free software for all these years. Rest assured, some of us truly appreciate it!
 

Easy_D

never left the stone age
Yeah I fucked up. Good on you guys for calling me out, calling it shit was uneccessary and for that I apologize.

1. So you come to a thread full of people that appreciate RetroArch with actual devs involved, call it shit then expect help? I will never understand this kind of attitude
2. Because no-one has implemented it? Pull requests are accepted.
What's terrible about the navigation? It's just as anything else you have an option to go one folder up and the current folder list....
Just configure a game directory...
3. I have ALL the MSU1 roms working you're just doing something wrong. Just load the BML as is.

Eh my only issue is adding stuff to the playlist is cumbersome, I had to specifically make a folder in the C:\ root starting with a 1 in the name to access the folder I add roms from quickly.
I did load the BML as is, all it does is crash, like you say I must have done something wrong, I'll try setting it up from scratch, if you can get 'em all running that's encouraging at least :)

On that note, how does Retroarch store roms, does it copy them to a specific folder like Higan or does it just add a path to the rom files internally?
Mainly wondering where I'm supposed to put the BML and the music files along with the patched rom, but if you load the BML manually just having them in the same folder should be enough right? I must have missed something really obvious as I did when I didn't get it running in 9X in the first place. Also thanks for adressing me rather than just calling me disgusting, it's appreciated. Though can't blame you guys for being upset.
 

Radius4

Member
Yeah I fucked up. Good on you guys for calling me out, calling it shit was uneccessary and for that I apologize.



Eh my only issue is adding stuff to the playlist is cumbersome, I had to specifically make a folder in the C:\ root starting with a 1 in the name to access the folder I add roms from quickly.
I did load the BML as is, all it does is crash, like you say I must have done something wrong, I'll try setting it up from scratch, if you can get 'em all running that's encouraging at least :)

On that note, how does Retroarch store roms, does it copy them to a specific folder like Higan or does it just add a path to the rom files internally?
Mainly wondering where I'm supposed to put the BML and the music files along with the patched rom, but if you load the BML manually just having them in the same folder should be enough right? I must have missed something really obvious as I did when I didn't get it running in 9X in the first place. Also thanks for adressing me rather than just calling me disgusting, it's appreciated. Though can't blame you guys for being upset.

No it doesn't mess with your files at all. Playlists basically have references to the original files.
We don't really like the higan way (enforcing folder layouts)

This is how my MSU folder layout looks
http://pastie.org/10968495#25

The only change I made from the roms when I got them is copied manifest.bml to romname.bml so they have at least separate entries on the history.
 

Easy_D

never left the stone age
No it doesn't mess with your files at all. Playlists basically have references to the original files.
We don't really like the higan way (enforcing folder layouts)

This is how my MSU folder layout looks
http://pastie.org/10968495#25

The only change I made from the roms when I got them is copied manifest.bml to romname.bml so they have at least separate entries on the history.

Massive massive thanks for that visual aid. Not only did I forget to copy the XML file, I also copied over the wrong audio files, copied the folder I set up for Higan instead (which forced me to rename every single music file lol). So even if I had loaded the rom properly I would't have gotten the streamed music. Crashed twice in a row after but turns out I didn't use the Load and Detect core option. Did so, the bml file appeared in the list and it loaded the bsnes core without issue :D. All of this could've been avoided if I'd just kept my cool lol. Time to enjoy Super Metroid with the fantastic orchestration without any stuttering :), which wouldn't be possible without RetroArch, so yeah, thanks to the devs for giving me an option to run my older games

Noticing the music is a tad loud though, must have applied the wrong patch.

I'm also curious, what is it exactly that RA does to manage to perfectly sync the frames to your monitor to avoid stuttering without sacrificing audio quality? Black magic?

Edit: After about 15 minutes of Super Metroid bliss I got somevery minor "pops" when there were more than two sound effects happening at once, every time a sound overlayed another there'd be this crack-pop sound instead of the proper sound effect, is this a bsnes thing? Perhaps it's better I try the Fast core instead of Balanced I remember similar issues in the past
 

Radius4

Member
It could be lots of things, rewind enabled for instance, or hard gpu sync.
The most usual culprit though is GPU drivers throttling down because low demand to the GPU. That happens a lot with windows/NVidia

It's fixed by changing the RetroArch profile in the NVidia control panel to maximum performance.
 

Easy_D

never left the stone age
Bumping audio latency up a notch from 64 seems to have mostly remedied the issue :D. Still get the occassional skip in sound effects but it's very minor and happens rarely.
 

Knurek

Member
Is there a way to combine Desmume quick switch option with a handheld border shader?
dsi_trickednvz04.jpg


When I enable the option with that shader, I always get the full border, with the actual visible screen visible over the empty areas:

advancewars-daysofrui3fk5v.png


Is there no way to have Retroarch switch between the lower and upper part of the border while switching screens, or am I missing some option someplace?
 

Radius4

Member
well... you could hack it around I guess.
Set an override shader dir.
Create two shaders in that dir with only the top and bottom portion
Map shader-next hotkey to the same button used for quick switch
 
Do you guys play your MAME games trough Retroarch? I am having problems getting any MAME cores to work.
I want to run Punisher for example and the game runs on mame and mameui64 without problems but here none of the MAME cores work with it. first I tried to load a 0.375b version of the Punisher on MAME 2000 since that's the core for that version but Retroarch just quits instantly, then I tried to run a 0.179 version of the same game on the other MAME cores but I get a runtime java error, like I said the roms load fine on Mameui64 and regular MAME latest version, any ideas?
 

Awakened

Member
Do you guys play your MAME games trough Retroarch? I am having problems getting any MAME cores to work.
I want to run Punisher for example and the game runs on mame and mameui64 without problems but here none of the MAME cores work with it. first I tried to load a 0.375b version of the Punisher on MAME 2000 since that's the core for that version but Retroarch just quits instantly, then I tried to run a 0.179 version of the same game on the other MAME cores but I get a runtime java error, like I said the roms load fine on Mameui64 and regular MAME latest version, any ideas?
Right now MAME2014 is probably the sweet spot on desktop since the 0.179 version still needs some work. 2014 is based on 0.159.
 
Anyone have any experience running RetroArch on a Sony XBR49X800D or any Android TV for that matter?

I am having trouble selecting cores to download. I don't know if it's an incompatibility with DualShock 4.
 

Radius4

Member
Anyone have any experience running RetroArch on a Sony XBR49X800D or any Android TV for that matter?

I am having trouble selecting cores to download. I don't know if it's an incompatibility with DualShock 4.

I just tried on my TV. The message read configured which means it matches with an existing autoconf but for some reason input doesn't register....

I will try with another pad tomorrow, maybe I just need to fix the map
 

Sillverrr

Member
I am having a nightmare getting Retroarch on my Shield TV to recognise my HORI CO.,LTD. Fighting Commander 4 joypad.

There is a file for this pad when you run the online updater for autoconfigs from within Retroarch itself, and I have manually changed the autoconfig directory to somewhere I can manually access the folder contents.

I can load the joypad autoconfig file, then manually bind all under User Inputs - but it's very screwy. I'm not at all sure there isn't an easier approach, as the autoconfig file seems to have the binds already set up - yet the emulator doesn't load any of these binds automatically.

Help!
 

Radius4

Member
Use a supported gamepad

  • Go to user 2 binds
  • Select user 2 default all
  • Select user 2 bind all (make sure to touch a button on the hori before doing this)
  • Bind the buttons
  • Test
  • Do user 2 save autoconf
  • User 2 default all
  • exit and start again
 

Sillverrr

Member
Interesting. I was trying to do a User 1 bind, but it wasn't having any of it, and was trashing the default workings of the Shield controllers to boot. I'll keep playing around later.

I'm just upset that Robert Broglia's emulators support any and all pads I attach by default, whereas Retroarch... doesn't.
 

Easy_D

never left the stone age
Seems I may have spoke too soon regarding fixing the audio crackle, although it's closer to an audio pop and it only happens in SNES emulation, when two sounds or more overlap with eachother, my Megadrive stuff runs perfectly though,
so naturally I thought it was bsnes demanding too much of my poor AMD CPU, but the issue is present in the 9X core as well

But yeah stuff I've tried based on info I've found so far: Threaded Video on/off, turning off audio/video sync indepdently of eachother as well as playing with the audio latency increasing it in increments.
Beyond that I've ran the refresh rate estimation thing to set up a proper refresh rate within retroarch itself, however I'm unsure if it bugs out on my system or not as the numbers go kind of wonky once it hits 2048 samples and it never hit a 5% error margin either.

Though after removing my custom resolution (which really was just my standard reso/refresh rate) it went as low as 4.5% but even then the audio issues persisted.
Typing this out gives me an idea though, if an uneven weird refresh rate is the culprit, wouldn't my easiest bet be to just set up my monitor to run at an even 59Hz when I'm using Retroarch?
I'll try that out and report back on that. For what it's worth trying to fix this has made me a pro at quickly navigating Retroarch, so setting up any future stuff will be an absolute breeze, so there's always that aspect of it. Also worth mentioning that I'm on Windows 10, wouldn't surprise me if that was the root of my issues entirely as I never had this much trouble in general in 7 or 8 lol
 

Awakened

Member
Seems I may have spoke too soon regarding fixing the audio crackle, although it's closer to an audio pop and it only happens in SNES emulation, when two sounds or more overlap with eachother, my Megadrive stuff runs perfectly though,
so naturally I thought it was bsnes demanding too much of my poor AMD CPU, but the issue is present in the 9X core as well

But yeah stuff I've tried based on info I've found so far: Threaded Video on/off, turning off audio/video sync indepdently of eachother as well as playing with the audio latency increasing it in increments.
Beyond that I've ran the refresh rate estimation thing to set up a proper refresh rate within retroarch itself, however I'm unsure if it bugs out on my system or not as the numbers go kind of wonky once it hits 2048 samples and it never hit a 5% error margin either.

Though after removing my custom resolution (which really was just my standard reso/refresh rate) it went as low as 4.5% but even then the audio issues persisted.
Typing this out gives me an idea though, if an uneven weird refresh rate is the culprit, wouldn't my easiest bet be to just set up my monitor to run at an even 59Hz when I'm using Retroarch?
I'll try that out and report back on that. For what it's worth trying to fix this has made me a pro at quickly navigating Retroarch, so setting up any future stuff will be an absolute breeze, so there's always that aspect of it. Also worth mentioning that I'm on Windows 10, wouldn't surprise me if that was the root of my issues entirely as I never had this much trouble in general in 7 or 8 lol
It would be weird if it was a refresh rate thing, since I've run on a 120hz monitor for years and have never noticed audio issues caused in any cores because of it. Refresh rate discrepancies usually just cause visual stutters/jittering.

Audio popping/crackling is almost always because of hitting the limit of your CPU, or something running in the background stealing your CPU cycles. It's worth checking your Windows power settings and trying the high performance profile. Sometimes similar power saving settings in your video drivers can limit performance too.

I used to have to set my Windows power profile to high performance in 7 to not get crackling in heavier cores like Mednafen-PSX, but after upgrading to 10, Balanced has no problem with it. Even Mednafen-Saturn is fine for me on Balanced. I haven't had to mess with any Nvidia power settings either. I have a 2500k though; always heard that AMD CPU's can be troublesome for emulation.
 

Easy_D

never left the stone age
I did check with MSI Afterburner and none of my CPU cores are actually maxed out when the audio pops happen, max usage I saw was 60% on one core, but mostly sits around the 20-30% mark. Though that obviously doesn't mean there isn't a thread that's not being run properly. The Threaded Video option didn't affect it at all so it's probably GPU and / or GPU driver related if I understand that specific setting right. Forcing the GPU to run at full speed with Afterburner also made the popping less frequent but didn't reduce it enough

It's worth pointing out that the problem is at its worst in Super Metroid with the MSU1 patch, maybe that causes enough strain on my CPU for bsnes to not be a viable option, it is just an FX6300 after all :p.
At least the custom resolution made emulators outside Retroarch run smooth as butter again so that means I can at least enjoy the MSU1 stuff with that one build of SNES9X.

All the other cores for other systems have been absolutely fine though , (apart from it not importing the Sonic 3 & Knuckles rom I got via SEGA Classics on Steam, know there are workarounds, too lazy and dumb to make 'em work :p).
Megadrive stuff looks awesome with some CRT shaders thrown on for good measure.
 

Radius4

Member
It's not about the CPU hitting the absolute max.
Basically the drivers see it is as a low demand application and just say... ok let's save some power instead.

It's not a windows exclusive thing either.
For instance SNES9x w/SFX games on android crackle a lot unless the screen is touched. Reason? The SFX routines actually sleep for a while, not sure why. So android figures out the application is not really demanding and throttles down.

Touching the screen boosts frequency to the max (project "butter", touchboost, etc).
 
I'm using the Mednafen core to play Ace combat 3's fan translation, I was wondering if there's any way to skip the PSX boot animations or speed up loading screens? Also, the game is detecting the controller as the original D-Pad controller, instead of as a Dualshock. any way to fix that?

Sorry for the setup questions, this is my first time using retroarch.

Edit: Also, how do you change internal resolution? I just cannot find it, forum posts say it should be in Core Config, but after loading the Mednafen core and going to Settings column -> Core, there's just 4 options and nothing relevant to the config settings I'm looking for.
 

Knurek

Member
I'm using the Mednafen core to play Ace combat 3's fan translation, I was wondering if there's any way to skip the PSX boot animations or speed up loading screens

You can configure Retroarch to autosave and autoload a savestate.
Just don't save during the PSX boot animation, as doing so will result in crash on load - any time afterwards is fine.
 
You can configure Retroarch to autosave and autoload a savestate.
Just don't save during the PSX boot animation, as doing so will result in crash on load - any time afterwards is fine.

Thanks! I figured out my other issues too, I guess I need to load the game, then go back into the menu and I have the config options for the core.

But now for some reason, now RetroArch isn't seeing my saves from yesterday. Not sure how I broke that yet.

Edit:
OOOOH, I had gone into the menu after loading the game and selected "overwrite configuration for this game", no wonder autosave and autoload got so janked up! Everything works fine now, finally!
 

Easy_D

never left the stone age
It's not about the CPU hitting the absolute max.
Basically the drivers see it is as a low demand application and just say... ok let's save some power instead.

It's not a windows exclusive thing either.
For instance SNES9x w/SFX games on android crackle a lot unless the screen is touched. Reason? The SFX routines actually sleep for a while, not sure why. So android figures out the application is not really demanding and throttles down.

Touching the screen boosts frequency to the max (project "butter", touchboost, etc).

It'd be nice if you could set up profiles for programs to force your computer/phone/tablet to throw everything it has at it to avoid blips like that.
 

Easy_D

never left the stone age
Well, boo @ AMD then. Unless setting up a custom profile for Retro does the trick. Fakedit: Which of course it doesn't, lol. I'll have to fiddle with Afterburner then, it doesn't seem to always get the "overclock" going properly in games that don't make the GPU enter high performance mode for some reason.
 
Well, boo @ AMD then. Unless setting up a custom profile for Retro does the trick. Fakedit: Which of course it doesn't, lol. I'll have to fiddle with Afterburner then, it doesn't seem to always get the "overclock" going properly in games that don't make the GPU enter high performance mode for some reason.

fwiw you can try changing the windows power mode to performance, if it's currently set to balanced or power saver mode. Probably won't solve your problem, but worth a shot.
 

Easy_D

never left the stone age
fwiw you can try changing the windows power mode to performance, if it's currently set to balanced or power saver mode. Probably won't solve your problem, but worth a shot.

Have done that to fix other issues, so unfortunately that's a no-go, anyway I consider the issue "solved" since I can do MSU-1 stuff fine in 9X outside of RA, only a matter of time before a core based on that version shows up within it and then there won't be any issues for me whatsoever.

On an unrelated note: In Sonic 2, is it accurate to an actual Genesis that the music gets a bit muffled when you spam the spindash move? A couple seconds later it sounds crisp as day again, it's odd and I can't believe I never noticed that before lol, if I pause/unpause it goes back to crystal clarity immediately.

Edit: Wait that was my equalizer settings, they adapt to whatever audio's playing and my temporary shitty earplugs don't play nice with it.
 

ss_lemonade

Member
Anyone know what the best, least buggy android nightly is? It's been a while since I last updated but decided to yesterday and well, the newest nightly has a bunch of newer problems (shader and overlay issues). It's weird too why your selected File Browser directory path has been moved to be used by a "Favorites" option now, instead of just how it's been for a while with "Select File". Confused me a bit there.

I tried the current stable build on the Play Store and that one has a bug too where you can't change overlay sizes.
 

Aeana

Member
Hm, so is the PPSSPP core no longer maintained? I noticed it hasn't been updated in over a year. I was trying to play FF4 and the "latest" core gives a writerest error, and the older build that's out there without that error has some issues like crashing on the Mist Dragon and some corruption on the overworld. Pretty unfortunate.

PPSSPP itself still doesn't let you map certain things like screenshotting to the gamepad, which is also irritating.
 
Anyone know what the best, least buggy android nightly is? It's been a while since I last updated but decided to yesterday and well, the newest nightly has a bunch of newer problems (shader and overlay issues). It's weird too why your selected File Browser directory path has been moved to be used by a "Favorites" option now, instead of just how it's been for a while with "Select File". Confused me a bit there.

I tried the current stable build on the Play Store and that one has a bug too where you can't change overlay sizes.

I don't have an answer to your question, just sort of adding to it on the same subject:

On the more recent Android nightly builds I've tried, a lot of the gamepad overlays won't work properly in portrait mode in Vulkan. They still work in portrait mode under the gl video driver though. The button to "shrink" down the overlay in portrait causes it to disappear altogether under Vulkan drivers.
 

Alszem

Member
Is the PPSSPP core supposed to be buggy? I can't even launch a game. I get a black screen and Retroarch automatically crashes. The standalone version of PPSSPP works fine and I copied the necessary folders in system/PPSSPP without success.

To be honest, the information I found was way too confusing for me, so I'm hoping someone will be able to explain how to make this work in layman's terms.
 

Awakened

Member
Hm, so is the PPSSPP core no longer maintained? I noticed it hasn't been updated in over a year. I was trying to play FF4 and the "latest" core gives a writerest error, and the older build that's out there without that error has some issues like crashing on the Mist Dragon and some corruption on the overworld. Pretty unfortunate.

PPSSPP itself still doesn't let you map certain things like screenshotting to the gamepad, which is also irritating.
From what I've read in #retroarch, there's some stuff no longer present in mainline which makes it impossible to update the existing port. So the port has to be redone from scratch. Now that MAME is up to date again (0.180 builds for Windows here, since they're not on the buildbot yet) I think it's something they might prioritize after the next stable build of RA is out. Maybe the patreon funds will help push it along too.

Is the PPSSPP core supposed to be buggy? I can't even launch a game. I get a black screen and Retroarch automatically crashes. The standalone version of PPSSPP works fine and I copied the necessary folders in system/PPSSPP without success.

To be honest, the information I found was way too confusing for me, so I'm hoping someone will be able to explain how to make this work in layman's terms.
I think a specific set of assets is needed depending on which build of the core you're using. Chucking this version of ppge_atlas.zim into your system\PPSSPP folder should work for the older version of the core I uploaded from before that one error started appearing.

Hopefully when the core is redone that stuff can be baked into the DLL.
 

Alszem

Member
I think a specific set of assets is needed depending on which build of the core you're using. Chucking this version of ppge_atlas.zim into your system\PPSSPP folder should work for the older version of the core I uploaded from before that one error started appearing.

Hopefully when the core is redone that stuff can be baked into the DLL.

It still doesn't work...

I don't really understand what you mean by "a specific set of assets". I'm using the latest version of PPSSPP and I copied the "assets" and "flash0" folders from my PPSSPP folder to the system/PPSSPP folder. Aren't they the ones I'm supposed to copy?
 

Awakened

Member
It still doesn't work...

I don't really understand what you mean by "a specific set of assets". I'm using the latest version of PPSSPP and I copied the "assets" and "flash0" folders from my PPSSPP folder to the system/PPSSPP folder. Aren't they the ones I'm supposed to copy?
I remember someone saying the newest core used a newer set of the atlas and font files.

Did you put the atlas file in system/PPSSPP? That's where I have it; it probably doesn't work if you put it in the assets folder.
 

Alszem

Member
I remember someone saying the newest core used a newer set of the atlas and font files.

Did you put the atlas file in system/PPSSPP? That's where I have it; it probably doesn't work if you put it in the assets folder.

I put it in the system/PPSSPP folder.
 
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