Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[Tse Tse Fly]

Hello,
I'm having a weird problem with Retroarch (version 1.10.3, Windows 10 x64). I'm using an 8bitdo sn30 pro+ controller. When I map the 'Hotkey Enable' command (Settings > Input > Hotkeys) to some button on my gamepad (select for example), whatever hotkey command mapped to the 'Guide' button (that one button with a heart on it, in the case of 8bitdo sn30 pro+) stops working. So I can't invoke that command by hitting select + guide (but all the other hotkey commands are still functional and can be invoked with select + respective button, as expected). Does anybody know how to fix this? Say I really need the guide button.

 

[FritzedProcess]

What games do I pirate emulate on my Android phone to play during my vacation, as a 33 year old boomer without reflexes or wrist ligaments?

The whole "Front Mission" series, except for Gun Hazard, which while also good, is an ARPG.

 

[spekkio]

BROs, tested newshitest Pcsx2.

Pros:
- x64
- regular and AVX2 .exe
- visibly faster than older builds (game launches immediately after you click "run", there's no "loading" of any kind)
- new UI windows are dope:

Cons:
- OSD is borked. Savestate-related messages "selected savestate #1, "loading savestate from slot #" stay on screen for over 10 seconds, so if you start switching from slot #1 to slot #9, it will look like this for over 10 seconds:

I'm sure that's not a desired behaviour / other OSD messages (turbo on/off, etc.) disappear after 1-2 seconds.

 

[Hirato]

BROs, tested newshitest Pcsx2.

Can you even say that, since this clearly wasn't built with QT_BUILD=ON?

 

[BLOBERT]

BROS I HAVE LEARNED ONE THING IN MY EMULATION JOURNEY

I HAVE A SETUP BACKED UP ON LIKE 4 HARD DRIVES THAT IVE ADDED TO OVER THE LAST TEN YEARS GIVE OR TAKE

MEDNAFEN HAS NEVER FAILED ME BROS

IVE HAD TO DITCH NUMEROUS OTHER EMULATORS OVER THE YEARS BUT NEVER MEDNAFEN

ALSO MUCH OF MY FRONTEND SETUP WAS SUCH A CLUSTERFUCK TO FIGURE OUT YEARS AGO THAT I BARELY REMEMBER HOW I GOT IT SETUP

LOLLOLLOL I DREAD HAVING TO FUCK WITH MY SEGA MODEL 2 OR NAOMI EMULATORS AGAIN

 

[BLOBERT]

BROS ALSO

I JUST WANT TO PLAY FUCKING GAMECUBE ROGUE SQUADRON DOES THE MOTHERFYCKING GAME WORK ON DOLPHIN YET!!?!!

 

[Puukko]

Oh yeah, speaking of setting up emulators, I figured I'd give OG Metal Slug a go on MAME or somesuch. Immediately felt like a caveman trying to bang rocks together. Fool is me for thinking I could drop the bios files in there and load the archive. What hubris.

...I'll have to do some proper reading on it later.

 

[BLOBERT]

BRO FEEL YOUR PAIN I GOT ALL THE MAME ROMS I WANTED YEARS AGO

ITS NOT TOO HARD I AM LAME AT COMPUTER STUFF COMPARED TO MANY AND I COULD DO IT

THERE IS ALSO A NEO GEO EMULATOR IF YOU ONLY HAVE A HARD ON FOR METAL SLUG

 

[Lutte]

Oh yeah, speaking of setting up emulators, I figured I'd give OG Metal Slug a go on MAME or somesuch. Immediately felt like a caveman trying to bang rocks together. Fool is me for thinking I could drop the bios files in there and load the archive. What hubris.

...I'll have to do some proper reading on it later.

There's very annoying levels of dependencies between various roms when it comes to MAME because they split every part into the tiniest common factor among them. It's not just like throwing a PS2 bios to start up an emulator. What people call "bios packs" for mame are more like sound chip firmware, gpu firmware etc. And then if there's multiple versions of a firmware, the newer depends on the older and acts like a patch upon it, same for game ROMs, there's a main rom that has the common denominator among all versions, and if you download a version that's not the main rom it depends on it to pull the content it misses.
It's a little like playing with a very early day linux distribution before package management and dependency solving had been invented.

So.. the solution the community picked to sort out that problem is to make torrent packs that contain every. single. rom that has ever existed for mame.

Just google "pleasuredome mame".
Whenever new mame releases come out you just pick up the latest torrent and point it at your current folder to update.
If you're willing to use.. a few hundreds of gb of storage for this, it's the "I don't need to care about anything" nuclear solution to the mame problem. Everything becomes simple and trouble-free. If you have all the roms that have ever existed, MAME just works.

 

[Perkel]

 

[Arthandas]

I am a fan of unfiltered pixel art but even I must admit the crt pic looks amazing.
Too bad you need a fucking degree to setup it and none of the preset crt filters I've used look this good.

 

[Puukko]

I've largely solved that problem by going by feeling with accuracy a secondary consideration. Mainly because I am far removed from when I last played these relevant consoles on a CRT and also because there's no single right CRT look. I usually try a number of shaders, settle on one and then think it looks all wrong when I return to the game some months later.

There are some exceptions where the raw output looks better. I couldn't find a good shader for Blood Omen, they all just made it too dark.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I can play either tbh. When I am really curious about the exact pixel art I take unfiltered just so I can admire each pixel. Then a crt filter is awesome to see the old magic at work. I still remember the tricks you had to do on ACS to make art look ok (as some default was pretty bleh). I was even more amazed at AppleII.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Since I can't decide which CRT filter is better/more authentic, and I don't want to became autistic about it too, in the end I just use a x2 + bilinear filtering, to add just a bit of smoothness (+ correct aspect ratio, if needed).

 

[Arthandas]

Since I can't decide which CRT filter is better/more authentic, and I don't want to became autistic about it too, in the end I just use a x2 + bilinear filtering, to add just a bit of smoothness (+ correct aspect ratio, if needed).

I think that's the worst possible solution. You can't just smudge everything with bilinear filtering and call it a crt filter. Even the crappy crt shaders are better than this.

 

[Perkel]

Since I can't decide which CRT filter is better/more authentic, and I don't want to became autistic about it too, in the end I just use a x2 + bilinear filtering, to add just a bit of smoothness (+ correct aspect ratio, if needed).

CRT-Royale i think is currently the best, the most advanced filter. You need high resolution screen though for it to work properly and decent gpu.

 

[Puukko]

I took a liking to newpixie but it's not universally the best. The scanlines are noticeably yellow which blends in in some games but really sticks out in others. Royale is a bit too heavyhanded I find.

 

[felipepepe]

Is funny how I'm perfectly fine playing games in 1080p with my GTX1060, but would be nice to have a 4K screen and better GPU so I could use better shadders on emulators.

 

[Perkel]

Also for those wondering how they were able to make pixel stuff and then make it look on CRT like that.
They were making art on CRT in first place. So they never saw LCD/LED version in first place.

Moreover thanks to this they used various CRT quirks to achieve those things. Like how you can see blue at side of face and none in LCD. That is because of how CRT color balance worked when you had near each other bright and dark stuff.

Another famous example of that is sonic waterfalls and how SEGA genesis used composite video quirks to create effects because they uses shitty quality to their advantage:

 

[e-mailio estevez]

Yeah, the dithering tricks I never knew about in the past are the big reason I can't go back to playing without shaders.

It's hard to go back once you realize most every single-pixel 'checkerboard' was intended to be some kind of transparency or dithering trick, such as the empty health bar on the right in this playthrough of MM4 I'm going through now. Without shaders the right health bar is not transparent at all :

These tricks were being used well into the PSX era. Although I will admit I haven't gotten quite the right mix of shaders, and I've noticed a lot of screenshots I've taken using them look like shit but look great in-game.

 

[Lutte]

Note that different platforms had different types of pixel art.
Home console games were designed for shitty TVs - composite signal, hefty pixel color bleed. Up till the ps1 era. Heck, even 3d games looked better on composite when it came to home consoles. Silent Hill 1 looked horrifyingly bad without some blurring.
This is what it looked like on a CRT if you used S-Video (better quality signal) rather than composite :

Motherfucking hell of a checkerboard pattern.
In video :


But computer monitors looked much sharper. I don't mean sharp like a LCD rendering a blocky square pixel but overall accuracy and consistency was better.

I find it harder to simulate the look of the sort of monitors we had on older PCs. Low resolution games looked better on CRTs than on LCDs, but the effect CRT monitors had on the image was more subtle than TVs.

 

[Carpincho Pampeano]

Since I can't decide which CRT filter is better/more authentic, and I don't want to became autistic about it too, in the end I just use a x2 + bilinear filtering, to add just a bit of smoothness (+ correct aspect ratio, if needed).

CRT-Royale i think is currently the best, the most advanced filter. You need high resolution screen though for it to work properly and decent gpu.

Jesus guys.

 

[Derringer]

There's a shader now for PS1 in Retroarch that does the dithering effect better for 2D sprites, ps1-dither-comparison, it makes the ps1 port of SMT1 a lot easier on the eyes with the pre-rendered assets.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Ok. I need a full list of Super Nintendo Satellaview games.

Super Nintendo Satellaview romhacked and ready for DL

Esp the zelda games.
https://bszelda.zeldalegends.net/bszelda.shtml

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Could you not have picked a better video than that? I thought that was some weird 3D vtuber thing before clicking on it and seeing her randomly start the video eating chicken. I don't know why someone going for sex appeal chose that thumbnail. Unless she's going for "serial killer" chic...
Don't know where there's a full list of those games, but Wikipedia lists some 110 of 'em.