Mednafen-PCE - TurboGrafx-CD vs Super CD-ROM^2 BIOS Screens

Hey everyone!

My latest endeavor is getting all my systems to show their proper boot screen when starting a game. For most systems/cores this is pretty easy to pull off.

I’m running into a possible issue with the TurboGrafx-CD though.

As you know, the ‘required’ BIOS for this system’s core is the v3.0 BIOS. v1.0 = PC Engine CD-Rom v2.0 = TurboGrafx-CD V3.0 = PC Engine Super CD-Rom^2 (It’s pronounced “CD-RomRom”, your fun fact for the day)

The wiki here mentions that you can use any version of the BIOS, however it also mentions that some games are not compatible with certain BIOS.

So, my ultimate question is… WHAT games are not compatible with the 2.0 BIOS? I hate seeing the Super CD-ROM^2 boot screen instead of the TurboGrafx-CD one.

OR

Is there a way to have it boot the proper BIOS based on game-region?

The Mednafen core for Sega Saturn already does this automatically between US and JP games. Which… is just awesome.

Thanks in advance for any help :slight_smile:

I might be wrong here but I think the games that aren’t compatible with the 2.0 bios are games that require the “arcade” card. I could be completely way off bass here though. I can’t say anything about the bios screen because I use a patched version of the syscard3.pce that bypasses the boot screen and I have had no problems loading any pce, supergrafx or cd game I have thrown at it.

[QUOTE=lordmonkus;46246]I might be wrong here but I think the games that aren’t compatible with the 2.0 bios are games that require the “arcade” card. I could be completely way off bass here though. I can’t say anything about the bios screen because I use a patched version of the syscard3.pce that bypasses the boot screen and I have had no problems loading any pce, supergrafx or cd game I have thrown at it.[/QUOTE]

I hope you’l forgive my ignorance, but… “Arcade Card”? What is that, exactly? I’m still pretty new to the NEC line of systems.

It was an addon hue card that had to be put in to the hue card slot for certain games like Sapphire, it had some extra memory on it. Check this video out, he explains it a bit at the beginning of the video, the rest is just showing off games. I just watched this today.

Skip in to about 2:30

It was used with a handful of arcade ports (hence the name).

Well placing syscard2.pce in the folder with syscard3.pce did absolutely nothing different. Nor did just leaving syscard2.pce in there. I had to rename it to syscard3.pce

At that point, a couple games loaded, but most the ones I tried did not :’( (Castlevania gave a funny error screen though)

This really sucks.

I don’t think it is possible to do what you are trying by having the correct bios screen show for the game. I just simply use the syscard3.pce bios and like I said before I have them patched to bypass the bios screen anyways.

I owned a TurboGrafx-16 with CD add-on, and later on got the Super CD card so I could play Super CD games on it (actually I still do; it’s just not hooked up at this point in time) so I know something about this. :slight_smile: There’s nothing “wrong” about using the Super CD card (i.e., the 3.0 rom) with ‘normal’ CD games that don’t require it as it was 100% backwards compatible as far as I know - I certainly never bothered to use the older 2.0 card that came with the Turbo CD once I got the Super CD card, unless I explicitly wanted to see what a Super CD game’s error message was with the older card (and as you noted, Dracula X has one of the more amusing ones). Similarly, I believe anyone playing a game on a TurboDuo (which as I recall didn’t use a system card for the CD BIOS and just had the 3.0 BIOS built-in) would always see the Super CD-ROM^2 BIOS screen before booting a CD game…

It’s been a while since I had my Duo actually hooked up, but from memory, this sounds accurate.

That would make sense that the Duo would have the 3.0 version…

I had a thought though…

I boot RetroArch using RocketLauncher via Hyperspin. So I’m thinking maybe I could do a second smaller installation of RA that loads the 2.0 BIOS, and then just point RocketLauncher to this version as an “Alternate Emulator” for the US games!

This would fix my issue with the new Mednafen Saturn core too, since the controls map differently than in Yabause.

The Yabause core was updated with controls matching Mednafen Saturn.

Oh, well… that fixes that then hahaha. I can’t keep track of what core updates when. Is there some place where that is announced?

https://github.com/libretro

Stumbled back across this, and I hate leaving threads without resolution.

For anyone possibly wondering the same thing I DID get it to work.

I setup a barebones “RetroArch - Alt” installation by copying over only the necessary files from my normal RetroArch. Then in RocketLauncher I just created a “RetroArch - Alt” emulator and pointed it towards the same module as RA. I then put the 2.0 card in RA-Alt’s system folder… and voila!

Now I get the proper TurboGrafx-CD loading screen on those games, and the JP one on the PCE-CD games.

A cleaner way to do that would be to use per game overrides with different system folders set. You’d have a folder for each version of the syscard and that version inside it. Then just point to the folder with the version you want to use in the game’s override config.

That’s not a half bad idea…

As it stands, I have all the 2.0 “TurboGrafx-CD” games in one wheel, and a seperate “TurboDuo” wheel for everything that needed a newer version card. Which, in this setup that was a simple switch to point it at a different emu .exe

Not sure where I’ll end up on that decision, but certainly sounds like a ‘cleaner’ alternative. Might just take a tad more work.

Luckily there’s only all of about 20 games that would run on that 2.0 card lol

You could also add an extra emulator entry that is identical to your normal RetroArch one, but with an extra command line argument for loading an append config with the different system directory:

–appendconfig “config\PCE2.0.cfg”

And in that cfg file something like:

system_directory = “.\system\PCE2.0”

That way you wouldn’t need to make a bunch of copies of the file for each game.

Wait, I like the sound of that, but how would I make command line entries through RocketLauncher? I’m turned around now. I know how to do it through cmd.exe and through a shortcut.

Dunno. I would think they would have an option somewhere to add arguments to pass to emulators somewhere in the GUI. I know you can edit the .ahk scripts to add arguments if you can figure out where the emulator launching bit is.