Retro games and emulation - Discuss retro shit in case you're stuck in the past or a hipster

Dean Pentel said:
Anyone here playing PS1 games on PS2 slim? That's working for me. I also have an old school Game Genie disc for PS1 that still works, as does the PS1 memory cards. That was a surprise.
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All the disc based gamesharks are forwards compatible with the PS2. It's the hardware based ones that are not.
 
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So I got myself a Retron 77. Its nice. Shit sucks that I can't play some game carts (my homebrew stuff and Robot Tank). There is a fan update to the system that allows for more roms and shit. But the latest version (6.2.1) doesn't work with paddle controllers. 6.1.1 works with Paddles fine. Still can't play some cart games, but the rom files work just fine.

Also got a ranger controller. Its very nice. Hybrid joystick / paddle controller. Works well. I think Stella has the sensitivity turned down so its somewhat less responsive. Not a huge deal and can be adjusted. The controller works on my 7800 as well. No issue though the plug is a bit tight for my 7800.

Gonna get a AtariVox eventually so I can hear those sweet voice through homebrew. Might work with the Retron 77 with a USB adapter I've heard. Not sure.
 
I bought an HDMI to RCA converter, hooked my Computer on a CRT screen. That was an amazing experience, no filter I ever saw matched the quality for old games, it's no meme guys. The pixelated faces in Streets of Rage 2 menu looked more like a regular painting, the rocks in Sonic 3 looked it could pop out of the screen, menus on ps1 were bright and rounded.

Totally recommended! Get some bucks and invest in the HDMI/RCA + CRT TV combo.
 
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Beluga Le Vampire Hunter said:
I thought I'd contribute to this thread with some help to those who are having trouble launching PS1 files from RetroArch.

The problems you've been having is mostly due to the ECM file. All you have to do is change the ECM file to a BIN file. Here's how:

1. Download this tool: https://www.mediafire.com/file/q2slybft4iuoxm6/ecm_tools.zip/file

2. Then extract the zip folder with WinRAR or 7Zip to your preferred destination.

3. Find your ECM file and drag it to unecm.exe and the BIN file will show up.

4. Open up RetroArch and set the game to launch to the BIN file.

Hope this helps!
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Speaking of disc images, I'm converting most of mine to Mame's CHD format. It's supported by most RetroArch cores.
It allows Mixed Mode like bin/cue but only needs a single file and it has basic compression (saves a lot of space when there's a lot of zero padding).
 
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Dean Pentel said:
Anyone here playing PS1 games on PS2 slim? That's working for me. I also have an old school Game Genie disc for PS1 that still works, as does the PS1 memory cards. That was a surprise.
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I wish there was a good way to launch pirated PS1 games on PS2.

The "emulators" people have put out are jank and you need a modchip to run PS1 games. She said while having a room full of devices that can emulate the PS1.

Jean Lafitte 1812 said:
PS1 on PS2 tip: PS1 games can't read a PS2 memory card, but PS1 saves are perfectly safe to be copied to and from PS2 cards. Considering how much bigger the PS2 memory cards are it's a good way to store PS1 saves, especially for games with multi-block saves like RPGs and RPG Maker. Might be able to do this with a hard drive too, but slims don't support hard drives.
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I don't know if there's a way to hack a DexDrive to run on a PS2, but if you have Free McBoot installed you should be able to copy the memcard saves to a USB drive.

AsianChris said:
I bought an HDMI to RCA converter, hooked my Computer on a CRT screen. That was an amazing experience, no filter I ever saw matched the quality for old games, it's no meme guys. The pixelated faces in Streets of Rage 2 menu looked more like a regular painting, the rocks in Sonic 3 looked it could pop out of the screen, menus on ps1 were bright and rounded.

Totally recommended! Get some bucks and invest in the HDMI/RCA + CRT TV combo.
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I would if I had the money for a GOOD CRT, the room, and of course there's the fact that they eat electricity. yee64 on retroarch is actually my favorite filter and simulates the last CRT I had (some Sylvania joint with S-Video) pretty well.

garakfan69 said:
Speaking of disc images, I'm converting most of mine to Mame's CHD format. It's supported by most RetroArch cores.
It allows Mixed Mode like bin/cue but only needs a single file and it has basic compression (saves a lot of space when there's a lot of zero padding).
Click to expand...

Some tips:

Retroarch supports .pbp, but not the official .pbps you can get from something like nps off Sony's servers. Doesn't seem to support multidisc pbp very well. PPSSPP supports .cso but PPSSPP in RA does NOT support this.

You can trim GBA, DS, and 3DS ROMs to save room. I can't get Retroarch to work that well with the .3DS files I have but Citra plays them. Does it play them well? Not on my machine, and I should pick up a 3DS + flashcart sometime along the way. (I prefer flashcarts.)

CHD works for most games.

If you really want to squeeze everything you can, Mednafen supports ISO+OGG and so does Genesis Plus GX. Mednafen supports this for Saturn games, even! However my Saturn binaries are in .chd format because Mednafen Saturn won't run very well on my tablet and whatever Yabause derivative I'm using supports it.

.chd works for nearly all formats. FM Towns on MAME supports it. I wish I knew how to get FM Towns in Retroarch MAME working for dem filters.

Lastly, DOSBox supports iso+mp3.
 
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CHD is great because its lossless and compresses very well. But for the love of god don't share those compressed rips to the public. IE iso+mp3/ogg or whatever. I saw those back in the day. That at least made sense since space was limited and internet speeds still were somewhat slow. But CHD is reversable with no permanate changes while you perm change the audio quality to mp3 or ogg. At least the encoders today are pretty great and changes to audio aren't apparently unless you fuck with your encoder settings to make it shitty on purpose.

Space is so cheap now of days I don't see the need for compression of ROM files. ISOs is another story. But most ROM compression techniques outside of 7z/RAR/Zip that involve removing data is dumb. I'm not sure if there's a lossless way of ripping games on 3DS though.

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Save_Disk_Space_for_ISOs
 
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Has any Nintendo DS emulation utilized the leaked source code yet? What's the best DS emulator?
 
TaimuRadiu said:
You can trim GBA, DS, and 3DS ROMs to save room. I can't get Retroarch to work that well with the .3DS files I have but Citra plays them. Does it play them well? Not on my machine, and I should pick up a 3DS + flashcart sometime along the way. (I prefer flashcarts.)
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3DS flashcarts have a history of being terrible. Gateway bricked peoples systems on purpose to try and harm the reputation of clones and Sky3DS had a hardware limit of 10 games per flashcart and can't play mods or translations (unless you mod your system anyway). I still recommend a DS flashcart thanks to it making hacking the 3DS easier and that it's more reliable in my experience than running original DS games bootstrapped into 3DS cias.

Dom Cruise said:
Has any Nintendo DS emulation utilized the leaked source code yet? What's the best DS emulator?
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DeSmuMe and MelonDS are you choices on PC. Melon is maintained by a small time cow but they're a competent developer and the emulator is actively being worked on. Apparently people are still working on DeSmuMe too, so I'd try both and pick whichever runs your game better. I doubt either project touches the leaked code to avoid a one way trip to C&D town.

On Android you have DraStic which is a feat of software engineering that lets old Android devices barely more powerful than the DS run DS games at full speed. It also costs money, but it's your only portable DS option other than a flashcart.
 
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I have literally never touched Retro Arch in my life.
Does this have some manner of blowjob attachment or something?
If even an eighth of the shit I hear people talk about is remotely true this sounds like a hundred tons of mame needing spoonfed roms and nesticle hacks on top of a pile of magic engine or some shit.
 
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XYZpdq said:
I have literally never touched Retro Arch in my life.
Does this have some manner of blowjob attachment or something?
If even an eighth of the shit I hear people talk about is remotely true this sounds like a hundred tons of mame needing spoonfed roms and nesticle hacks on top of a pile of magic engine or some shit.
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It's good for the filters and a decent frontend for Mednafen. Genesis Plus GX is only on Retroarch, or Wii.

It is however not very user friendly, to say the least.
 
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bighugeguns said:
Hooked up an old ass CRT TV to an old ass Wii and played some emulators, looks absolutely fantastic.

My eyes are burning and sore now, how all us boomers aren't blind today is a miracle.
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Our mothers told to not sit near the screen for a reason.
 
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OH BOY


Finally got the Official Wisdom tree NES collection in the Mail.

And there's many things I'm noticing just from the box in general. The Logos for the games used are low res JPEGs, there are white artifacts surrounding some that are not cleaned up. Words have white spaces in the center of letters like the center of P's, e's, and O's. There are vast swaths of the logo missing from Bible Buffet because someone took the wand tool in photoshop and just deleted everything so now you have half to a quarter of a person visible in the logo where there should be two characters visible in the logo.

Here's what the OG Bible Buffet Logo looks like
Bible+Buffet+(USA)+(v6.0)+(Unl)-image.jpg



Now this is not mine but this is the only good photo I can find of the box art which they copied for the cart as well.
wisdomtree2.jpg

All the photoshop errors are clearly visible on the case and cart.

The one thing that collectors have noticed is that there are multiple variants of the bible adventures collection. The red one is visible in the image, but I got a gray cart. There's also a bunch of translucent colors that also apparently exist including purple, green, and a blue. It may be random what you get. The company doesn't respond to shit quickly and next to no documentation exists. Looking through the instruction book(you get one that includes everything for all the games). They just took the originals scanned them in and maybe spent 5 minutes resizing shit in illustrator. There's pages missing that were in the originals and nobody bothered to check because some sentences just cut off in the middle that were meant to continue on to the next page. Spiritual Warfare's a zelda clone and that was the largest of these games. How stuff works is barely covered in what they give you in the booklet.

Also they put the collection title on the wrong spine for the box, they reversed it.
 
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XYZpdq said:
I have literally never touched Retro Arch in my life.
Does this have some manner of blowjob attachment or something?
If even an eighth of the shit I hear people talk about is remotely true this sounds like a hundred tons of mame needing spoonfed roms and nesticle hacks on top of a pile of magic engine or some shit.
Click to expand...

If you're not feeding it giant romsets and are just throwing it a folder of like 100-200 roms it's a nice frontend for everything other than mame. If it hits metadata it doesn't like (this happens if any mame game can't resolve one of the roms it needs and/or requires a CHD over ~400mb) it's going to crash and wipe out all of its scan results since for some reason it doesn't save incrementally.

If you want a frontend to throw on some shitty low-end windows box for emulation, check out LaunchBox for the frontend paired with retroarch for the actual emulation. Works great with gigantic collections even on ancient Core 2 Duo machines.
 
AsianChris said:
I bought an HDMI to RCA converter, hooked my Computer on a CRT screen. That was an amazing experience, no filter I ever saw matched the quality for old games, it's no meme guys. The pixelated faces in Streets of Rage 2 menu looked more like a regular painting, the rocks in Sonic 3 looked it could pop out of the screen, menus on ps1 were bright and rounded.

Totally recommended! Get some bucks and invest in the HDMI/RCA + CRT TV combo.
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It kind of angers me a bit that it's working, doing that in the Quake 1 and later on DivX days was always a source of pain and frustration. 'it worked yesterday, what the hell...'

TaimuRadiu said:
I should pick up a 3DS + flashcart sometime along the way. (I prefer flashcarts.)
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Softmodding and getting a larger SD card is way easier. Having used flashcarts on both GBA and DS softmodding the 3DS is the only pirating solution ever that has made me uncomfortable in how effortless it was. I felt like a thief, there was no effort. Or Chinese software.
 
Picked up an awesome 32in CRT recently for $10. It was a bitch getting it into the basement, but now my Genesis games look real nice, and I got that flash cart to make it all the better.

Dom Cruise said:
Has any Nintendo DS emulation utilized the leaked source code yet? What's the best DS emulator?
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Any emulator writer, especially one who does Nintendo emulation, knows to stay far away from any leaks. Nintendo will be looking over the source code of those emulators with a fine tooth comb and anything that looks suspicious will get it brought before a judge. I bet they haven't even seen the leaks, and that's a good thing.
 
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