What is your opinion about Retroarch?

>>4203608
It's breddy gud. Nice frontend for a lot of emulators that jest werk. Still prefer original hardware.

>>4203608
Used to be 100% functionality over user-friendliness, but thank god it's gotten a lot more accessible and easy to use in the past couple years. Using stand alone emulators is still easier, but RetroArch has made leaps in being less arcane and finally has a nice array of GUI options that, while comprehensive, are clear and easy to understand, and of course has kept all the sync/shader features that make it in many cases more functional than the stand alone emulators.

I recently switched my entire collection to it and I'm pretty happy with the results. I don't even use shaders, I just mainly like having it all on a centralized hub. If it keeps evolving the way it has, I don't think I'll switch back to stand alones.

If you are into retropie and recalbox , forget it. Is a very complete system , very diferent and usefull. The only problem is the dificult curve to learn to use it. Watch youtube. And you will see that if you use it with launchbox is a lot more easier. Good luck.

Is it possible to turn Wii Retro Arch into not shit? By default it's an eyesore, plus it crashes if you do anything unexpected.

>>4203608

A great idea, a half-assed implementation.A lot of the cores are based on old versions and aren't updated in a timely fashion.
The menu system is a set-top box nightmare, I couldn't imagine using this thing as a frontend when I have to waddle my way through a whole bunch of menu entries just to load a game I want to play, and using an analog gamepad to navigate the game list sucks - if it picks up the slightest bit of left or right on the stick, it exits the file list and jumps to one of the five other configuration menus which are treated the same as the directory list, and when you go back, it returns you to the top of the list so you have to find your place again. Pain in the ass.
The interface needs serious work by someone who's read a book on human interface design. It's clunky and ass-backwards, though I'll grant that it's not as utterly terrible as it used to be, now it's just foul.

Also, lightguns don't work, so all lightgun games are out of the question. What kind of ghetto Nintendo emulator wouldn't let me play Duck Hunt?
Also, if everything's using the same core functions, why can't you make a save state in one core and load it in another? Seems like that ought to be part of the library functionality, so if you switch cores it doesn't just error out if you try to load a save state. Either that, or fix it so each core has its own save states, instead of sharing them like they'll work across cores when they don't.

The idea of writing emulators to a solid library so you immediately get all the frontends and backends as a bonus is fantastic, but they really need some emulator authors on board for it to work, IMO.

>>4203608
the idea is really cool. the implementation really sucks. the retroarch people are really hard to work with and so they fork emulators and don't merge them again. also the default retroarch program is really poor code quality and the configuration is a nightmare (seriously, the default autogenerated config is like 1500 lines, what the fuck)

It's rather pointless, unless it happens to be ported to some obscure platform that you want to use, and that otherwise doesn't have any other form of emulation available. libretro cores are about the only option for a Pi box, for instance.

The entire thing is just a frontend that wraps a bunch of third party emulators together, and in fact causes further performance loss and input lag due to creating unnecessary overhead. Almost every core supported by RA already has a GUI and doesn't require a frontend anyway. It just seems like a really shitty attempt by RA's developer to take credit for emulators that other parties designed.

What gets me is when emulation newbies claim RA is somehow a superior "emulator," not realizing that the libretro cores they're using are available as independent emulators that have nothing to do with RA.
>"Retroarch is the best NES emulator because of the Nestopia core!"
You mean Nestopia is the best NES emulator. The core isn't developed or even maintained by RA's creator, and Retroarch is not an emulator in and of itself.

>>4204304
>The entire thing is just a frontend that wraps a bunch of third party emulators together, and in fact causes further performance loss and input lag due to creating unnecessary overhead.
i mean retroarch has a lot of problems but it really doesn't create any overhead

rest of your post is ok

>>4204324
>it really doesn't create any overhead

Adding a frontend to anything creates overhead. Do you understand how software works?

>>4204331

Do you? If I create a bash script that opens a zenity dialog to pick a rom, and then launches the emulator, then yeah, that creates "overhead" but that "overhead" is only about a megabyte of ram to store the bash process while the thing's running. Whoop-de-doo.

Show me some framerate differences between a Retroarch core and the emulator it's based on. (Provided you can still compile a version that's that old, lol) I sincerely doubt there's any significant overhead associated with retroarch/libretro, though I'd be interested to see if you can establish it's real.

It's nice if you want to use shaders, but I've moved over to BizHawk as a multi-system emulator.

>>4203608
I downloaded it to play some PC Engine CD games and they did not work.
Ended up just getting a different emulator for for my phone

File: the only kind of vista RMS enjoys.jpg (491KB, 1536x2048px) Image search: [Google]

491KB, 1536x2048px

>>4204347
>BizHawk

>Windows only

Sigh.

what is retroarch?

>>4203608

Increasingly broken for me at least, I'm slowly switching back to just using seperate emulators for everything, especially considering that they always use outdated builds for the cores

>>4204363

A frontend for libretro. Libretro is a library of functions that are useful for emulators, so you can write an emulator and not have to worry about displays and input and file handling and stuff like that, the library does it all for you.
Retroarch is the default frontend for libretro cores.

is bsnes the best retroarch snes core? everything i've thrown at it has seemed to be perfect. but idk

>>4204384

bsnes is overall one of the best emulators, and byuu specifically builds it for libretro since he loves the project, so, probably yeah.

>>4203608
It has the sharpeststep shader and extremely low latency thanks to hard sync. I'll use it whenever I can, even if setting it up sucks.

>>4203608
Wii version needs some fine tunning. I mean the fact that I can't change the controls in the way I like it makes me cringe.

>>4203608
Along with the low latency thing, it's the best way to use many of the best emulators, which are even less user friendly than Retroarch or have shitty vsync implementations. See: Mupen64plus, Mednafen PSX/Saturn, MGBA, Nestopia.

That said some of the cores are laughably shitty. DOSbox, MAME, Hatari and UAE are "why even bother" tier. Also, why the *FUCK* can't it take roms and throw it to the right core from a file association? I should be able to double click any rom and have the auto-core functionality work, but noooo. I've worked around this via Default Programs Editor autism, and it can run all my shit straight from explorer without any stupid front ends in the way, but it was a pain getting there.

>>4204304
>together, and in fact causes further performance loss and input lag due to creating unnecessary overhead

Nope. It performs better in some cases since RA was optimized better than the standalone frontend. higan is an example of this.

>Almost every core supported by RA already has a GUI and doesn't require a frontend anyway.

That's not the point of RA.

> It just seems like a really shitty attempt by RA's developer to take credit for emulators that other parties designed.

So that's why they credit each emulator author and avoid rebranding the emulators unless specifically requested...

>What gets me is when emulation newbies claim RA is somehow a superior "emulator," not realizing that the libretro cores they're using are available as independent emulators that have nothing to do with RA.

If the libretro port of emulator running within RetroArch provides more features and better performance than the standalone build, then it would definitely be superior by any measure.

>You mean Nestopia is the best NES emulator. The core isn't developed or even maintained by RA's creator, and Retroarch is not an emulator in and of itself.

Rdanbrook/tehcloud maintains the libretro port of Nestopia in the upstream Nestopia git repo. You picked a bad example because you don't actually know what you're talking about.

>>4204454
>So that's why they credit each emulator author and avoid rebranding the emulators unless specifically requested...
It's also why the cores are explicitly named after the emulators they come from and why they show up with that same name constantly when selecting cores, on the status bar when you play a game, etc...

That guy's pretty deluded if he's saying RetroArch is "stealing" credit from other devs.

>>4204331
Do you? It's just separating the emulator core from its standalone frontend, and exposing its internal functions to the libretro API. There's no overhead involved since you are just swapping one frontend for another.

ITT: RetroArch is trash-talked by noobs who don't know how to use it.

I'm old fashioned so I like my emulators to be their own thing, but I do retroarch on Android and it's usable but could really use a search function for ROMs.

Retroarch Defense Force is on the scene!

>>4203608
Does it have mouse UI navigation yet? If not I'll just stick to stand alone emulators.
Gave up after using it for a month since using the gamepad for UI navigation is slow as fuck, I can get games running in 1/6 the time with emus that have mouse driven UI's.

>>4203608
Unnecessary

File: retroarch.png (205KB, 1920x1080px) Image search: [Google]

205KB, 1920x1080px

>>4204698
>Does it have mouse UI navigation yet?

Yes, sort of. Like much of retroarch, it's half-assed and busted. You can turn it on, but it's not like it's useful or anything yet.

>>4204359
You have to use mono, but it definitely works on Linux and OS X.

I wish it had better 6th gen support, but it's otherwise perfect. The state of DC and PS2 emulation just makes me sad. I hope the Mednafen devs dabble in those someday because they've done God's work on PS1 and Saturn.

>>4204389
>byuu specifically builds it for libretro since he loves the project
haha, no he doesn't

byuu and the libretro people publicly hate eachother

>>4204497
A Console tier OS that just binds a few programs together for a specific purpose should be so easy to use that there can't be noobs, otherwise you already failed

RetroArch was for me pretty useful for many years and it still is. I like the convenience of being able to play with multiple platforms (and that's a fuckton of em, not 6 or 7) and how some options remain for most games.

I think my favorite thing about it is dynamic rate control. The reason why is because about a decade ago I was trying really hard to investigate why the fuck was my new monitor by the time (a 120hz monitor) having so much trouble with emulators. I was really nitpicky with the whole crackling sound every 10 seconds or whatever the fuck, like vsync and other things. Today I use a 60hz display but still it's something that I'm really thankful for. There's nothing worse than frame drops like those.

However it does have some issues:

-The d3d driver is pretty much abandoned despite it having better performance on Windows.
-Along with that, I remember a few years ago having no trouble with black frame insertion. These days it's impossible not to have the screen blink under the same conditions (which is related to performance).
-xmb is a poor choice, and they kept that for long now. It's not exactly that good looking and not too convenient to sift through collections of games.
-Playlists are a pain in the ass. They won't recognize all of your games so you have to add some manually, you can't just remove or add entries inside the emulator and all of your covers have to be converted to PNG. Besides that, you can only get covers in packs which are a bit random.
-A lot of drama involved with the developers.

Really what I wish is that someone took OpenEmu and made something a little bit more decent and multiplatform rather than this. It gets some things right, except a severe lack of settings which would be actually necessary for plenty of people + performance issues not present in RetroArch and the like.

>>4203608
Bloatware shilled by squarepusher. This is a nice containment thread. Stay in it.

>>4204170
I think the last version that I used that was actually stable on Wii was around 1.3.X

http://buildbot.libretro.com/stable/1.3.0/

It still looks like shit though.

>>4205124
>bloatware

*Tips fedora*

>>4203608
I never got the hype early on, especially when the UI was just a total clusterfuck to use but it's really matured since then, and I say this as an old "lol how the fuck does this shit work" fag. If you use Windows, there's no real reason to use it since you have so many emulators available, but if you're on anything else, Retroarch is a godsend. A lot of the hate it gets seems to be from Windowsfags that (reasonably) don't see the need for the all-in-one confusion.

Now I'm on the other side of the fence and don't understand the cringey hate-fest it gets.

My only issue is that (at least on an unofficial Fedora build) even though I point it to the right folders, it adds everything to the library except my PSX games. Though they load fine manually.

>>4204776
Is this a bait based on your apparent belief that Beetle PSX and Beetle Saturn are Retroarch original?

>>4203608
It's amazing

>>4205064
I was happy with OpenEmu until I tried playing Mother 1 and realising that I needed to crop the overscan, a feature OpenEmu lacked. I love the grid art view and want to keep using it but the features are just too barebones, so I'm with ya

>>4205198
I would love the fuck out of OpenEmu but I currently use Hackintosh and it seems that my setup ain't good enough for it, because even on genesis games I get frame drops.

Really they need to understand that you don't need to go as far as RetroArch, just include some options that might help a bit. Apparently one of the big issues OpenEmu has is precisely the refresh rate and I don't know exactly what to set it to.

>>4205160
It's still useful on Windows where it has things that the standalone versions might lack, like shaders, dynamic audio rate control synchronization, or WASAPI exclusive mode support. I personally use it on Windows for most of my retro emulation, barring cores that are badly outdated or incomplete.

>>4203608
Not sure if this question is really related but since everyone's talking about emulators: is it possible to use retroarch (or different programs (with) emulators) and change the visual framerate to 50fps? I usually notice how choppy PAL roms run on a PC emulator, especially SNES9X while the framerate looks better with NTSC ones.

>>4205242
You have to change your display refresh rate to 50Hz to have smooth vsync with PAL games without changing the speed audio pitch. If you choose to speed up the game, you can allow it to do that by changing the maximum timing skew setting to 0.17 or higher, if you're using a 60Hz display (the exact speed difference will be 16.6667%).

Is there an alternative to retroarch besides using individual emulator?

I want something like retropi/gpd xd where you have a nice UI

>>4204725
XMB doesn't really support mouse input, but the GLUI driver does at least. There was also preliminary work with a mouse driven menu driver using Nuklear but I don't think it went anywhere.

>>4205064
https://github.com/team-phoenix/Phoenix

>>4205273

I switched over to mostly using Mednafen + Attract Mode as a frontend. AM is gorgeous and a joy to use compared to the shit sandwich that is retroarch.

>>4205291
The fuck? I thought that project was dead. Nice.

>>4205305
You do know that RA has extensive commandline support and would work as well as Mednafen in a scenario where you use a launcher like Attract Mode? You are not forced to use RA's own UI.

>>4204454
>It performs better in some cases since RA was optimized better

Anyone with even an iota of common sense would understand why this is blatantly false. The cores are not modular in any sense of the term, because they were developed by third parties to be released as standalone emulators. They were absolutely not designed to interface with RA or any other software. RA is just additional overhead forcibly tacked onto third-party code.

>>4205339
>Anyone with even an iota of common sense would understand why this is blatantly false
"Common sense" is a shit argument used by people when they don't know what they're talking about.

>The cores are not modular in any sense of the term, because they were developed by third parties to be released as standalone emulators.
That's so wrong it's not even funny. You know that that code can be modified, right? If they get modified to be modular, then they become modular.

>They were absolutely not designed to interface with RA or any other software.
Doesn't matter if they were 'designed' or not, if they can be modified to do so. Of course some are better than others at being recompiled to work with libretro.

>RA is just additional overhead forcibly tacked onto third-party code.
By this logic the standalone frontend has additional overhead too, because it's the same thing, you are just swapping one for the other.

Please stop acting like you know what you're talking about. All you're doing is appealing to "muh dev intentions" and "muh vague claims of additional overhead with no proof to back them up".

>>4205314

Yes, but RA doesn't support light guns, and I'm still required to interact with that shitty interface every time I want to configure things. Add in aging cores and bugs, and I'm not using RA anymore unless it has an obscure core that I can't find an alternate for.

>>4205339
Again, if you believe this overhead affects performance, test an RA core versus the same emulator's standalone executable at the same version, and get back to us with numbers. "Common sense" is no substitute for facts.

>>4205449
>RA doesn't support light guns

It does have lightgun support but some cores might not have it implemented. I think bsnes core does, at least.

>I'm still required to interact with that shitty interface every time I want to configure things.

It has plaintext config files, so you could just modify those, just like with mednafen.

>Add in aging cores and bugs,

I'm not sure Mednafen is going to be much better there outside of PSX, Saturn, or PCE. Mednafen's NES, SNES, GB, GBA, Mega Drive emulation is all based on older emulators than what's available as libretro cores.

>>4203608

It seems like an emulator for people more interested in tweaking emulator settings, than actually playing games.

>>4205272
Those seem to be interesting solutions. Thanks for the suggestions anon.

>>4205463
>lightgun support
Like using a wiimote through bluetooth?

>>4204170

Use an old version. about 1.3.0 like the other anon said, and set up the cores as plugins on Wiiflow/USBGX so you can go straight into the games and completely avoid the UI.

Never had a need for it. I admire the rabid militant fanbase it's gathered, though.

>>4204418
This was corrected in the last nightly version.

>>4204429
What's wrong with mame? it works great for me.

Best thing about RA is you can press the Menu button and quit out of your emulator, not many overlays have this option do this, though I think they added this to Steam's Big Picture Mode recently. I wonder if it adds any lag. Though big picture mode pretty ugly.

Any other good front ends with this option as I use my media centre to play emus on?

File: attract.png (3MB, 1920x1080px) Image search: [Google]

3MB, 1920x1080px

>>4205807

Attract mode can do that. I'm sure there's plenty of others that can do it too.

>>4205529
If that acts as a pointing device, then it might.

>>4205151
>links against 64 libraries
>not bloated

>>4206162
It links against ffmpeg for encoding/decoding support, which is itself bloated. However, you can easily make a build that doesn't link that or anything else for that matter.

>>4206317
you're implying that i'm gonna want to build software on windows

maybe if i was using a *nix but even then the libretro way of building stuff sucks ass (the fucking super script has to download absolutely everything unless you manually specify what you want to fetch, build and install for every script)

>>4206324
Ain't that hard with MSYS2.

>the fucking super script has to download absolutely everything unless you manually specify what you want to fetch

Why is that bad? How else would it work?

You could always just git clone the repos you want and run the makefiles directly, which is what I do.

>>4206339
that's a pain if you use as many cores as i do

if anything the super script should take a list of items you want

and yes i do have MSYS2 installed but i shouldn't have to use it

Excellent concept that hampered itself early on by the developers having the typical Linux lack of attention to user experience, it has since improved but the damage has been done in the minds of most users. It's also the only option for rollback netplay right now aside from Fightcade so I'll give it points for that much

>>4204331
You're the one who doesn't, do you think they just leave the old frontend code in the cores they port?

>>4206567
well libretro MAME still has its UI which makes it embarrassingly bad

File: PrettyBrutal.png (115KB, 488x228px) Image search: [Google]

115KB, 488x228px

>>4206567
>>4206573

>durr they don't leave the old UI code in

>except when they do

>>4206567

That's not a linux thing, it's an amateur coder thing. I could show you some atrocious UIs on windows, mac, android, you name it.

>>4206573
That UI is just a 2D overlay though, not much to it. MAME is complicated so it needs that UI for things like dipswitches to work.

>>4206604
why can't any of it be externalized to the libretro UI?

>>4206612

It would require a whole ass, and the libretro devs only have half of one available.

>>4204384
If you're on mobile, bsnes-mercury and snes9x have a lot of reasons to be around.

Bsnes's best form is on RA though, no contest.

File: pi & android users.jpg (70KB, 680x457px) Image search: [Google]

70KB, 680x457px

>>4204161
>dificult curve to learn to use it.
Spoken like a true retropi mongoloid.
-Start RA
-Load content
-Select rom
-Run
WOW SO DIFFICULT. You don't even have to set up controls, a dualshock 4 just works immediately.
>>4204304
>and in fact causes further input lag
Utter horse shit. It has significantly less than standalones. There're some things that are really broken with RA but you picked the one thing it does exceptionally well.
>>4204384
Just use snes9x. 99.99% of games work fine in it and it doesn't need anywhere near as much cpu power.

>>4203608
Last time I tried to use it I was too much of a potato to figure it out.

>>4205291
Absolutely no documentation on how to run/install/configure/dependencies.

Already -1.

>>4203608
Really useful but only once you get used to all of its fucking quirks. I've been using it for ages on multiple devices and I still can never be 100% sure if the config changes I just made will be saved the way I wanted.

It really is too complicated and hard to get everything running without any problems and it shouldn't be like that. plus the UI is horrible. I recommend downloading emulators separately and putting them all into a frontend like Hyperspin or Maximus Arcade.

>>4207301
>Too complicated and hard
>Recommending overcomplicated frontends

>>4207269
There's one release and building it is not too complicated (although they really need to update their fucking guide).

The issue is that it doesn't deal too well with performance and it's obnoxiously basic.

>>4207301
Download core (which is done automatically from a menu), load content, play game. It only has one extra setup step compared to plug and play stand-alone emulators.

>>4207504
It's as though people didn't emulate shit up until now.

I remember with kawaks I had to look for the "right" ROMs, scan them, set up the controller and video options too. With ePSXe it was a mess full of plugins, and N64 was like that too.

But nowadays it's like "oh no, I have to download cores" and that stops everyone. People are stupid, plain and simple.

The biggest flaw with RetroArch is not difficulty, it's the UI. It's the choice of XMB, which is not the pinnacle in UI design.

>>4207301
Another thing with downloading emulators separately: Enjoy configuring each one of them and dealing with whatever issues each might have.

>>4207465

That's why I recommended Attract Mode upthread. I didn't even read the instructions, just muddled through by digging through the menu options one afternoon and I got it all set up and now it's good to go.

>>4207301
Frontends are actually horrible. They make a tiny bit of sense (maybe) for very limited cases like a dedicated emulation machine that you will never need to tweak or configure again, or like a MAME cabinet.

They are so overwrought and bloated that it is really a pain to use them on your general use computer. I don't play any games on my PC anymore, but when I used to use emulators on there I found the best solution was just to write my own simple frontend with minimal components. Basically just a wrapper to pick a rom and launch it in the appropriate emulator. At that time almost all of them had command line interfaces so it was very easy to launch roms automatically, and there were fairly simple workarounds for the ones that didn't (I think I had to call an autohotkey script to load games in FreeDO, for instance).
The only special feature I ever felt inclined to add was a randomizer button--great fun for groups, hit it and go into the game blind and there's a very good chance you'll land on something hilariously bad.

>>4203608
Emulators are for ppl who are bad at games

>>4207531
I do like frontends similar to OpenEmu and Phoenix where it's easy to pick games by their covers and just play them right away. Those whole arcadey frontends that need setting up and downloading humongous packs of shit just to select games are overblown and look like mid 2000s crap.

The problem with some frontends is that instead of letting you choose your emulators of preference you are stuck with what they provide which might not be the best, like the examples I gave.

>>4207537
How do you come to this conclusion? Nobody needs to use features like save states or rewinding. It's a matter of preference and convenience.

Don't get me wrong, I still like my PS1 better than any PS1 emulator but it's much more convenient to have all of that shit in a hard drive.

>>4207543
>downloading humongous packs of shit just
I wonder if I'm the only person who downloads that stuff but doesn't use it with emulators. I like to grab the video clip packs and convert them to webm to post on /vr/.

File: 139359881277.jpg (10KB, 229x220px) Image search: [Google]

10KB, 229x220px

When I first used it, I loved it. Now I'm hating that piece of crap..

>1.5.0
>everything works fine.

>1.6.0
>don't recognizes the same PS1 isos that 1.5.0 recognized, but i still can load all games from all systems from the File browser option.

>1.6.3
>don't recognize any shit and can't open any game of any system from the file browser option.

File: max.jpg (211KB, 1024x768px) Image search: [Google]

211KB, 1024x768px

>>4207531
>>4207465
Maximus arcade is actually very easy to get up and running and you don't even have to configure the controls if you don't want to as it already does it for you with each separate emulator you download. all you have to do is let it scan the roms from the directory where the folder your emulator is at and you're good to go. plus the customization is endless, which is why I personally use it over retroarch.

File: attract2.png (476KB, 1920x1080px) Image search: [Google]

476KB, 1920x1080px

>>4207604

Looks pretty sweet, anon.

Here's my Attract Mode arcade view. This is the first display I set up, and the one that really sold me on the idea of using a major frontend in the first place.
I used to use a simple frontend (advmenu) for mame back when you couldn't load roms from inside the emu, but eventually broke and I hit on this as a replacement. Then it was like "why aren't all my other emulators this nice and easy to use?"

>>4207586
It used to have better performance as well. I loved it for the black frame insertion option. 2 years ago I was fine with it. Now I can't really use it with the same cores because it'll keep blinking (which is a sign of performance issues)

However on macOS is the only emulator that doesn't crap itself out so I'm stuck with it for the time being.

Im pretty stupid with emulation. I just got retroarch and im trying to run mednafan through psx beetle. I cant figure out how to get the bios set up. Where should they be directed to in settings? All i get is a black screen everytime i try to run a game. Can anyone help? I feel like crash bandicoot is tauting me every time i boot up my computer

>>4207642
Go to the emulation general wiki, download the retroarch bios files and put them on the system folder, that's it

>>4207642

Go to the Settings submenu (the gear icon) and at the bottom look for Directory, and set the System Bios directory, which is where you put all the bios files for all the cores you set up.
(I prefer putting them each in a directory under the system, but retroarch doesn't support that)

>>4207650
>(I prefer putting them each in a directory under the system, but retroarch doesn't support that)

With under the system what do you mean? If you need to put them inside hidden folders on linux you just have to enable show hidden files in the Load content options.

>>4207648
Does retroarch look there by default? Ive been rerouting like a madman to a bio folder i created and no bios even show up

>>4207656
Yeah. In the directory options you see which folder is it using for System/BIOS files. You can change that folder, but you need to put the correct BIOS files in that folder which again are linked in that wiki.

>>4207654

No, I mean I have a directory hierarchy that's like Emulators/Sega Genesis/ and under that there'll be things like:
roms
snap
bios
boxart
isos
and so forth. That way when I'm trying a new emulator out I can just go to that one directory and start passing subdirectory names to it and have it set up quickly and easily. It's just a personal preference, so it's not really a big deal that retroarch wants all the various system bios files in one directory.

>>4207665
I see. One of the things that irritates me the most about RetroArch is how it handles boxarts and such. Only lets you download packs which aren't being really updated, they lack many boxarts at random, some of them are of different quality, it's a mess.

>>4207682
You can download individual files here: https://github.com/libretro/libretro-thumbnails?files=1

Then replicate the directory you see on that site inside your thumbnails folder and place your picture there (ie a PlayStation game cover goes on thumbnails\Sony - PlayStation\Named_Boxarts). If a game doesn't have a boxart on the database, you can add it manually by naming a png after the name of the game as it shows up on the playlist inside retroarch.

So it can be done, it just takes micromanaging. I sure hope they implement individual downloads soon, because it seems stupidly taxing both for end users and their servers to force huge downloads that have files for stuff you'll never ever use.

I put my bios under system but they still willnt show up when i look in the directory and it says im missing the bios under core information. Am i missing a step?

>>4207859
That's really odd. With scph5500.bin, scph5501.bin and scph5502.bin it should work. My only suggestion otherwise would be to download a different version as it seems the latest apparently have some trouble detecting files for some reason. Though in my end it's fine.

>>4207872

>retroarch developers in charge of not creating a pile of bug-ridden spaghetti code

>>4207872
Yea its pretty weird. Ive got those bins in the system file and the directory is set to that system. It just will not recognize them. Im sure im just doing something really stupid and obvious

>>4207875
>retroarch developers
they only port existing things to it. its why dreamcast support still sucks due to very very slow progression of reicast, to which theyre porting over every solar eclipse

>>4207883
If you're going by default settings, no clue.

I'm not even sure it should have problems by enabling "Skip BIOS" if by any chance you have that enabled.

Are you games .iso files or .bin/.cue pairs?

>>4207898
Theyre bin/cue. I thought that for psx you needed additional bio files, where under settings is the skip function?

File: Screen Shot 2017-08-22 at 21.26.33.png (188KB, 948x710px) Image search: [Google]

188KB, 948x710px

>>4207913
After loading a game (even if it doesn't boot) Quick Menu > Options > Skip BIOS

You still require those files anyways. What that does is just skip the PS1 logo.

Always load the .cue file instead of .bin. If that doesn't work, open the .cue file with notepad and check that the name of the .bin file is the same.

If that don't work, I can't really tell what's going on.

>>4207942
.cue and .bin are the same. I tried toggling with the skip bios but still just a black screen. Ive toggled the drivers and shaders but still no dice. Its a mystery to me being its my first time ever emulating. Thank you for helping tho, i hope i can figure it out

>>4207973
No problem. In any case, if all else fails try an older stable version and use that one. Maybe that will do it.

>>4207749
For thumbnails, they should only download pictures from games registered on your playlists. They should also implement some sort of script so that hacks and translations automatically get the thumbnail. As it is, if you have, for example, a translated ROM, you need to edit the name of the thumbnail image and add the "[T+En by Whatever v.X.X]" thing manually. It's cumbersome, thumbnail association should just ignore the brackets.

>>4208280
Isn't that why goodtools exists?

>>4208375
From what I gather, RetroArch has the ability to scan your roms, check that the file in question fits in with the GoodTools rom data, and create playlists from them. Meaning if you have ACRSROMSNES.sfc, RetroArch can scan it and realize it's "ActRaiser (USA)", and display it as such. The thumbnails respond to that GoodTools name, too (if you were to replace "ActRaiser (USA).png" in your thumbnails folder with a picture of a dick, the dick would show up in RetroArch as the game box, as long as it's named "ActRaiser (USA).png").

The problem with thumbnails comes if you're trying to make any hack or translation show up correctly in the playlist. Often, GoodTools has info on hacks and translations, so they do show up on the playlists, but the thumbnails from "ActRaiser (USA)" don't show up for "ActRaiser (USA) [Whatever]", which makes no sense.

The worst part is that new hacks, of course, are not listed in the GoodTools database yet, so you have to manually write in the rom on the playlist file with a text editor if you want it to show up on the playlist. You can always just load and play it, but if you're organizing a library it becomes cumbersome.

So the GoodTools integration is really convenient in general, but it does have quirks that should be addressed. When it works it's awesome, but when it doesn't you need to manually finetune a lot of stuff, which would be fine, but it's obvious some of that stuff could be easily fixed.

>>4208432
>the thumbnails from "ActRaiser (USA)" don't show up for "ActRaiser (USA) [Whatever]", which makes no sense.
But goodtools (dunno about the implementation of it used in retroarch as you describe) can surely be configured not to put any extra text in brackets like that. That is, if it can correct "ACRSROMSNES.sfc" to "ActRaiser (USA) [Whatever]," it should also be able to correct it to just plain "ActRaiser (USA)." Changing retroarch to ignore bracketed text (or whatever) seems like a hacky workaround when goodtools should just be able to prevent the problem from even occurring. I have no idea how you'd get it to do that in retroarch though, just that it has to be possible. But that's a change the developer might be more willing to make.

>The worst part is that new hacks, of course, are not listed in the GoodTools database yet
Yeah, that part is a problem that just can't be solved in a fully automatic way. Somebody has to enter that data. The best technological solution might be to have the database update continuously and cloudsource the data entry to the users, but then you would have major problems with the quality of the data. I might not want my copy of some romhack to show up under the same name as you would pick.
I think solutions that work perfectly most of the time, and require some careful attention a small fraction of the time, are preferable to a solution that works only okay-ish all the time. Romhacks are going to be a small part of most people's libraries anyway, probably countable on one hand unless you're into that scene yourself. And even then you could very easily write a script or modify some tool to let you edit the playlists more conveniently.

>>4208432
It's an interesting problem though. It makes me think about whether emulators will ever be able to generate live previews of games from the roms themselves, rather than requiring the user to download multi-gigabyte packs of video clips and screen shots of every single game. Getting far enough in-game to see anything other than logos would probably require a custom script of a sequence of inputs for each game, but once you had those sequences they could be fed to something analogous to TAS software. And the scripts of the sequences themselves would be much smaller than video clips, so you could distribute thousands of them at the cost of only a few kb. It would work equally well to distributing packs of screenshots once all the data has been collected, but then you would have exactly the same problem with having to customize for obscure games/romhacks/translations etc.

If the frontend software spied on all its users to collect input sequences you could fill in a lot of the gaps, but another approach could be to use "AI" to attempt keystrokes and watch for features on the screen that indicate you've gone in-game. That probably wouldn't cost nearly as much in terms of CPU cycles to do than the emulation of the game itself (necessary to capture the video). That part would be quite costly indeed for games that only run at or close to 100% speed in the emulator, so much so that you would have to capture the video and store it permanently for it to make any sense (which kind of defeats the purpose). It would work great for Atari 2600 games and things like that though, and potentially some day with superior computers most of the popular retro consoles would be accessible as well.

>>4203608
The Archlinux of /vr/ for autistic neet hipsters.

File: EA4C0ACA3.jpg (41KB, 591x593px) Image search: [Google]

41KB, 591x593px

>>4208715
Well, the thing is that the bracket text IS useful so you can tell apart different versions, hacks and translations from one another. It's not a problem in and of itself as it allows for a comprehensive cataloguing of all hacks, translation versions and fixes a rom may have. It's only a problem because RetroArch lets the brackets interfere with the fancy UI playlist+thumbnail options and such. It doesn't seem hacky to me to just make RA ignore it for that one specific purpose, since it's otherwise useful.

>>4208742
>It makes me think about whether emulators will ever be able to generate live previews of games from the roms themselves,
The Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Classics' emulator does this. When you browse the game, you can se a live preview of it. The live preview shows the rom starting up without any input, so you see logos, the title screen and the attract mode if available, but it's fairly neat. Pic related.

>>4208820
>bracket text IS useful
Sure, I'm not saying GoodTools shouldn't support it, just that RetroArch should be able to display it when it is appropriate and get rid of it when it is causing problems (such as with thumbnails). That should all be configurable and there would be no problem (I don't know whether it is).

>The Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Classics' emulator does this
That is awesome! I didn't think about attract mode. If most of the games on a system have that, it makes the live preview very convenient. I suppose you have to linger on the rom for a little while to see that though. I think it would be neat if the frontend could speed up the emulator to skip ahead to the gameplay part (or pre-render a few seconds of good clip for games in the background) though.

>>4208838

Yes, it would be trivial to write some code that would look for an exact match, and if there wasn't one, drop a level of brackets/parentheses off the end of the name and look again.

>>4208838
Yeah, when it comes to assigning thumbnails RA definitely should just ignore the bracket text, that'd fix everything on that front. I hope they continue to improve on it.

The live preview on the Classics emulator works very well because for whatever reason the Genesis used to have custom SEGA logos on startup, so it's usually very attractive and slick. Getting to attract mode does take a while though. It would definitely be neat to have some sort of custom script to skip the logos, but I'm guessing it'd be very complex and, like you mentioned, has to happen on a per-game basis. As it is, just having a live preview is neat enough on its own, though.

>>4207586
All my PS1 games are still working on the latest nightly. Dunno why yours stopped working, maybe try looking at the log output.

>>4207625
Black frame insertion is still working good for me with my CRT on the latest version. Keep in mind that because of the way it works, it is like using 8ms frame delay so it increases system requirements to maintain fullspeed but also decreases latency from vsync.
If you were using WASAPI exclusive mode with a low latency, you might need to increase the audio latency with black frame insertion enabled.
It's also quite sensitive to synchronization issues, so you might need to make sure the refresh rate setting is accurate or nothing is causing dropped frames externally.

These are my settings for black frame insertion on a CRT

https://hastebin.com/raw/qexowusagu

It seems to work fine with bsnes-mercury-balanced, on a i5-4690K