Retroarch Request

[OnionEclipse]

Does anyone have a retroarch build that still has per core option AND support the vulkan shaders (.slang)? This new override is pissing me off but I really need to use vulkan in the new psx HW.  If you could supply me with a link I would forever be in your debt!

[thatman84]

You can always fool the override system I think.

 

setup what you want for a core then go and save new config. (That option was still there for me last week on nightly)

Then place it and name it as per the override system. 

You will still be using overrides but it will be loading a full config.

[OnionEclipse]

What I ended up doing was a little different I think. I saved the new config as you said but then instead of renaming it to the overide name is just added .dll before .cfg. so it looked like this name_of_emulator.dll.cfg doing it this way made it indistinguishable from per core when launched via rocketlauncher.

[Styphelus]

What? They removed the per core option? Should I even bother updating my Retroarch or should I keep what I have and just update the cores?

[thatman84]

If it ain't broke....

[OnionEclipse]

1 hour ago, Styphelus said:

What? They removed the per core option? Should I even bother updating my Retroarch or should I keep what I have and just update the cores?

If you want to use vulkan and the new shaders for it, updating is a must. I must say mednafen psx HW + vulkan 8x internal resolution doesn't NEED shaders but it is a nice option. vulkan seems to be perfect in recent nightly builds.

Edit:

Oh, a couple of the updated cores already need more recent nightlys or else you will notice bugs. for example both psx software and hardware with gl or vulkan driver gave me audio cracking until I updated retroarch.

[Styphelus]

Ok, installed the latest Retroarch but what is this Vulkan thing you speak of? I also tried using  psx HW but it always says I'm using just psx. Tries an internal resolution of 8x and everything came to a slow crawl. How did you manage to get it running?

 

Also, I see a new Mercury bnes cove. How is the mercury version different?

[OnionEclipse]

1 hour ago, Styphelus said:

Ok, installed the latest Retroarch but what is this Vulkan thing you speak of? I also tried using  psx HW but it always says I'm using just psx. Tries an internal resolution of 8x and everything came to a slow crawl. How did you manage to get it running?

 

Also, I see a new Mercury bnes cove. How is the mercury version different?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan_(API)

Under driver/video driver, select vulkan instead of gl. That's why you got the slowdown, the gl renderer blows for HW. Well I'm sure it using the software core isn't helping. Don't know why you are not getting hw if that's what you picked. Are you launching it with anything or straight from retroarch? FYI at the moment you need a pretty good pc to do 8x. Nothing mind blowing but fairly beefy.

Edit:

Are you by chance loading the HW core then selecting a previously played game? If so it will load the software version instead.

Just as a example 8x runs perfect on my GTX760, not the best card but it definitely has bite https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DBPKEOI/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[Styphelus]

Ok thanks. Got it working. 

Can't find a filter I like to work properly at 8x resolution. Plus my old crt-geom-flat no longer works with this version. It won't even recognize it. But the real reason I don't use Retroarch for PSX is the lack of multidisc support. You can create 3mu files but that's too much work.

I'll keep it for now but I think I'll stick to my Retroarch install.

[OnionEclipse]

22 minutes ago, Styphelus said:

Ok thanks. Got it working. 

Can't find a filter I like to work properly at 8x resolution. Plus my old crt-geom-flat no longer works with this version. It won't even recognize it. But the real reason I don't use Retroarch for PSX is the lack of multidisc support. You can create 3mu files but that's too much work.

I'll keep it for now but I think I'll stick to my Retroarch install.

Ah, I converted all my dumps to .pbp and the core supports combined pbp swaping.

[Aorin]

17 hours ago, Styphelus said:

Ok thanks. Got it working. 

Can't find a filter I like to work properly at 8x resolution. Plus my old crt-geom-flat no longer works with this version. It won't even recognize it. But the real reason I don't use Retroarch for PSX is the lack of multidisc support. You can create 3mu files but that's too much work.

I'll keep it for now but I think I'll stick to my Retroarch install.

The Retroarch crt filters will work really better in the PSX original internal resolution, by upscaling 3D, the sprites will still look pixelated, maybe the only filter you'd be able to use to make sprites look better in 4x internal resolution would be Xsoft.

By using GL driver to be able to upscale to 8x with a good speed, means that lots of games will have heavy glitches, mostly in sprites, or rendering issues, as the hardware driver is in its infancy.

Using the software driver will make sure all PSX games will run correctly, without any glitches, rendering issues.

[OnionEclipse]

4 minutes ago, Aorin said:

The Retroarch crt filters will work really better in the PSX original internal resolution, by upscaling 3D, the sprites will still look pixelated, maybe the only filter you'd be able to use to make sprites look better in 4x internal resolution would be Xsoft.

By using GL driver to be able to upscale to 8x with a good speed, means that lots of games will have heavy glitches, mostly in sprites, or rendering issues, as the hardware driver is in its infancy.

Using the software driver will make sure all PSX games will run correctly, without any glitches, rendering issues.

Not sure if you noticed but we are talking about the new(ish) vulkan hw renderer, enabled a week or two ago for psx. Although it's maturity is much less than gl it is already far better. I think he said he worked on it off and on for a couple months.

I haven't had a lot of experience with it yet but vulkan upscale to 8x hasn't shown any issues (junk added in, slowdowns, things looking off or warped) on the games I have played. Also on my 42 inch 1080 it doesn't look pixelated at all. 

I did notice some warping and odd glitches at 2x and 4x but not 8x, seems odd. 

I feel like I'm cheerleading (probably am) but the new mednafen psx hw core with vulkan is the best experience I have had with psx emulation.

[Aorin]

30 minutes ago, Thepagel said:

Not sure if you noticed but we are talking about the new(ish) vulkan hw renderer, enabled a week or two ago for psx. Although it's maturity is much less than gl it is already far better. I think he said he worked on it off and on for a couple months.

I haven't had a lot of experience with it yet but vulkan upscale to 8x hasn't shown any issues (junk added in, slowdowns, things looking off or warped) on the games I have played. Also on my 42 inch 1080 it doesn't look pixelated at all. 

I did notice some warping and odd glitches at 2x and 4x but not 8x, seems odd. 

I feel like I'm cheerleading (probably am) but the new mednafen psx hw core with vulkan is the best experience I have had with psx emulation.

I'm following the cores development in the libretro forums, it's nice they added support for vulkan driver, but, anyways a trouble free psx core as far as I know is the main core, which uses software driver.

Personally I tried upscaling PSX games and they look weird, the 3D models look really clean, sure, junk added in, slowdowns, things looking off or warped, like you mention seems a lot of problems, but they'll sort it all I'm sure since they work on these cores almost every day.

I'm posting 2 different screenshots from 2 games using Mednafen PSX core, one is a sprite based game, the other a 3D game that uses sprites, both using the internal PSX resolution and a shader to add a scanline effect.

I remember some 2D fighters for Dreamcast or GameCube, while we can upscale games up to 4k in Dolphin, I'm not sure if they added a filter or something to make those look better, PPSSPP on the other hand has a lot of filters for 2D games.

[Aorin]

18 hours ago, Thepagel said:

Ah, I converted all my dumps to .pbp and the core supports combined pbp swaping.

I have converted my set to pbp as well, best thing to do, saving a lot of space and being able to switch discs on the go in RA is a must for me too.

[OnionEclipse]

4 minutes ago, Aorin said:

I'm following the cores development in the libretro forums, it's nice they added support for vulkan driver, but, anyways a trouble free psx core as far as I know is the main core, which uses software driver.

Personally I tried upscaling PSX games and they look weird, the 3D models look really clean, sure, junk added in, slowdowns, things looking off or warped, like you mention seems a lot of problems, but they'll sort it all I'm sure since they work on these cores almost every day.

I'm posting 2 different screenshots from 2 games, one is a sprite based game, the other a 3D game that uses sprites, both using the internal PSX resolution and a shader to add a scanline effect.

I remember some 2D fighters for Dreamcast or GameCube, while we can upscale games up to 4k in Dolphin, I'm not sure if they added a filter or something to make those look better, PPSSPP on the other hand has a lot of filters for 2D games.

I can never seem to get my games to look that nice in software 1x, no matter what shader I use. Maybe it's the recent update to the Nvidia drivers but as I said I have no issues yet with vulkan.

What shader are you using? Maybe I'll give it another go when I get home.

[Aorin]

7 minutes ago, Thepagel said:

I can never seem to get my games to look that nice in software 1x, no matter what shader I use. Maybe it's the recent update to the Nvidia drivers but as I said I have no issues yet with vulkan.

What shader are you using? Maybe I'll give it another go when I get home.

I don't remember if I changed one or two settings, but I have the preset here, put it in :\HyperSpin\Emulators\RetroArch\shaders or wherever your Retroarch folder is, load a psx game using any psx core in in software mode and 1x internal resolution and load this cgp file, it should load the correct shaders preset.

mednafen_psx_libretro.cgp

[OnionEclipse]

Just now, Aorin said:

I don't remember if I changed one or two settings, but I have the preset here, put it in :\HyperSpin\Emulators\RetroArch\shaders or wherever your Retroarch folder is, load a psx game using any psx core in in software mode and 1x internal resolution and load this cgp file, it should load the correct shaders preset.

mednafen_psx_libretro.cgp

Thanks, I'll report back later tonight hopefully.

[Styphelus]

How do you batch convert to pbp? And how do you deal with multiple cds?

I can't say I had a good experience with the latest Retroarch nightly. Shaders just didn't seem to work with any system. Also I couldn't use my 360 gamepad with PSX. It was set to Dual Shock but it just woudln't work. Had to keep on manually switching it to PS1 Pad and enable the left analog. Not even sure how to set per core config files with this version.

Haven't kept up with Retroarch development in months. Seems frustrating now. 

[Aorin]

25 minutes ago, Styphelus said:

How do you batch convert to pbp?

I can't say I had a good experience with the latest Retroarch nightly. Shaders just didn't seem to work with any system. Also I couldn't use my 360 gamepad with PSX. It was set to Dual Shock but it just woudln't work. Had to keep on manually switching it to PS1 Pad and enable the left analog.

Haven't kept up with Retroarch development in months. Seems frustrating now. 

Yes you can batch convert them, but it requires some extra work you'll need to be aware of.

When you convert a bin+cue psx game to pbp, it creates a folder with the game title, something like Street Fighter Alpha 2, and inside it you'll have your eboot.pbp file, since the psx2psp tool was intended for the PSP, and the PSP only recognizes a PSX game when it's inside a folder and it has a "eboot.pbp" file inside it, any renaming try will result in a "corrupt" file in the PSP xmb.

So, if you batch convert, say, 100 PSX games, you'll have to rename 100 "eboot.pbp", I have made it for my set, that has something like 800 titles, and I'm still alive.

I'm not sure if someone have created a better tool now, it would be nice to have a tool that could automate this process. There's also the multi track games that needs to be converted to a single bin+cue track before making it a pbp file, otherwise, you'll have a game without sountracks.

With this, I'm telling you that this route requires a lot of your intervention, patience and time, I have no regret making my set pbp, since it has a lot of advantages. Riven has 5 Cds, it's a single PBP file "Riven (USA).pbp", I can switch discs without problems, and it saves a lot of space, since it compresses data, like CSO isos for PSP.

Remember that PBPs are also supported in epsxe and pcsx-r standalone emulators and are also easy to extract the isos if you need the raw uncompressed iso for some reason, so I don't see any problem here.

I don't have any problem with controllers, some games only work with the original PSX pad, if that's the case, you can switch it to the PSX pad and save a game remap file, so every time you load that specific game, it should automatically load that controller you have set, not sure if it's your case or it's another issue.

There's a custom Retroarch module in rocket launcher forums that fixes the custom config loading issue, it could be something like this that is causing you troubles.

Here SkyGamer have provided a lot of information about compressing formats for systems that won't need to decompress them to play, using much less space and avoiding the need to wait for it to decompress every time you load a 7z game:

I have provided some further details in the psx games conversion and some other ideas, I hope this can help you.

[OnionEclipse]

I have a batch file somewhere that auto merges multi bin files, I'll look for it. After all the files are single bin/cue when you do the batch conversion select the option to put the pbp into a folder with the game name. Some hours later (depending on your collection size) use bulk rename utility or something similar to rename all the .pbp files to the folder name. From there you can search for .pbp in the root folder and cut and paste them to their permanent home. It is important to note that .pbp is still lossless and if done correctly all audio will be intact. That's why redump started multi bins but all the games that had audio problems in single bin seem to work fine for me in .pbp.

*all the games I tried

[OnionEclipse]

So turns out I remembered incorrectly and its python not batch. The reason I remembered a batch is because I made a drag and drop batch file to do all the work for me. I never got around to adding a queue in the batch. This is the github page where I originally found the code.  I put in a pull request for the bat so hopefully he merges it in and adds a queue and a couple other fixes. This is not as easy as it could be but it is easier than any other way I have found.

Steps:

Download and install python

1) Edit the bat file to point at binmerge.py

2) In the root psx folder search for .cue EDIT: you might want to find all the multi bin games first and move them into a working folder.

3) Drag every .cue file onto the bat file individually (should probably wait for each to get done before you start a new one)

4) on the root folder search for then cut

cue.cue

and

cue.bin

5) paste files into a working folder

6) use Bulk rename utility to change ".cue.cue" to ".cue" and ".cue.bin" to ".bin"

7) Test the files and if they work delete the old ones.

 

This may sound like a lot of work but it really does beat mounting and ripping, its faster and takes less clicking. Plus you wont run the risk of making a bad rip, unless the files being merged were bad to begin with. Here is the file bin merge.zip

I may have edited the python script, cant remember.

[Aorin]

9 minutes ago, Thepagel said:

 

So turns out I remembered incorrectly and its python not batch. The reason I remembered a batch is because I made a drag and drop batch file to do all the work for me. I never got around to adding a queue in the batch. This is the github page where I originally found the code.  I put in a pull request for the bat so hopefully he merges it in and adds a queue and a couple other fixes. This is not as easy as it could be but it is easier than any other way I have found.

Steps:

Download and install python

1) Edit the bat file to point at binmerge.py

2) In the root psx folder search for .cue EDIT: you might want to find all the multi bin games first and move them into a working folder.

3) Drag every .cue file onto the bat file individually (should probably wait for each to get done before you start a new one)

4) on the root folder search for then cut

cue.cue

and

cue.bin

5) paste files into a working folder

6) use Bulk rename utility to change ".cue.cue" to ".cue" and ".cue.bin" to ".bin"

7) Test the files and if they work delete the old ones.

 

This may sound like a lot of work but it really does beat mounting and ripping, its faster and takes less clicking. Plus you wont run the risk of making a bad rip, unless the files being merged were bad to begin with. Here is the file bin merge.zip

I may have edited the python script, cant remember.

I didn`t want to totally derail the thread about making the psx set to pbp, so I just pasted a link where he could find more info about it, I`m sure there he`d find the batch process that can convert multi bin games to single bin Iggy provided some months ago, it uses isobuster to make that.

Have you tried the shader I uploaded?

[OnionEclipse]

4 minutes ago, Aorin said:

I didn`t want to totally derail the thread about making the psx set to pbp, so I just pasted a link where he could find more info about it, I`m sure there he`d find the batch process that can convert multi bin games to single bin Iggy provided some months ago, it uses isobuster to make that.

Have you tried the shader I uploaded?

Merging takes half the time with negligible chance of changing the files. Rerip will change the file, but I'm sure most games wouldn't be affected. No I have not, going to try it now.

[OnionEclipse]

It wont load for me.

[Aorin]

6 hours ago, Thepagel said:

It wont load for me.

Maybe it uses my paths and it won't load, would it help if I send you a screen-shot of the shader presets?