[Request] Ability to enable BIOS to boot prior to the game in various cores

General Development
#1

Many cores are missing the ability to boot into the system’s BIOS prior to gameplay. The PS1 seems to be the only emulator (in retroarch) which boots into BIOS prior to booting into the game and maintains the emulator’s ability to do so. This feature is missing from many cores: DesMume (Nintendo DS), VBA-M (Gameboy Advance, Game Boy & Game Boy Color), Yabause (Saturn), PCFX (Mednafen), etc.

#2

If the standalone versions implement this it should be possible. Otherwise I don’t think so

#3

Yes, the standalone emulators have this implemented. I’m not entirely sure about PCFX, but I’m 100% positive of the rest.

EDIT: I have confirmed that PCFX (Mednafen) also has the ability to do so in the standalone emulator.

#4

Yabause automatically shows the BIOS screen if you put a BIOS file called saturn_bios.bin in your system folder.

I looked at stand alone Desmume and don’t see any options to load a BIOS file. Stand alone VBA-M does have the option to load GB, GBC and GBA BIOS’s though.

#5

[QUOTE=Awakened;18395]Yabause automatically shows the BIOS screen if you put a BIOS file called saturn_bios.bin in your system folder.

I looked at stand alone Desmume and don’t see any options to load a BIOS file. Stand alone VBA-M does have the option to load GB, GBC and GBA BIOS’s though.[/QUOTE]

Desmume can indeed boot from BIOS/firmware. If you have the correct BIOS/firmware files, then here are the steps in order to do so.

  1. Config > Emulation Settings
  2. Select the following dialog boxes: “Use external BIOS images”, “Emulate SWIs with BIOS image (otherwise, HLE)”, “Use external firmware image”, and “Boot from firmware (like NDS)”.
  3. Boot a game, and experience the NDS in it’s full glory! :slight_smile:

EDIT: Also, make sure you direct Desmume to each file, specifically. You will need to do so for ARM9, ARM7, and firmware.

#6

Cool, I missed it since I figured it’d be in path settings. Maybe Radius, Jackos or someone else would be interested in adding external BIOS support at some point. Jackos added a lot of core options to Desmume a few weeks back. I made a github issue about adding support for it here: https://github.com/libretro/desmume/issues/42

I also made an issue for VBA-M: https://github.com/libretro/vbam-libretro/issues/17