Complete RetroArch Guide For Noobs.

[gigapig]

Changes really do have to be made to the module notes and setup on this sytem, its very confusing for people who are new to this and it puts people of something they really should be using for certain systems.

If you feel up to it you could rewrite them or add your findings, omit anything none relevant and pass it on to Mr DJ; I don't think he has much time for them but I could be wrong.

[gigapig]

Thanks for the guide, it explains a lot! This might be a stupid question, but how do you configure the controls for each core if you don't use a xbox controller? I build a minipac arcade board so I mapped them to different keyboard controls.

Duff said to do it manually which seems to be correct, however just going into the relevant .cfg doesn't seem to do much either.

Using 32x as an example.

As you can see from the screen shot I have renamed the 32X cfg file to Sega 32X for Hyperlaunch from whatever the default was.

But you can also see I highlighted "picodrive_libretro.dll.cfg", you have to make changes in this config file, then once you run a game and test it will write those changes to your Sega 32X.cfg. That is the only way I could get them to work, also trying to change next shader from "X" to either ">" or "." did not work, but changing it to "U" did work.

[SIMPLYAUSTIN]

If you feel up to it you could rewrite them or add your findings, omit anything none relevant and pass it on to Mr DJ; I don't think he has much time for them but I could be wrong.

I have already done this, its in another thread for RetroArch. I added the missing systems at that time so people could use PSP, Jaguar etc with RetroArch.

Here is a copy of mine if anyone would like to use it. Please BACKUP any module you have already, although I have included a stock version in the download too in case anything goes wrong. I have also changed the tool tips in the module options the best I could. However Im not sure how to add PSP etc as options, but these systems only have one core and it will use those as default with the settings I have placed.

If anyone would like to use it, HERE is the link

[Gerurver]

Hai gigapig, you said.

also trying to change next shader from "X" to either ">" or "." did not work, but changing it to "U" did work.

did you do that in de cfg file? of in the gui?

[gigapig]

Only in the cfg file as mentioned above.

[Styphelus]

I'm a ways off getting this fine tuned but here's a comparison. We should have a Scan lines, for and against pole.

With.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]45280[/ATTACH]

Without.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]45281[/ATTACH]

I like it without scanlines but I would apply a filter to it to remove all the jagged edges. I hate scanlines! Why? Several reasons:

1. The scanlines are always greatly exaggerated. I still have an old CTR in the basement and the scanlines are not that noticeable unless you are very close to the tv and even so, they are not black lines. Than again, they may have been more noticeable in an old 70's tv (the ones with the big round dials) but I never had one of those in the house growing up in the 80's or 90's. People didn't watch TV on a daily basis with all those black lines across the image. It would have been a nightmare to watch anything like that.

2. I'm trying to emulate games, not bad hardware. I don't play with an old atari joystick or calico dial button and I don't delay the loading of a ZX Spectrum or C64 game to simulate the loading times of a tape so why would I want to emulate an old, low quality tv?

That's just my opinion and personal taste.

[Gerurver]

Giga tnx!! I forgot the option save on exit. Thats why it was not working.

[gigapig]

I like it without scanlines but I would apply a filter to it to remove all the jagged edges. I hate scanlines! Why? Several reasons:

1. The scanlines are always greatly exaggerated. I still have an old CTR in the basement and the scanlines are not that noticeable unless you are very close to the tv and even so, they are not black lines. Than again, they may have been more noticeable in an old 70's tv (the ones with the big round dials) but I never had one of those in the house growing up in the 80's or 90's. People didn't watch TV on a daily basis with all those black lines across the image. It would have been a nightmare to watch anything like that.

2. I'm trying to emulate games, not bad hardware. I don't play with an old atari joystick or calico dial button and I don't delay the loading of a ZX Spectrum or C64 game to simulate the loading times of a tape so why would I want to emulate an old, low quality tv?

That's just my opinion and personal taste.

Good points and ones I felt myself once upon a time. Displays where smaller and we sit further away from TV's so we don't notice the scan lines or the matrix of an LCD. But I like the effect and it can help to reduce jaggies on systems like Saturn and PS1, and it's cool to mess with these shaders, something else to suck up the time.

[gigapig]

Giga tnx!! I forgot the option save on exit. Thats why it was not working.

Did you managed to use the ">" key?

[Awakened]

I like it without scanlines but I would apply a filter to it to remove all the jagged edges. I hate scanlines! Why? Several reasons:

1. The scanlines are always greatly exaggerated. I still have an old CTR in the basement and the scanlines are not that noticeable unless you are very close to the tv and even so, they are not black lines. Than again, they may have been more noticeable in an old 70's tv (the ones with the big round dials) but I never had one of those in the house growing up in the 80's or 90's. People didn't watch TV on a daily basis with all those black lines across the image. It would have been a nightmare to watch anything like that.

2. I'm trying to emulate games, not bad hardware. I don't play with an old atari joystick or calico dial button and I don't delay the loading of a ZX Spectrum or C64 game to simulate the loading times of a tape so why would I want to emulate an old, low quality tv?

That's just my opinion and personal taste.

1. There are so many crt shaders available for RetroArch, I think it might be worth trying a few just to see if you like any. I was never a scanlines guy, but most of the shaders have parameters for changing the scanline size. Or just have less pronounced scanlines by default. So I eventually found some I like.

2. It's definately a preference thing, but I think certain crt shaders can add more detail to the image and help with blending things. Here's an example with Mega Man X without a crt shader, with crt-royale and with crt-geom (you might need to right click the images and open in a new tab to make them full size so they don't look weird):

If you look at the left wall, the shading on the edge has a smoother transition from darker to lighter with the crt shaders, especially geom. Geom is pretty dark and blurry though, so I don't use it much.

Here's a few more royale shots, just because I think it looks cool:

[Fromlostdays]

Yeah, the truth is that I don't know enough about shaders to really speak on the issue, so I'm going to scrap that little write up on it. Hopefully the dialogue will be open and new ideas keep flowing. Also my company is going through a merger so I don't have time to fart. Here's a relevant snippet for the shader tutorial I was writing, but this is really all I'm going to be able to add in the foreseeable future:

Scanlines do a lot to make SNES look more authentic and natural and (almost counter intuitively) help to smooth out some of the edges. In my experience really help on games like Mario Kart and Donkey Kong Country.

In RetroArch, the best scanline type shaders can be found in the CRT and NTSC folders. As stated before, 5x will give you some strong scanlines while 1x may or may not be visible at all.

Here are some scanline type shaders to try:

CRT – geom – flat – sharpness (This seems to be a very popular one)

CRT – geom – flat

CRT – caligari

CRT – snes-hires-blend (no scanlines)

NTSC – gauss- scanline (and varients: these also seem to be quite popular)

NTSC – composite/svideo and varients

Blurring type shaders:

Anti-Aliasing – while I never found a good use for it on snes, one linear pass of advanced-aa on Nintendo 46 looks amazing. You really don’t need to do anything else unless you’re looking for scanlines.

Other blurring type shaders include sal, sai, supereagle, and blur.

My personal favorite shader is Sabr 3.0 which doesn’t blur the image, but smooths out all of the blocky lines/pixilation. This is a perfect shader for SNES.

Sharpening Shaders

If you want to sharpen the image as far as I know you can use HQX filters or Sharp-Bilinear.

[Fromlostdays]

Hey Giga, I had some time today to play around. Rather than getting into a discussion, I've uploaded some shader presets that work with RetroArch into my FTP folder under "RetroArch Shader Presets". All you have to do is put the files into your retroarch/shaders folder, open RetroArch, and navigate to shaders, then select "Load Preset", then navigate to the file. We should have the same list of shaders so it should work. Again, its all about personal taste, but maybe they'll give you some ideas. They are the shader combos I've settled on for SNES, Sega Gen, N46, and Playstation. Hopefully this will catch on as its easy as hell to load the presets.

[gigapig]

Thats wonderful Walter, I look forward to checking out your work.

There does seem to be varying levels of complexity with shaders, even delving into editing the shader files. One I use at the moment for N64 has an annoying green and red tinge which I'd love to edit out. Just takes time.

Cheers.

Edit: I fixed that green and magenta tinge, commented it out in the .cg file.

[Gerurver]

Hai Giga, YES its okay. I could use the > (comma)

[kroton181]

I know I'm late on this but I used the 3dfx shader and I think its just perfect for n64 and ps1.

[Styphelus]

Is Retroarch better than ePSXe or PSX for PS1 emulation?

[Fromlostdays]

I think so. I use Chrono Cross as a base. Both the above emulators have trouble with some of the effects in game - specifically the "I'm about to battle some shit" effect. Xebra handled everything flawlessly out of the box, so I used that, but it has no shader support. RetroArch with the mednafen core does both. I'd keep installs of all the emulators for ps1 (and n64, all sketchy systems etc.) just in case you run into a snag, but I haven't found a reason not to use the RetroArch/Mednafen core for PS1 emulation. In fact, it was specifically n64 and ps1 emulation that prompted me to write this guide and got me excited about RetroArch. I've since ported every system I can over to it.

[coodkidd]

Trying to launch 3DO images with build "RetroArch-Win64-2014-10-10" but not able to with .cue based images...

If I have the 4DO core loaded, and browse to a game either as a .7z or extracted to a folder, the .cue files do not show up. If I browse using the "Detect Core" option they do show, but after choosing the .cue file, the bios loads to the 3DO menu saying to "Insert CD". Doing this from a .7z only seems to extract the .cue to the temp folder, not the .img so that surely would be an issue. But the same behavior on a self extracted folder where the .img does exist. Loading an .iso seems to work fine though (sometimes). Tried adding the .img extension in the info config and booting straight to that, but still just the "Insert CD" screen.

Probably just don't know what I am doing, anyone know how to load .cue/.img files (preferably out of a .7z)?

Thanks a lot for any help!

[gigapig]

Trying to launch 3DO images with build "RetroArch-Win64-2014-10-10" but not able to with .cue based images...

If I have the 4DO core loaded, and browse to a game either as a .7z or extracted to a folder, the .cue files do not show up. If I browse using the "Detect Core" option they do show, but after choosing the .cue file, the bios loads to the 3DO menu saying to "Insert CD". Doing this from a .7z only seems to extract the .cue to the temp folder, not the .img so that surely would be an issue. But the same behavior on a self extracted folder where the .img does exist. Loading an .iso seems to work fine though (sometimes). Tried adding the .img extension in the info config and booting straight to that, but still just the "Insert CD" screen.

Probably just don't know what I am doing, anyone know how to load .cue/.img files (preferably out of a .7z)?

Thanks a lot for any help!

I'm currently getting the same result.

[potts43]

Can someone please confirm something for me about per system configs...?

I've done lots of reading but they don't seem to be being read.

I've turned on both save on exit and per system cfg in RA. I've the created a cfg file for Atari 2600 stella core.

So renamed Atari 2600.cfg and placed in config folder ?

Can you please confirm what I need to rename it to and where it should be stored. Is it in the config folder? Do I need to setup the paths in RA or does the module use relative paths so it's not necessary?

Thanks for any help offered.

[gigapig]

Can someone please confirm something for me about per system configs...?

I've done lots of reading but they don't seem to be being read.

I've turned on both save on exit and per system cfg in RA. I've the created a cfg file for Atari 2600 stella core.

So renamed Atari 2600.cfg and placed in config folder ?

Can you please confirm what I need to rename it to and where it should be stored. Is it in the config folder? Do I need to setup the paths in RA or does the module use relative paths so it's not necessary?

Thanks for any help offered.

What I do is.

Start RA, go to "Core" and choose the the required core.

Back out and then save the new config and then close RA.

Go into the config folder and find the config that was just created and rename it to the system name.

I then fire up HLHQ and double or change the path to the core. Sometimes 2 or more are available, (like for Atari Lynx you can use the Mednafen core or he Handy Core; the Mednafen core crashes for me) so point to the core in the core folder.

Also check you have downloaded or the cores, as some could be missing from your install.

Once a game loads you can press F1 or the Xbox button and mess with shaders etc.

[potts43]

What I do is.

Start RA, go to "Core" and choose the the required core.

Back out and then save the new config and then close RA.

Go into the config folder and find the config that was just created and rename it to the system name.

I then fire up HLHQ and double or change the path to the core. Sometimes 2 or more are available, (like for Atari Lynx you can use the Mednafen core or he Handy Core; the Mednafen core crashes for me) so point to the core in the core folder.

Also check you have downloaded or the cores, as some could be missing from your install.

Once a game loads you can press F1 or the Xbox button and mess with shaders etc.

Sounds similar to what I tried ;-(. Wondered if I had missed a step. I'll try again...and again ;-)

[gigapig]

Sounds similar to what I tried ;-(. Wondered if I had missed a step. I'll try again...and again ;-)

What system are you trying to get working?

[potts43]

What system are you trying to get working?

I love the shader effects for atari 2600 as stella runs like a sloth with them turned on. They seem to work and save ok but when I change the game play keys in the Atari 2600.cfg file they are still the original ones so I'm guessing they aren't being read

[gigapig]

I love the shader effects for atari 2600 as stella runs like a sloth with them turned on. They seem to work and save ok but when I change the game play keys in the Atari 2600.cfg file they are still the original ones so I'm guessing they aren't being read

I have a feeling, if your doing that manually you need to change them in stella_libretro.dll.cfg. Of course backup before changing things.