RetroArch + LaunchBox Integration = 5 Minute Front End Emulation Setup!

hi everybody this is shane armanrow and today we're going to look at launchbox's new integration with retroarch and we're going to get you set up playing your favorite games inside of a beautiful front end launcher inside of five minutes no emulator to set up no nonsense let's take a look a couple of disclaimers before we get started i have already obtained a small rom set of my own including arcade gba genesis n64 psp super nintendo and turbo graphics 16 or pc engine depending on what part of the world you're from we're doing this inside of a virtual machine so it is not going to be a speed demon so uh just understand that your particular experience with this will be a lot faster than uh what's going on with mine here so the first thing we need to do is download and install launchbox which is the immediate barrier of entry because it requires you give them an email address that you can actually check to get the download link i'm not particularly in favor of that but i'm sure they have their reasons if you attempt to download without entering your email address uh you get the uh uh uh so i've already done this uh so i've i've got a copy of it but just understand that before you can even get started you're gonna have to give up your email address all right so let's go ahead and install launchbox now um you may get asked to install some ancillary software that goes with this like net core directx stuff there's a handful of things you might get asked to install and they will probably kick off the user account control you're going to see at least one of these during the install but depending on how many sub packages you install each one may require that you allow it elevated permissions to your system just a little fair warning everything seems to be on the up and up though and again remember this is a virtual machine i'm going to say this several more times just so you understand this isn't my personal workstation that i'm doing this on there you go there's your user account control hit for the directx sdk just making sure you've got the latest and greatest here all right so now we're at our first run of launch box okay and we are greeted with a nice little wizard here we obviously aren't here to do any of these epic games origin games maim may be but let's go ahead and start with importing your rom files all right here's the wizard and we're going to add a folder and i'm purposefully going to skip adding arcade first and i'll explain why later so we're going to add gba game boy advance and look at that it even knew that that was a game boy advance folder this isn't always right always double check most of the time it is though which is pretty impressive now here is the money shot right here would you like to automatically install and configure retro arch this is the part that would normally get people uh confused right this is the part where you'd have to put it in and you'd have to configure lunchbot launchbox to um to point to the emulator and use the uh command line blah blah blah it gets it gets nasty this takes this all out of the way uh would you like to move or copy your files no just use them where they're at i i've i've well curated my stuff i want to keep them where they are and we are going to allow it to download whatever images it would like as a result of adding this mu movies we're going to skip that if you know what that is you could do that now but we're not going to look at that today all right and so it automatically before we've done anything it already sort of knows what it is that we're adding again this isn't always accurate either but let's get started so you can see what it looks like so now it's reaching out to the launch box games database so right off the bat you should probably know that you need internet connectivity for this i know that sounds like uh well does shane who doesn't have internet connectivity you would be surprised at the number of classic game enthusiasts that have an isolated box sitting in a main cabinet somewhere that may be installing this without the benefit of even wi-fi connectivity it might just be a completely isolated box and you're trying to do this all off of a usb drive obviously you're going to need some internet connectivity in order to better use this now again this process is probably all going to be faster for you please don't take that against the five minutes that i told you would take to set this up it would go a lot faster if i was actually on a faster computer not a virtual machine also understand that the initial setup is going to also install retroarch and you know do some of the very basic stuff see it's loca it's doing stuff for its own games database now so it's um it's doing sort of a first run and the subsequent editions of um of game folders will not be as slow but we do have to go through this the first time now i told you when we talk about the arcade games one of the things that i found right off the bat was that if i pointed to a collection of main roms now i use older versions of main so my main roms are an older main rom set it's important to understand it i'm going to show you how to get around this uh it's important to understand what version of the main core you need to be using for the roms that you have and the default stuff that that launchbox may put together for you may not be may not be compatible with your rom set you may have to change to an older main rom core depending on your the emulation requirements for your set okay now we're downloading and actually installing the emulator now that uh launchbox has updated itself and it's all of its game database stuff all right so now it is uh all right perfect launch box five games were imported successfully and it will now download uh other stuff in the background and you can see the games have been added up here and in the background it's silently picking up all of the other good stuff metadata and graphics assets to match each one of these games if you click on one of these games you'll see all sorts of good stuff over here in the sidebar all right so we've added gba and so technically speaking we could start this right now if we wanted to but i'm going to go ahead and let this sit and chew in the background we now need to go to tools and import rom files and we're going to do this wizard again all right we're going to do these individually you could probably do them in batch but i want you to see them each as we go so genesis is up next right and it identified correctly as sega genesis perfect and now look at this it actually knows we have an emulator ready to roll again we're going to leave our files in the current positions that they're in the locations and we're just going to zoom our way through this now the genesis stuff has a lot of failed matches in it which is one of the reasons why i wanted to do this one in particular all right so now it brought in 37 games awesome let's go ahead and let that sit and chew in the background and let's go ahead and import the other rom files that we have here all right so we're going to add a folder desktop and 64. next identified as nintendo 64. perfect retroarch perfect and use the files in their current location blah blah blah blah blah there's only one game in there so that should go pretty quick now obviously all this multitasking that's going on here would be a lot smoother if i wasn't on a vm again i apologize for the vm just the easiest way to do this psp sony psp identified correctly retroarch perfect use the files in their current location blah blah blah there's only one file in this one as well import rom files oh see we can't overlap everything i guess there's only so many threads that can handle i suppose so we waited a moment i think we're good to go now add folder and we'll go to desktop roms snes next yep super nintendo entertainment system perfect retrace awesome all right there's only one in here so that should go pretty quick no comments please on my choice of games for this uh demo i realize that everybody wants to play michael jackson's moonwalker all right so now that we've done the easy stuff and it's still processing in the background let's take a look at a couple things that do not work right or you may end up having particular issues with so let's go to roms turbo graphics 16 and it has no clue what i'm looking for what what is that what is tg16 i don't even know what that is so let's go down maybe it's under turbo graphics no so maybe pc engine all right there's pc engine super graphics i'm assuming that's what it is and it does say retroarch perfect so far we're going well oops wait a minute in order to play pc engine super graphics game you need a bios file ew well i don't have that so we're going to go ahead and cancel so in some cases like the playstation 1 for example you may need a bios file to continue importing if you want to use the wizard so just be prepared for that let's talk about the arcade because that's the last one we have to do roms arcade i saved this for last one because there's problems with it and two if you do it as the very first folder that you bring in it won't recognize retroarch as the emulator don't know why that is i should probably submit a bug report i managed to do it several times and it happened the same way every time so all right so now it understands it is arcade grape oh but there's no emulator selectable hmm so we'll go ahead and choose retro arch i just know there's going to be a problem here right that doesn't doesn't bode well all right we're going to go ahead and do the next next next and let it go through its thing i got a handful there we're going to go ahead and let that come in and you'll also notice here on the left hand side that it's sorting all of our games for us for example arcade consoles right and handhelds i imagine if we added commodore 64 or something we'd get at computers over here okay so let's take a look at arcade all right and it's still processing down here so you'll see various cover arts or in this case probably brochures depending on what they had available at the time that's mr dewan for example will change uh over time they have multiple ones i guess of that so we're going to go ahead and sit there and let this sit here and download while we're waiting all right so we talked about turbo graphic 16 and needing some rom images but what about the arcade stuff so i should be able even though we're downloading stuff i should be able to launch mr do i said i should be able to launch mr do okay obviously there's a problem right so you could start troubleshooting by right-clicking and opening retro arch and actually using the retroarch interface to load that game up and make sure that it actually works boy oh boy this vm is killing me all right so you could actually use retroarch low decor load your content do all the scary stuff that you're that you're here to avoid anyway right you could do that i will tell you right now i know exactly why this doesn't work and i'm going to share that with you we're going to go to tools and we're going to go to manage emulators retroarch is the only emulator we have here associated platforms oddly enough arcade is missing from here and if you had already done your research on uh on reddit or some other source they'll say just make sure that you have arcade in here but they don't tell you how to add it there's no add button there's no there's no visible way of doing it what you actually have to do is scroll to the bottom click in this empty space i swear this is true select arcade we're going to choose uh so up front you you don't you know what your rom set is i don't so choosing maim you know lib retro is probably a good start you will have to fill in the dash f and you'll want to have this as the default emulator okay make sure you hit ok and not close otherwise it disappears and it doesn't save it so let's try to run it now and again i apologize for the speed of my vm there we go now it's running hmm something appears to be awry so we can hit escape twice to get out of that it's attempting to uh unzip the files before it runs them so let's go back into the emulators retro arch we can't you can't unzip it see down here this is just one of those weird things uh let's just take that out you don't need it but it's there close out let's try this again mr do let show me mr do now fatal error required files are missing so no mr do hmm what about donkey kong do we get any love from donkey kong hey that's that's better all right so that works but mr dude does not how about um let's try something else how about uh mario brothers so we have one working and one not working and i can tell you why and you probably already know but we'll go through the motions anyway ah required files are missing well the reason that this is a problem of course is because we're using old roms with a newer main core so here's what we're going to do we're going to go ahead i know for a fact that i use old maim roms i'm going to go back here and change the core from the existing sort of the main main lib retro library i'm going to go back to 2000 because i'm guessing that that's probably what my roms are for let's see if mr dude behaves now ah now we're talking runs like crap in this emulator uh vm but perfect okay so now we're in pretty good shape so we showed you how to fix the arcade problem let's go back real quick here and see if we can fix a couple of these boxes because you got all this beautiful artwork and then you got this would it actually run though is the question so let's double click it even though there's no metadata or anything does it still run and you might actually have to run one of these things it does run it's just very poor all right so it's back to the future three but we kind of knew that right right click that guy hit edit and we'll go ahead and change the title all right and then we'll search okay now we actually have a match let's go ahead and grab that and if we go to media we can hit download media to make sure that it gets the latest i feel like i should be feeling the dead air here okay so let's see if back to the future three now we got ourselves a game pretty fun anyway okay well listen i know this was longer than five minutes but the entire process of actually setting this thing up really only took five minutes i just showed you a few extra goodies on the outside uh last thing i should mention is there is this is the free version it is a paid piece of software and i totally recommend that you actually pay for it um you could go here and take a look at the at what you get when you go premium probably the thing that everybody's really going to be interested in is this 10 foot interface so you get this big box it's sort of like steam big screen that gives you that gives you a nice interface to use on your tv there's all sorts of good stuff in here but yeah so uh it's it's not too bad they usually have some sort of a deal going on keep an eye out because they often have specials and deals on holidays at least that's when i got mine all right well listen i hope you enjoyed the video please like subscribe you guys know what to do ring the bell blah blah blah this is shane r monroe i hope you enjoyed this video and as always take care

Channel: MonroeWorld

Views: 29,580

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Id: qdSOI_FlBrI

Length: 18min 13sec (1093 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 17 2021