General Emulation Discussion

Aye that'd annoy me too. I know there's a way to get it in retail mode, but not sure how safe it is.

Honestly I don't get the whole point. Sure it'll auto update, but you've to manually manage your cores so it's swings and roundabouts. Cloud saves I suppose is the big thing people are buying into, but ultimately you're using a frontend to launch a frontend to launch a core to launch a game.....

Standalone RA remains the way to go imo.

Sounds like a few things wrong here:

1) Best practice with multi disc games is to ALWAYS create and use *.m3u files to manage disc swapping. Very very easy, very simple to do.

Eg:

virtua cop (disc 1).bin

virtua cop (disc 2).bin

virtua cop (disc 3).bin

virtua cop.m3u

Inside the m3u file (which is just a text file with its extension renamed), are the full names of each disc, all on separate lines.

You then load the m3u file in Retroarch instead of any disc, and the first disc will be loaded. To change disc, enter the Retroarch menu, go to disc swapping, eject the current disc, append the next disc, close the virtual disc tray, and continue on your merry way. The m3u file tells Retroarch exactly what discs are available and where to find them.

Even better is to convert those bin/cue files into chd files, and just replace the extensions in the m3u file from bin to chd. Not necessary but saves space, and much cleaner to manage files this way. It's archival quality compression, non lossy.

2) depending on what name you give your m3u file, you'll have to rename your save file to match it. This only happens because you've got a save file existing before the m3u was created, normally the save file would be created with a matching name and this wouldn't be an issue.

3) I've read you might need to change the default browsing location for Retroarch, to anything but it's default. This is something I've done anyway, to the root of where my games are stored....if anything it just saved scrolling through directory after directory just to find games. Not sure if this step is needed if you follow the above, but it's worth doing anyway.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroArch/comments/eeuapv/how_to_switch_cds_on_sega_saturn_beetle_core/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

@Retr0gamer I'll take a look on my end and see. I've read standalone mednafen doesn't give this issue, so maybe there's a bug in the libretro saturn core?

@Retr0gamer how far is it between the save point and the disc swap prompt?

@Retr0gamer nevermind, I've been able to reproduce it with that game. If you boot from Disc 0, and choose to start the game, it'll ask for Disc 1. Upon swapping it, I can see the system resetting to the bios. I'm able to just start disc 1 then, but any progress presumably won't follow over due to the reset. It happens in Beetle Saturn, Yabause, and Kronos. To be fair, what they're doing is what actual hardware would do upon opening of a disc tray lid....this game in particular must be using some type of voodoo to halt the Saturn and not cause that reset somehow. Still, shame.

I'd actually never heard of it, seems interesting enough?

Someone from GBATemp discovered that the recent "Cotton Guardian Force Saturn Tribute" release on the Switch, isn't using some custom/tailored Saturn emulator that only applies to these games...but instead seems to be a VERY functional global Saturn emulator.....complete now with 4MB Expansion support. You seemingly need to just inject your Saturn game into the emulator and boom, fantastic Saturn emulation on Switch (Switch running cfw of course.)

HOWEVER - input lag seems to be an issue, with some users reporting a whopping 11 frames of lag. Seemingly (according to one of the Mame dev's on that Reddit thread, Saturn games on real hardware do exhibit some input lag natively....but 11 seems excessive.) Maybe it can be improved upon? The Switch hardware is seriously outdated, which isn't helping the case here, so whatever they've achieved is impressive regardless.

Showcase of where things are at currently with OG Xbox emulation - an even at that, it's missing some info like the newer multiplayer features etc

That's mental, and they're charging for it!

Would the open source license there not prohibit packaging the compiled emulator as a retail product?

I know it's subjective, but how people prefer raw pixel output on lcd's over actual crts, or crt shaders is beyond me. I find it so damn harsh to look at.

@Steve X2 damn, that needs to be NSFW man....

PC Engine - Beetle - beetle_pce

Megadrive - Blastem is cycle accurate, but Genesis Plus GX is probably the most common. You won't notice the difference outside of some obscure tech demos.

Snes - Bsnes is cycle accurate, but again, Snes9x is not noticeably any different. Bsnes however has the newish HD Mode 7 feature, which is pretty damn cool for the handful of games it can apply it to. From memory, Bsnes doesn't place nice with shaders but that could be ancient history. Snes9x also runs MSU1 content very very easily these days. Check out the true widescreen patches for SMW and Super Metroid, amazing stuff.

NES - Nestopia, Mesen, etc....most of them are all trading blows nowadays. The Mesen HD Packs are an interesting thing to explore too, like the HD-Mode7 stuff.

PS1 - I use Beetle HW for this. I'll post my settings shortly for a quick gander if anyone fancies it. Internal resolution boost, pxgp, super sampled back down to native, and a shader applied....absolutely beautiful looking.

Saturn - Beetle Saturn, based on mednafen (leads the pack re Saturn emulation.)

Dreamcast - Flycast (though I paid for the ReDream license also, Flycast has passed it now imo.) No issues this end with an Nvidia GPU. It also runs Naomi stuff too.