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.