Guide: RetroArch for the PS Vita (NES, SNES, GBA, Genesis, and more)

[Music] hey everybody this is ross from metro gamecore so today we're going to look at emulating classic systems using retroarch on the ps vita now a lot of people have a love-hate relationship with retroarch on the ps vita not a lot of people love it but there are a lot of people out there who hate it and those who don't like retroarch on the ps vita they've got pretty good reasons why the app is fairly difficult to get installed and set up in the first place and then actually mastering retroarch getting it to the point where you're actually playing games the way you want them to play is an even higher tier of difficulty and so because of that a lot of people say well you know what standalone emulators actually perform better than retroarch and i've tried the standalone emulators some of them are pretty good and this video isn't meant to be an argument against those stand-alone emulators but rather an argument for retroarch because if you get retroarch running properly everything from the 8-bit and 16-bit era is going to run just great so that's what we're going to do in today's video it's going to be a bit of a longer one but my goal here is to get you from zero to hero with retrowork on the ps vita we'll take a look at installing the app configuring everything so you can have playlists going making them as pretty as possible and then configuring the screen so it takes advantage of the beautiful display on the ps vita we got a lot of ground to cover so without any further delay let's jump into it so beyond just raw performance let's talk about why i like retroarch so much on this device well for starters it's a single user interface on the ps vita you can use retroarch to reliably play all the game boy systems nintendo super nintendo game gear genesis turbo graphic 16 or pc engine as well as a fair amount of arcade games as well and i really appreciate being able to do that all from one place and in addition to having one user interface all the settings are universal across the systems so you can set the same graphics and scaling options to suit your needs you have universal cheats across all of the systems hotkeys that will do the same thing across any of them and finally you can also integrate retro achievements to be able to get achievements while you're playing these classic games another reason i really like retroarch is because it has ongoing development support there's a global team behind retroarch who at this point are providing updates every two weeks and the update process is pretty simple i'm going to show you how to do it in this video too and finally one of my favorite things is that you can actually have bubbles on your main screen that'll boot directly into retroarch which allows you to take advantage of all the universal settings without having to deal with the user interface okay so let's actually install retroarch now to start you're going to want to go to the vita written guide which i have in my video description below and in the retroarch section you're going to have two links there one is to download the retroarch vpk and the other one is to download the retroarch data file the vpk is going to have the app itself as well as all the emulation cores and the data file is going to have all the assets you need in order to run it smoothly now you could actually get these links directly from the retroarch website you just go to retroarch.com go into downloads and then scroll down till you find the ps vita section and these are the exact same links that i'm linking to on my website but if you want to get it from the source that's how you do it okay once you have your vbk in your data file we're ready to actually get into your device and this guide assumes you already have vita shell installed in your device from a previous guide so open that up plug it into your computer and then press the select button to enter usb mode back on your computer it's going to open up a new folder and this is going to be basically direct access to your sd card within here you want to move over your retroarch vpk it really doesn't matter where you put it you just need to know where to find it later on i'm just going to put it in the root folder but you could also put in a folder named vpks next we're going to go into the data folder here on the sd card and we're going to move all that retroarch data right over there so just go ahead and open that up with something like winrar or 7-zip and then move that retroarch data file over it's going to be a bunch of very small files so it'll take a minute or two to move over okay once you're done go ahead and press x on your ps vita to get out of usb mode and then navigate to wherever that retroarch vpk was placed and then go ahead and select it and then agree to the install and the install itself is going to take a while maybe about five ten minutes and it'll get hung up a couple times i wouldn't worry about that it's very normal okay once that's done you can exit out of vita shell and you should see the retroarch up there and all we want to do right here is just start it up which will make a bunch of folders onto your device and then we just want to quit retro work so as soon as it's opened up you can just go down and select quit retro retroarch okay once again let's go back into vita shell plug it into our computer and then get into usb mode back in our computer we're going to see the folder again and if you open up the data folder in retroarch you're going to see that there are many more folders here what we want is the system folder now within this system folder we're going to put the bios files these are going to allow us to launch specific systems and i have all these listed on that same written guide as well as the specific name that they need within that folder and once you've moved over your bios files we're ready to move over our game files so back on that main page on the sd card let's make a new folder let's just call it roms you can call it whatever you want and within here i'm going to put all the game files that i want to run with retroarch so this is going to be things like arcade systems nintendo genesis super nintendo basically everything up until ps1 but minus nintendo 64. we're going to cover that on a different video and i would recommend that each of your systems have their own folder within that roms folder okay once you've moved everything over let's actually get into retroarch and set it up so back on the device we're going to start up retrowork the first thing i want to do is change the menu driver or the theme for the retroarch itself so you're going to go into settings then drivers and then menu and then within this i like to change mine to xmb after you change that over go into the main menu configuration file save current configuration then all you need to do is just close retroarch and open it up again i personally like the xmb file system because it reminds me of an actual playstation system and the way everything's laid out just makes logical sense to me first thing i want to do is adjust the size of the text here in the menu so i'm going to go into settings user interface and then appearance and within here i want to change the menu scale factor from something less than 1.5 1.25 is okay but sometimes i like to go all the way down to 1.0 it really depends on how your eyesight is so now let's set a playlist so we can actually access our games go over to this plus menu and then select scan directory go into uxo and then scroll down to your roms folder and then pick one of these systems let's go with nes this first time and then select scan this directory it's going to take a minute but it'll scan through all your nes games and then parse them out into their own playlist so if we go over here to the end of the menu you can see now we have all the nes games listed and essentially what you want to do in order to boot a game is just select the game itself and then select run and if there's more than one core available for that specific system it's going to ask you that first time around which one you want to use and on my written guide i actually have a list of what my recommended cores are for each of the systems now before we get into actual gameplay here let's do a little bit more settings tweaks first thing i want to do is add thumbnails to all of my playlists so go into the online updater section and what i like to do is select the on-demand thumbnail downloads option and this will basically download the thumbnails as you navigate through them and it'll slow down your system the first time you go through it but after that they're there and you don't have to worry about it anymore so as we go through these playlists now it'll actually download the box art and the screenshots for each of these games and like i said it's kind of slow the first time around but after that they'll go nice and fast now additionally in the settings menu we can actually change how the playlists look so go into that user interface section again and then appearance and near the bottom you're going to see some thumbnail options personally what i like to set up is the thumbnails or the box art and then the left thumbnail is a screenshot and then i also like to make sure that the thumbnail scale factor is set to 100 that'll make the thumbnails nice and big now once you have that set you can go through the playlist now and then you'll see you'll have the box art on the right and the screenshot on the left and i think it just looks really nice that way additionally as you're navigating through if you press the start button it'll actually bring the pictures to the front of the page i think that's a really nice touch but yeah this is basically as pretty as you can make it using the default settings so what i recommend is going through and making playlists for each of your systems it's pretty easy it takes about five minutes altogether now one thing you might notice is there's a lot of data behind the name of the game for example it'll say something like usa or revision1 things like that so there's a way to hide all of that what you do is you go over to the settings menu and then select playlists and then right at the bottom you're going to see one that says manage playlists then select whatever playlist you want to change let's go with super nintendo and then under the label display mode option you'll see an option there that says remove parentheses and brackets i like to select that one and you'll want to do this for each of the playlists as you're going through them now when we go over to the super nintendo playlist you can see here it just shows the name so that's a really handy tool to clean up your playlists next let's set up your hotkeys so this is going to be under the input menu in the settings and then under hotkeys first thing you want to do is adjust the menu toggle configuration what i like to do is use the one that says hold start for two seconds that means that when you're playing a game and you hold the start button for two seconds the retroarch menu is going to pop up you can also set up a hotkey personally i like to use the l button as my hotkey but you could use something else and the main two hotkeys i like to use are the square button to toggle my frames per second and then the triangle button to do my manual toggle this is the same thing as holding down the start button for two seconds but i like hitting l and triangle as well you can set up other hotkeys for example using save states or just quitting out of a game altogether it's really going to be up to you how you want to set that up but this is the menu where you do that and remember anytime you make any of these system-wide changes make sure you go into the configuration file and then select save current configuration this is going to save all your settings for the next time that you boot up retroarch and like i mentioned before retroarch supports retro achievements and to set up an account it's very easy you just go into retroachievements.org and then create your own user account then just go into settings and achievement and add your username and password and i have a whole video guide on this so if you want to know what this is all about go ahead and check out that video okay so now let's configure our screen settings so we have the best available picture the retroarch data file actually comes with a bunch of filters that you can use to improve your screen but for some reason they didn't configure it properly so we'll do it manually here real quick takes just a second first thing you want to do is go into settings and then directory scroll down until you find the filters section and then we're going to navigate to the filters folder you're going to find it in the uxo data retro arc and then filters folder and then select use this directory and that's it and again make sure you save your configuration file anytime you do any of these big system changes okay so let's talk about screen quality for a second with something like nintendo when you scale it up in order to fill the entire screen you're going to have some pixel distortion for example if you look at mega man's health bar here on the left you can see that the pixels are not evenly distributed some are darker than others and that's because of the pixel distortion that happens when you scale up to full screen like this so we're going to go into our video settings and start adjusting things so you just go ahead and enter the menu and then go into the video settings and then for example we can turn on integer scaling that means it's going to perfectly size the pixels as you scale it out but it's not going to fill up the whole screen so for example you see here the life bar looks great but you've got a lot of unused space in the screen so that's not ideal so we're going to turn off the integer scaling and we're going to try filters and these are basically overlays that happen over the screen itself you're probably familiar with something called shaders which is often used in retro work but unfortunately shaders don't work in the vita version of retroarch you have to use filters instead so let's try to filter and see how that looks i'm going to pick this one here called scale 2x now what this did is made the picture very nice and sharp but as you can see here it still has the issue with the life bar so a filter isn't going to fix some of your pixel distortion issues at least not on its own so we got a little bit more investigating to do so instead of trying a filter let's try bilinear filtering and this basically smooths out all the pixels and it does fix the life bar as you can see here but at the same time it makes the image very soft and some people like this you know it has a very retro feel to it but personally i like to have my sharp clear pixels so here's the actual solution is you turn on bilinear filtering and then you also use a filter on top of it so for example here you can see scale 2x filter with bi-linear filtering on and it looks really good not only is the life bar fixed but the image quality itself is also sharp and clear now scale2x actually makes some fundamental changes to the picture quality itself so if you want to have the closest to normal picture then i recommend the normal 2x filter and this is what that looks like here it's basically very true to the original image while still keeping those perfect pixels and also staying sharp in general i would recommend this across any of your systems for example with super nintendo you can see that mega man's life bar is screwed up in this one as well because we're only using the normal 2x filter and not by linear filtering but if we turn on just by linear filtering it fixes the life bar but again the image is very soft now if we turn on both by linear filtering and the normal 2x filter everything looks great now using the normal 2x filter like this does come in a performance cost but in general when you're playing 90 of snes games they're going to stay locked in at a solid 60 frames per second and i recommend for the best performance to use the snes9x 2005 plus core this one gives you really good performance but also has really good sound for example you can see here i'm using this core and running mario 2 yoshi's island one of the hardest games to emulate on the super nintendo and even having that normal 2x filter everything's playing just great we're getting a solid 60 frames per second for a guy who has a hard time getting super nintendo to work properly this is pretty impressive to me now even though nearly every single game is going to play perfectly there are a couple that have issues star fox is a great example no matter what core you choose you're still going to have issues with it here we are with the 2010 core which on the rg 351 devices actually is the best core to use for star fox and you can see it's not running very well same thing with the 2002 core and unfortunately it's just as bad on the 2005 core so honestly star fox just doesn't really work very well in retrowork if this is a really important game to you then maybe look into using the standalone snes emulator for this one game in particular but for all the others i didn't find any issues moving over to something easier here here's the regular game boy and when you go into the options menu here in the quick menu you can change the colorization to internal and then you have all these different palettes that you can choose from this one's my favorite it's called special one it has a light green hue to it but you could use the original dmg one if you want to get super nostalgic and even some of these super game boy pellets look pretty good as well personally i like this one called special one but you've got nearly a hundred different palettes to choose from for game boy color everything looks really nice especially when you add that normal 2x filter you've got some pretty hefty bezels on the left and the right but i found that as i'm playing they just kind of don't bother me after a while now on the opposite end of the spectrum the three by two aspect ratio of the game boy advance actually fills up a lot of the screen and so game boy advance games actually are some of my favorite to play on this device because using the native game boy aspect ratio looks very impressive on a 5 inch screen like this game gear looks great on this as well i recommend using a 4x3 aspect ratio for this and just about every single sega genesis game is going to play perfectly even when using the normal 2x filter so you can start up a season of mutant league football or collect all the chaos emeralds and sonic the hedgehog 2 all of them are going to play beautifully on top of that sega cd and sega 32x play just great on this device now the vita version of retroarch actually comes with the genesis plus gx wide core which allows you to stretch the genesis games to widescreen to do that you load up a game using that core then you go into the options menu and then find the option that says extra columns to draw in age 40. and typically you're going to want to move this number over to something like six or eight and then when you resume the game it should be widescreen but as a quick word of warning any time i tried to use this retroarch would crash so i think there's still a bug in this core particularly for the playstation vita but hopefully the team will fix this sometime down the line okay moving over to arcade here generally i like to use the final burn neocore when i'm playing your arcade games but as you can see here there's a lot of slowdown when it comes to this one and initially i thought to myself well maybe arcade just kind of sucks on this machine but when trying out the final burn alpha 2012 core i could actually get everything to run at full speed now that being said this is one of the systems that doesn't play nicely with using a filter so if you try to use the normal 2x filter with this you're going to get some slowdown even when using the final burn alpha 2012 core so unfortunately on this one in particular you're either going to have to use bilinear filtering or just have to live with non-perfect pixels regardless it's very easy to get 60 frames per second on arcade games through the 80s in the early 90s okay let me show you how to update retroarch when you have it already installed so what you want to do is go over to this downloads page on retroarch and like i showed you before you just want to download the latest vpk and they're pushing new updates every two weeks or so right now so it's good to do this maybe once a month or so once you have the vpk downloaded just connect to your pc using vita shell and then you can just move that retroarch vpk over onto the sd card again you can put it wherever you want as you see here i've made a vpks folder so i'm just moving it over there now now this vpk is pretty big that's why it takes so long to install it's going to be like 200 or 300 megs back on vita shell go ahead and disconnect and then navigate to wherever that vbk is if you remember i put it in that vp case folder and there it is there so go ahead and run through the installation process again it's going to take another 5 or 10 minutes it's just how long it takes when you install it on this device and just like that you have a new version of retroarch this will update the app itself as well as all the cores this isn't going to affect your settings your games your playlists or anything else like that it's really just going to improve the system that you have currently installed and as you see here i have the latest version as of making this video so the last thing i want to show you here in this video is how to install bubbles that you can actually access from the main screen this is super handy if you have one or two favorites and you want to make sure you have easy access to them so all this is spelled out in the written guide but i'm going to run you through it real quick and i should mention this only works on windows pcs right now first thing i want to do is go to this retro builder github page and then head over to the releases page and then download the latest version of retro builder it's 3.0 as of making this video but it might get updated in the future once you have it go ahead and extract that folder so you should just have the retro builder 3.0 folder at the bottom of this folder you should see a retrobuilder.bat file go ahead and open that up so this retro builder menu is super handy it actually takes you to wherever you need to go so first thing we want to do is go into the input folder so press one and enter and it'll take you to the input folder in here we're going to add a bunch of pictures as well as the rom that we want to load so to find the pictures i recommend going to the le retro thumbnails page and again all this is linked in the written guide so i'm going to go into super nintendo here i'm going to open up a box art and i'm going to download the super mario world box art i'm just going to select save as i'm going to go and put it somewhere that i can find it easily i'm going to do the same thing now and you can either do it with the screenshot or the title screen let's do with the screenshot first save image as and put it in that same folder and finally we need an image here that we're going to click on when we actually start up the game i'm going to go to screen scraper for this one go into the super nintendo section and then into the media tab and then i'm just going to grab this bubble here that has the word super nintendo on it i'm going to open this up in a new tab and then i'm going to adjust the size of the image to a width of 400 pixels it's just a tiny bit bigger than it was initially and again i'm just going to save this in that same folder okay so now if we go over to that folder where i have the images saved i have these three images and i need to rename them for this icon that we're going to click on i'm going to change that to startup.png for the background image i'm going to use the word background.png and then for the actual bubble itself i'm going to name it icon0.png i'm going to drag these over into that input folder that popped up earlier and then i need to grab that rom file that's actually on my vita so again going back into veda shell connecting to my computer i'm going to go into my roms folder here and then the snes folder and then i'm going to grab super mario world and i'm going to drag it over into that input folder so now i have everything i need i have the images as well as the rom so back in the retro builder menu i'm going to do the easy vpk option i'm going to press 2 and then enter and this is going to run through a script here which is going to build that vpk for me you're going to get a pop-up that's going to ask you what is the name of the bubble and here i'm just going to name it super mario world next it's going to ask you for a title id this needs to be 9 characters long and either in all caps or with numbers so i'm going to write smw one two three four five six that's nine characters and then just press enter it'll say please wait and once this window disappears you're ready to go okay without any fanfare we've actually made that vpk so we're going to go back into the retro builder folder and then vpk and there it is right there if you want you can actually rename this vpk to something that's a little bit more memorable so i'm going to rename it to something like super mario world now back on the vita i'm going to go into the vpks folder and i'm just going to drag that over and so back on the vita itself i'm going to close my usb connection i'm going to navigate to uxo and then my vpk's folder so that way i can install the super mario world bubble then just select it it's going to say do you really want to install that package and you say yeah man i want to do it installation will just take a second you can close out a vita shell and if you scroll down to the bottom you should now see a super mario world bubble and as you can see the bubble itself is the box art and then when we tap on it the background is a screenshot and then the super nintendo logo is the thing we click on now this is going to basically boot into retroarch in the background and then load the game itself the boot time is actually going to be significantly long to the point where you might think that something's going wrong but then eventually the game itself will actually boot up and just like that you've gone from the main menu over into a game it's not the fastest method in the world but it's still super handy if you don't want to navigate through retroarch just be aware that when you close out of the game you have to actually slide down and close out a retroarch and then the game itself now personally i wasn't really happy with how that bubble looked so initially i changed it to the screenshot as the bubble instead and then when i clicked on it i now had the box art and i thought that looked a lot better but i still think you can do a little bit better so instead i changed the bubble to the title screen and this is just about perfect to me i think it looks really nice but again you could actually design this however you want all right everyone i'm going to start wrapping up now i really appreciate that you stuck with me through the end here we covered a lot of ground and basically took retroarch from the beginning to the end in terms of getting it set up for your device if you have any specific questions about how to set things up i would recommend checking out that written guide that i have linked in the video description because i walk you through all that stuff in a nice complement to this video itself overall i think that retroarch kind of unlocks all the potential that's remaining in the vita because you can use this to play all the classic systems and then you can use the vita itself to play ps1 psp in vita games the missing piece of this puzzle is nintendo 64 which i'm going to cover in a future video but for now let me know if you have any questions in the comments below and be sure to like and subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy [Music] gaming

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 474,211

Keywords:

Id: 6q9yRrEOrG0

Length: 25min 12sec (1512 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Uddercup]

Which game are you running and which core? I've found certain games like Super Mario RPG are unplayable with one core and perfect with another. I believe the one that works best for me is Snes9x 2005. I would try the other cores and see if there is any improvement.

[u/KainYago]

I dont know if its a thing at SNES games, but on GBA games in the options theres something called "Dynamic recompiler" whenever i turn this on, my games work flawlessly, but if its off, some games starts to lag. (im also using a vita 1000)

[u/Detox1ng]

try different cores and also disable any filters or overlays in video settings. also use psvshell to overclock. if all doesn't work fresn reinstall retroarch. just bear in your mind that snes games don't run too well to begin with on vita. you can also try the standalone snes emulator on vita but i never tried it so idk if it would work better.

[u/Oldgun80]

Have you tried a fresh re-install of RetroArch?

[u/Thunderstarer]

Take a second look at your resolution scaling. Certain non-integer scales can cause massive slowdown.

[u/GenoCL]

I'm getting near perfect performance without overclocking but I'm not too sure what to recommend you. The one time I got bad FPS on RA with SNES I just deleted the retroarch.cfg file from its folder and then it just worked.
I'm gonna assume you have RA up to date.