It's Been a While

Wow, it's really been a long time since I have done anything here and obviously I get no visitors but I can tell by the stats I do get the occasional view which is amazing to me.

Well since the last time I posted an entry it was about SNES MSU-1 emulation I may as well make this new one about it as well and a lot has happened and changed since that time. Back then there was only a small selection of games that had received the MSU-1 treatment and getting them to work was a bit of a chore with the emulators at the time. Now we have quite a lot more games done with amazing soundtracks and the emulator choices and ease of use has improved quite a lot. The structure of how these hacks are put together has been improved and standardized along with support from Snes9x.

If you are wanting to get into these hacks I highly suggest using either a stand alone version of Snes9x 1.54 or newer or the Snes9x core in Retroarch. If using Retroarch make sure you are using the Snes9x core that does not have a year in its name, it's the one that's been updated to use the 1.54 code. With the Snes9x emulator or Retroarch core all you have to do is simply load the rom file and it should just work. Not every single one will work with Snes9x but as long as it is not an older hack it should work but of course there are no guarantees and I have run into a couple that don't. My second recommended option if you are absolutely against using Snes9x for some reason is to use one of the BSnes cores in Retroarch but there will be some extra legwork in order to use this emulator core. When you download a pre done MSU-1 pack you will find a bunch of files but most notably the manifest.bml and the rom file itself. If you open the manifest.bml file you will notice a line there that contains "program.rom", this is to support the use of the stand alone version of Higan and these files would all go in the "rom folder" that Higan uses, If you are a Higan user you will know what this is and where it is and how to use it. For the BSnes core however as it sits this won't work and you have two options, you can either replace the "program.rom" text in the manifest.bml file or you can rename the rom file itself to program.rom. I suggest making a copy of the rom file and renaming it to program.rom, you don't have to do this of course but better to have a backup copy and not need it.

Now of course all this is well and good but what about getting the hacks and stuff ? Well luckily enough there is a website with all the latest hack files and everything else you need to put it all together. The only thing they don't provide the rom itself because that would be illegal and we don't want to break the law now do we ? Head on over to the Zeldix forums here https://www.zeldix.net/f45-msu-1-hacking and you can find a lot of information to get you patching and compiling your own MSU-1 rom packs in no time.

SNES MSU-1 Emulation UPDATE!!

In my previous post about SNES MSU-1 Emulation I said I could I only get these games to work using the stand alone versions of bSnes and not using the Retroarch bSnes cores. Well it turns out I was missing one major component to this and that was you need to point Retroarch at the manifest.bml file that comes with the patch files and not the rom file. Retroarchs GUI will not see this bml file if you try and load the game through the GUI. You will need to either load it using the command line or through a front end, my front end of choice is LaunchBox.

SNES MSU-1 Emulation

For those of you that don't know what this is.
http://www.smwiki.net/wiki/MSU1
"MSU1, also named "Media Streaming Unit revision 1", is a homemade enhancement chip made by byuu for the SNES.
It allows the SNES to have 4 GB of storage space and CD quality Stereo Audio.
It can be used for every SNES games, but is so far only emulated by bsnes, and supported by future SNES flashcart, sd2snes.
You can add MSU1 registers just by having .msu with the ROM. (since bsnes v081)"

So basically what this does is that allows people to have CD quality audio and FMV "injected" into the games. Now by injected I don't mean it's placed directly into the rom. You need to have a folder with a patched rom, a bunch of pcm audio files and xml file for it to all work together. As of right now there is only 2 ways of playing these games, through an SD2Snes cart and the bSnes / Higan emulator.

Patching the the rom and injecting the music is not a simple task but it has been done for several games and if you look around you can find them pre patched and compiled for you (search Google). One game you will not find done for you is the Chrono Trigger but the rom patch file is easily gotten on romhacking.net but you will need to get the flac format sound track "Chrono Trigger Symphony (Vol. 1,2,3) - Blake Robinson Orchestra" and convert all the music yourself.

When you do find these pre patched games they are designed to be played through the SD2Snes cart and playing them through an emulator is hit and miss at best but I have had the best luck using bSnes version 0.88. Some games work with earlier versions but not newer, while some work with newer versions and not previous. Version 0.88 gave me the best all around compatibility but I did have to use 0.75 for MegaMan X2.

Do a youtube search for Snes MSU-1 and check out some videos showing off how cool this stuff is. It is a pain in the ass to find these pre patched games but it is worth it in the end. The list of games that has had this done for them is not very big but the notables are Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Link to the Past, Mario World, DKC 2 Super Metroid, the MegaMan X series and a couple of others. Hopefully someone does this for other games like Final Fantasy, Castlevania and Super Ghouls N' Ghosts, these games are just crying for CD quality audio.

I don't know of  a better and more reliable emulator than bSnes 0.88 for playing these games but anyone out there has any suggestions I would love to hear it.

Now if only someone can figure out a way to do the same thing for the Genesis since Watermelon was able to do it with Pier Solar on the physical hardware.

Retroarch CD Systems Tutorial Video

I figured I would make a video as a follow up of my written tutorial on getting CD systems like the Sega CD, TurboGrafx CD and Playstation.

Retroarch CD Systems Tutorial

Getting most systems up and running under Retroarch is fairly straight forward, you download the appropriate core and then you are good to go with your roms. Some systems require some extra files to get the system fully functional like "Bios" files. I am not going to go into what exactly a bios file is as there are plenty of information on that on the internet, all you need to know is that you need these files for certain systems. Some of these systems are the Sega Dreamcast, Sega CD, 3DO and the Playstation. Retroarch requires all of these systems bios files to be placed into the "system" folder within your Retroarch install folder (eg: "D:\retroarch\system"). You can put them in another folder if you prefer but you will have to make sure to set your "System/BIOS" path in the Directory settings within Retroarch. Retroarch is very particular over these files, they need to be a specific version and they need to be named correctly (case sensitive).

If you look around the internet you can find these files fairly easily, places like Emuparadise.me is a good source, be sure and register on their forums. If you find a version that doesn't seem to work try looking for another version that does.

If you look too hard it may bite you in the face though.

The other thing when it comes to CD based games in Retroarch is that it requires your disk images to be in cue and bin format, sometimes the bin can be iso or img. No matter the format there needs to be a cue sheet. If you have been using a Playstation emulator like ePSXe and all your games are just simple bin files without the cue sheet and you want to make the switch to Retroarch for your Playstation emulation there is simple way to generate a cue sheet. Mount your bin file with a virtual cd program such as Virtual Clone Drive and load a program like ImgBurn. From there click on "Tools" at the top and then "create cue file". This has worked for me for several disk images.

WARNING: If you are going to use ImgBurn be extremely careful installing it and make sure you do not accidentally install the ad-ware that is included in it. Another option is to get an older version (2.5.0 or earlier should be safe) from http://www.oldversion.com/windows/imgburn, be careful installing it just in case. I'm sure there are other programs out there to help generate cue sheets just as easily but this is the way that I use and works for me.

Retroarch Settings

Retroarch is an easy program to get up and running but getting it fine tuned to be at it's best can be more tricky especially with all the different settings. I am going to go through what I think are the most important settings to get the best performance out of Retroarch to boost your enjoyment of playing your games. There are other settings but I don't feel they are that important to getting up and running or they are for more specific occasions. These are also the settings that I have found that work best on my setup and your setup may require some other settings. I use just a basic 60hz Samsung (non-gaming) monitor.

As of me writing this the latest official build of Retroarch is 1.3.0.
Here is a link to an example retroarch.cfg file and description of all the different settings. https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/RetroArch

The first settings you should be looking at are in the Video section of the Settings tab.

• For testing purposes turn on "Display Framerate", while playing you want your games to be running at a constant 60 frames per second.
• Aspect ratio should be set to Core provided or Custom depending on your personal preference. Personally I use core provided but Custom is just fine too but then adjust the Custom Viewport Width and Height settings to adjust the screen size to what you like. Start out by setting each number at it's lowest setting then bump up each by one til you get what you want.
• Integer Scale is another personal preference and I use this with Core Provided aspect ratio. This setting however will give you black bars across the top and bottom of your game. This setting scales the game image at equal steps. The purpose of this is to maintain the proper aspect ratio at bigger sizes. If you leave this setting set to off with "Custom" aspect ratio when you adjust the Viewport Width and Height you will either get black bars or your screen will probably just slightly be larger than the height of your screen. Integer Scale set to "On" is my recommendation if you choose to use some sort of shader which uses scanlines. With it off your scanlines may look a little off.
• HW Bilinear Filtering is a personal preference, basically this just adds a slight blur to the output image. I like this one on to help break up the sharp pixels but it is purely personal taste, try them both and you decide.
• Threaded Video should be left off if you can help it but if you are running on a low end system and you need to squeeze out a little bit more performance you can turn this on but off is preferred.
• Vsync is another setting that should be left off when possible. Off can cause some screen tearing depending on your display but the downside to having it set to "On" is it can cause some input lag which is something no body wants. Turn Vsync on only if your screen tearing is really bad and you can live with some input lag.
• Hard GPU Sync is an amazing setting, just leave this set to "On". This is a feature that drastically reduces input lag. Input lag = bad.
• Frame Delay is another setting that can help with input lag. Set this as high as you can before getting audio distortions like crackling or a frame rate hit. 0 is an ok setting but higher than 0 is better but don't go too high.
• Crop Overscan should be set to On. What this does is it crops a few pixels off the image output which on an old fashioned CRT would be hidden by the bezel but on new wide screen displays and using the Integer Scale setting above you may see. You don't want to see those garbage pixels do you ?

That should be it for the Video section so now we move on to the Audio section where there really isn't too much to mess with here but you should set your Audio Latency to as low as possible without hearing crackles in your sound. The best thing to do here is set the latency all the way down then bump it up one notch at a time til you no longer hear any crackling.