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

You need to have Sega CD bios in your system folder.
Thanks for your reply. It still doesn't work after throwing a few bios *.bin files at the RetroArch system folder and the console/command prompt disappears immediately after I launch the game. I can't read what's wrong. Frustrating.

Anyway I'm playing this on Kega Fusion for now. Runs super fine
 

EasyMode

Member
Thanks for your reply. It still doesn't work after throwing a few bios *.bin files at the RetroArch system folder and the console/command prompt disappears immediately I can't read what's wrong. Frustrating.

Anyway I'm playing this on Kega Fusion for now. Runs super fine

If you open a command prompt first and run RetroArch from there it won't disappear immediately after RA exits.
 

Radius4

Member
Thanks for your reply. It still doesn't work after throwing a few bios *.bin files at the RetroArch system folder and the console/command prompt disappears immediately after I launch the game. I can't read what's wrong. Frustrating.

Anyway I'm playing this on Kega Fusion for now. Runs super fine

Select the core and go into "Core Information" it will tell you if you have the required BIOS files
 

Radius4

Member
I updated PPSSPP to windows x64 and it should be easier to keep it up-to-date now that we have a CI server.

Still fails building for win32...
 
try disabling autoconfig and mapping manually

Prior to trying this, I downloaded last nite's build and all seems to be working fine with both controllers! Thanks for the tip though. :D

On another note, I can't seem to get Mario Kart to work at all with bsnes. It has worked with every single other game I've tried.

EDIT: Oh do you have to use the bsnes mercury core for Mario Kart and a few others?
 

Radius4

Member
Prior to trying this, I downloaded last nite's build and all seems to be working fine with both controllers! Thanks for the tip though. :D

On another note, I can't seem to get Mario Kart to work at all with bsnes. It has worked with every single other game I've tried.

EDIT: Oh do you have to use the bsnes mercury core for Mario Kart and a few others?

You need the DSP roms, check the core information panel
 
If you open a command prompt first and run RetroArch from there it won't disappear immediately after RA exits.
Lol I feel ashamed I should have known that... You guys were right I was missing the Sega CD bios file... Well actually I had the right one in the system folder *but* it needs to be named bios_CD_U.bin for the game (Snatcher on Sega CD) to launch

Thanks !

retroarch-0208-112825d3u3z.png
retroarch-0208-112843yjujt.png

Select the core and go into "Core Information" it will tell you if you have the required BIOS files
Good to know
 

Conan-san

Member
So is there any way to make the genesis_plus_gx core not constantly come out of focus when it switches video modes?

Also, what's the deal with it expanding Sonic 2's 2p mode video to full size?
 

ILoveBish

Member
Looks like some work has been happening on porting Dolphin to Retroarch.

https://github.com/libretro/dolphin

I guess it doesn't build yet, but it is being worked on still. From what i understand, it will run out of the box, or you can load the actual full emulator menu from retroarch and use dolphin as you would normally on pc.
 

Joey Ravn

Banned
Looks like some work has been happening on porting Dolphin to Retroarch.

https://github.com/libretro/dolphin

I guess it doesn't build yet, but it is being worked on still. From what i understand, it will run out of the box, or you can load the actual full emulator menu from retroarch and use dolphin as you would normally on pc.

Interesting. I wonder how it will work with the fast nature of Dolphin dev releases. I guess the RetroArch port will not be able to follow them 1:1, but I hope that it will at least be able to keep up with them weekly. Be as it may, great news!
 

Radius4

Member
We have a continuous integration server now, and a buildbot.
I think the only showstopper to keep it up to date once it's working would be changes in the GL backend
 
Can anyone recommend a GBA shader? I've tried the lcd_cgwg one, but I'm not a fan of the refresh rate. Admittedly I haven't taken the time to try and change it how I want (I actually couldn't figure it out), I was just curious if anyone has had success with a different shader.
 

Rich!

Member
Can anyone recommend a GBA shader? I've tried the lcd_cgwg one, but I'm not a fan of the refresh rate. Admittedly I haven't taken the time to try and change it how I want (I actually couldn't figure it out), I was just curious if anyone has had success with a different shader.

Not really in terms of LCD. Some CRT shaders look great with GBA games, like crt-easymode
 

Knurek

Member
Can anyone recommend a GBA shader? I've tried the lcd_cgwg one, but I'm not a fan of the refresh rate. Admittedly I haven't taken the time to try and change it how I want (I actually couldn't figure it out), I was just curious if anyone has had success with a different shader.

crt-caligari with SPOT_HEIGHT set to 0.8
 

Radius4

Member
CT Special Forces 3: Bioterror

Thanks. Shaders and GBA are a tricky combination, Royale is too strong, smoothing shaders work well for some titles and others not...

I'm still trying to tweak royale + image adjustment to suit GBA for me:


I need to diminish the effect of the scanlines somewhat but I do like the way metroid looks. Too bad Royale doesn't work well with 640x480 games, it flickers a lot there, I was trying it on some DOS games and some look good:


But Twinsen's Oddisey and Duke Nukem don't really work well with this shader. Also this looks pretty darn perfect for me:


Back on topic, we fixed soft filters and video recording recently, there was a threading bug affecting this and SRAM auto-save. Also we fixed desmume nightlies for Android.

SRAM auto-save is still segfaulting sometimes but it should be fixed soon. A lot of effort is being put into OSX/iOS builds now, and in the XMB, hopefully it will be usable in 1.1.
The new settings menu is odd, but you can go back to the old layout by changing menu_collapse_subgroups_enable to false, I'll make it a default on future nightlies. At least the CI server is helping us spot build errors immediately now, I'll keep adding cores to the CI server in the following weeks.
 
Radius4, I'm assuming you're a developer on Retroarch? Maybe you can help me with my problem.

When using any of the bsnes cores (performance, balanced, accuracy), anytime I have GPU sync on my audio gets really distorted and makes the game unplayable for me. I'm using the stable build 1.0.0.2, and my CPU is a 4770k 3.5ghz. I can play the standalone higan accuracy emulator with no problems. And every other core I've tried in Retoarch works fine as well with GPU sync. Any suggestions?
 

Aku-Audi

Member
I got a question.

On some configs like Nintendo DS, I have the overlay transparency set to 1.00, but whenever I want to change settings or load games after selecting the config, the overlay completely covers the UI to the point I can't see anything, is there a way to make the Retroarch UI always go ontop of the overlays?
 

Aku-Audi

Member
Another problem I am having with the nightly builds is that I can't seem to edit any custom aspect ratio or screen size, meaning most games just go outside of any overlay border.
 

Awakened

Member
Radius4, I'm assuming you're a developer on Retroarch? Maybe you can help me with my problem.

When using any of the bsnes cores (performance, balanced, accuracy), anytime I have GPU sync on my audio gets really distorted and makes the game unplayable for me. I'm using the stable build 1.0.0.2, and my CPU is a 4770k 3.5ghz. I can play the standalone higan accuracy emulator with no problems. And every other core I've tried in Retoarch works fine as well with GPU sync. Any suggestions?
The nightly Win64 builds of BSNES seem more optimized for me. Changing the Windows Power plan from Balanced to High Performance in the control panel helps on some people's systems too. I have to do that on my 2500k 3.3ghz to get full speed (no sound crackling) on special chip games while hard sync frames is set to 0. I have to set it to 1 to avoid crackles on those games if I use the Royale shader. This is all on the Balanced core.

I tested Accuracy and it runs much better than last time I tried it. I can do hard sync frames 1 and Royale and get no crackles in KSS and YI. I do get minor crackles on the title screen of MMX2, but gameplay is fine. Accuracy is only really needed to show the shadow in Air Strike Patrol anyways.
 
Tried this out on my Nexus 7 last night, and the latency is really bad. I think it's a normal Android thing, and it's probably OK for like turn based RPGs but it makes Mario basically unplayable; I tried Mario Advance 4 and it's like Gameboy Player level of latency.

Does anyone know of a way to improve this at all? I'm still on 4.4.4 cause I'm worried about bugginess and compatibility on 5.0. Would upgrading improve latency significantly?
 
Are they bug filled, or just not as double checked as the stables?

I've never understood the differences in software between, stables, betas and nightlies

They're not particularly buggy. I've been running only random nightlies forever and rarely had trouble with them.

Basically, a nightly is literally a build compiled each day, with whatever features have been completed and committed by the developers. A stable release is one that has been identified and chosen to be a "full," versioned release that's undergone further testing.

With most software, nightlies can be unstable and versioned releases are regular enough that it's worth holding out for them. With a lot of emulators, you see nightlies that actually are pretty safe to run, and less frequent stable releases, so everyone just runs the nightly builds.
 

Radius4

Member
CT Special Forces 3: Bioterror
Thanks!

Are they bug filled, or just not as double checked as the stables?

I've never understood the differences in software between, stables, betas and nightlies

They are rolling releases, there may be unexpected changes, features not ready for general usage. Most of the time they work great though

Thanks, turning off threaded video definitely helped. There's still a decent amount of latency but probably OK for all but precise jumps.

I might try upgrading to 5.0 and see if that helps.

Latency and android are best friends.. not much you can do about that. Audio latency is terrible compared to iOS, that's why there aren't that many professional music applications for android..

Threaded video sacrifices a bit of lag for smooth framerate by decoupling video rendering from the main thread.

Radius4, I'm assuming you're a developer on Retroarch? Maybe you can help me with my problem.

When using any of the bsnes cores (performance, balanced, accuracy), anytime I have GPU sync on my audio gets really distorted and makes the game unplayable for me. I'm using the stable build 1.0.0.2, and my CPU is a 4770k 3.5ghz. I can play the standalone higan accuracy emulator with no problems. And every other core I've tried in Retoarch works fine as well with GPU sync. Any suggestions?

That's really odd... I'm on the latest nightly on an i5 2500k@4.2Ghz and I can play higan accuracy with video sync, audio sync and hard gpu sync 0. Some special chip games still have slowdown but nothing really noticeable.

BTW, there is an enormous fact about bsnes. For 98% of the games Snes9x is just as good, and even if you want bsnes, balanced is way to go in most cases.

Anyway, usual suspects when you have bad performance:

- rewind, if you really want rewind increase your granularity, it's quite demanding
- hard gpu sync 0
- uncalibrated refresh rate
- multi pass shaders, most will not tax RA enough to cause noticeable slowdown but shaders like royale can
- audio latency set too low for your system
 
So is it normal for shaders to slow down performance tremendously. Even NES games? I tried Mario and its really really slow.
I tried the included CRT shaders but they slow it down to 20 fps
 

Rich!

Member
So is it normal for shaders to slow down performance tremendously. Even NES games? I tried Mario and its really really slow.
I tried the included CRT shaders but they slow it down to 20 fps

Not at all. I have to have like, four shaders on top of each other before slowdown starts.

What are your specs? What settings do you have in graphics options? Do you have rewind turned off to save resources?
 
Not at all. I have to have like, four shaders on top of each other before slowdown starts.

What are your specs? What settings do you have in graphics options? Do you have rewind turned off to save resources?

I am on a laptop with integrated graphics. But I do have a i5. Its not a netbook.

I think it was the emulator because later it was working a lot better. I'm going to mess around with it today and see if it was just an error.
 

Vertti

Member
Duh nothing looks good with Game Boy Color emulation. I've tried all the shader combinations but just can't get satisfying results. The lcd_cgwg looks the most realistic but it's bit too much. And it has some weird bleed emulation which I'd like to turn off if I know how to do it.

Easymode is my go to shader for non handhelding emulation and the lcd3x looks fine with GBA but not so nice in GBC games. Well I keep using the dot one even though it doesn't look realistic at all but okay in it's own way.
 
Duh nothing looks good with Game Boy Color emulation. I've tried all the shader combinations but just can't get satisfying results. The lcd_cgwg looks the most realistic but it's bit too much. And it has some weird bleed emulation which I'd like to turn off if I know how to do it.

The GB shader looks great for original GB games (I modified it a bit to rip out the frame) and I find lcd_cgwg to look pretty good for GBA games, but I don't think I've even tried a GBC game in Retroarch.

Do you have a screenshot of the effect you don't like? I'm curious now.

Darn there isn't one, I was sure I added that too :p
I'll do sometime later today my bad

While we're on it, where'd the shader options go off to in the menu of the latest nightlies? The options menu has a ton more sub-categories now, which is fine, but I couldn't find where to actually load shader presets.
 

Awakened

Member
While we're on it, where'd the shader options go off to in the menu of the latest nightlies? The options menu has a ton more sub-categories now, which is fine, but I couldn't find where to actually load shader presets.
It's missing some options, but you can get them back by going into Menu Options - Settings View and turning Collapse Subgroups on. That changes it back to the old layout. After doing that, trying to go into Shader Options crashes when I use XMB though. RGUI works fine.
 
I had never really tried Mednafen psx core. I'm quite amazed by how accurate it feels

untitledczutx.png


untitled2wxuoh.png


It's hard to get used to psx wobbly graphics but a good crt filter helps a bit here. I used crt-hyllian-glow in the above shots.
Wish I could try crt-royale but it gives me a « 8-bit and 16-bit image support are not implemented. » message when I try to load any preset even though I have the very latest versions of.. everything (build/shaders) :/
 

Radius4

Member
Weird issue.. no idea about that
CRT hyllian glow is good enough at less and equal to 1080p, Royale needs higher resolution to really shine
 

Vertti

Member
The GB shader looks great for original GB games (I modified it a bit to rip out the frame) and I find lcd_cgwg to look pretty good for GBA games, but I don't think I've even tried a GBC game in Retroarch.

Do you have a screenshot of the effect you don't like? I'm curious now.
Yeah of course. It looks like this:


Like I said it doesn't look too realistic but still pretty nice. Hopefully we get a really good GBC shader in the future. We are almost there but not quite...
 

MRORANGE

Member
Anyone have a list for what sharers they think works best for each platform?

Started using RetroArch but just overwhelmed with shader options and borders.
 

Palom

Member
Anyone have a list for what sharers they think works best for each platform?

Started using RetroArch but just overwhelmed with shader options and borders.

My go to effect is a combination of cbod-v1 and gdapt for dithering, and scanlines on top of it. I was using mdapt and scanlines, but the mdapt shader stopped working and I haven't tried it recently to see if it's been fixed.

Settings:

Comparisons:

Everything looks a lot more smooth to me, without being ass from filters like 2xSai or SuperEagle. The moon behind Batman looks spherical, and more like the Moon. The color gradient behind Harley Quinn looks much more gradual, rather than distinct bars of different colors. The Genesis really benefits from the dithering shaders; The Lion King title screen looks much more natural and gives some better color depth. I also use it on PS1 and Saturn games some times, but I've mostly played 2D games on those systems.

The only issue I have with the dither shaders is that on small fonts, the middle leg on W and M usually gets blended with the outer legs, but it doesn't really affect their legibility.

I don't use borders for anything, personally.
 

Toad King

Banned
I am on a laptop with integrated graphics. But I do have a i5. Its not a netbook.

I think it was the emulator because later it was working a lot better. I'm going to mess around with it today and see if it was just an error.

Shaders depend 100% on your graphics driver, and integrated won't cut it for some of the crazy ones or stacks of like 4-5 shaders.
 
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