Hello everyone - i need help setting retroarch - so far it only works with atari 2600 games, but when i try to run 5200, 7800, jaguar, lynx or any other MESS - i does not run, i only get a blank screen (if im lucky) or it just crashes… i have tried it with both the stable and nightly versions I dont know what else to do, please help!! im running a windows 8.1 machine and hyperspin is the front end…atari 2600 launches from hyperspin and rocketlauncherUI with no porblems, but nothing else run directly from RA
MESS is hard to get running in RetroArch. You need all of your ROMs in softlist format and a pretty specific directory structure.
Thanks - i’m not married to RA so if it is a PITA to set i would gladly jump onto the next best thing. The only requirement i have is that it needs to run with hyperspin…can you recommend other emulators?
Where can i find the files or info on the folder structure required to get MESS working in RA?
Most of the info is here: http://www.libretro.com/index.php/mamemessume-cores/
You should be able to use official/mainline MESS with hyperspin, I think. Generally, MESS is sort of a last resort vs pretty much anything else, so your best bet is probably to use RetroArch for the things it supports easily and then use mainline MESS to fill in the gaps (e.g., Intellivision, etc.).
im still fairly new to all this so can you dumb your question down a little bit? LOL I dont need/want to use MESS if i dont have to…(side question: isn’t mess and MAME the same?) i’m trying to get retroarch to work with what i think (and according to their website) it supports…i guess what i’m trying to ask is…how can i get atari 5200, 7800, jaguar and lynx to work with retroarch what are the systems that retroarch “easily supports”? maybe i can get them working first
thanks for your help!!!
Yes, MAME/MESS are the same thing now.
Jaguar and Lynx work fine with RetroArch without anything too crazy, just regular ROMs (make sure whichever Lynx ROMs you get have headers; recent No-Intro sets may remove them and it breaks emulator compatibility). For Lynx, you can try the Handy and/or mednafen/beetle-lynx cores. I think the Virtual Jaguar core also needs a BIOS image in your ‘system’/BIOS directory.
I don’t think RetroArch has any straightforward cores for atari 5200 or 7800, though, just Stella for 2600 and Hatari for ST, so you’ll need MESS for the others.
I noticed what i was doing wrong…i had selected 7z as disabled in RocketlauncherUI…once i enabled it, everything started working as expected…thanks for your help
I do have a new problem though…how do you set filters and improve the overall video quality in retroarch?
There are “video filters” that run on the CPU, but they are few and limited. I suggest using shaders, instead. You can download them from the online updater. The Cg shaders are generally a better choice than the GLSL ones on Windows.
Once you have them, start up some content, then go back into the menu (the ‘quick menu’) and you should see ‘shader options’ down at the bottom. The easiest way to get one going is to use ‘load shader preset’ and then navigate through the shader directory to find one you like. There are a lot of them to choose from but some popular ones are crt/crt-easymode-halation.cgp and crt/crt-geom.cgp for CRT effects and xbr/xbr-mlv4-multipass.cgp for smoothing effects (think: hq2x and supereagle). The shaders in handheld/console-border are also a lot of fun when emulating handhelds.
You can also manually add and remove shader passes to mix, match and stack effects once you get a feel for how you want things to look.