RetroArch Starter Guide

[Music] hey everybody this is russ from metro gamecore today we're going to do a starter guide for the retroarch emulation platform now i remember the first time i used retch work it was about 10 years ago and i first installed it and turned it on and had no idea how to use it at all i couldn't even figure out little things like how to use a controller and the experience was so frustrating that i remember immediately uninstalling the program and then not touching it for like another eight years well fast forward to about a year and a half ago and i started getting some retro handheld systems that relied on retroarch for all of its configuration and so i finally had to hunker down and learn how this program worked and since then i've learned a lot of things about this program in fact i've come to really appreciate it but there's no doubt about it it has a steep learning curve for new users and so the point of this guide here is to kind of walk you through some of the fundamentals of retroarch to the point where i think you would be comfortable messing around with the settings yourself now the thing about retroarch is that it is a multi-platform system so the things that you'll learn in this video will apply to any number of factors for example you could use this on the pc or on a mac but you could also use it on a phone or an xbox ps vita or any number of retro handheld so the idea here is that it's basically a foundational guide that's going to help you in many different contexts and so without any further delay let's jump into it [Music] okay first things first i have an entire written guide that that'll accompany this video and it's linked in the video description below in here you can read a little bit more about what retroarch is in the first place and some of the reasons why it's worth investing your time in and i imagine over time the video guide will start to get a little bit outdated as new features get implemented but what i'll do is i'll continue to update the written guide so you'll have the most up-to-date data there and not only that you'll be able to reference this and then tackle everything at your own pace as well so either way you can watch the video or use the written guide or use them both now before we start messing with retroarch first thing you need is a game library and typically what i recommend doing is building a rom file structure that basically has one folder per every system that you're going to emulate as you can see here this is one of the hard drives i have on my pc and within each of these folders i'm going to have my specific rom files that apply to that system now retroarch does work with zipped and 7z files but in general i prefer to keep them unzipped for smaller retro games additionally all of my roms are named a specific way it's called the no intro naming convention and typically that'll be the name of the game then the region and then any other amplifying data after it and this naming convention is important later on as we'll see in this video now i understand that building your first rom library can be a little bit overwhelming and of course robin files are copyrighted so i'm not going to have any links or anything else like that you're on your own to find and build your own library but the retroarch team does have some good documentation that will help you along your way for example they have a libretro docs page here and within here they have a core library and what you can do here is you can find this specific platform that you're looking for and then you can find the different emulation cores that are supported within retroarch say for example with nes we're going to use the fceum core and within here you're going to find all sorts of data for example the file extensions they prefer with this core on top of that you're going to be able to find information about bios files that are relevant to that system and if you're not sure what bios files are these are basically system files that are embedded in a console that allow the games to run and not every system requires bios files but there are some that do and retroarch also has a listing of all the different bios files that are required per system and of course i'll have this in the written guide but you can click on this here and then see specific bios information whether or not they're optional or required and things like that so in addition to building a rom library you also need to build a bios collection as well and the retroarch website will tell you system by system what's the best in addition to this in my written guide i just have a list of some of the common bios files and the ones that i recommend so if you're looking to build a bios collection these are two different ways to start but in general you're just going to want to make a bios folder and then throw all those files into there and you can do this piecemeal by downloading the bios files one at a time and putting them in there but you can also find retroarch bios packs available on the internet as well so if you find those you can also load those as well now much like rom files bios files are copyrighted so i'm not going to have any links to those in my written guide either but yeah in general this is how you want things to look you're going to have a specific folder for every system you want to emulate and additionally you'll have a bios folder that'll have all those system files that you need for specific consoles and honestly this will probably take more time than anything else when it comes to setting up your first emulation system okay so now that you have that set up let's actually start installing and configuring retroarch so first thing you want to do is go to retwerk.com and then select the get retroarch button to get to the download section and within here you can find both stable and nightly releases i recommend using the stable ones if you're just getting started and what you want to do here is just scroll down and find the platform that you're going to install retro work on and then download that respective installer file and i go into more detail with specific platforms in my written guide but in general it's just a pretty plug and play experience and so you want to download the one that's most applicable to the operating system that you're using now i'm actually going to use a windows pc for this video here so i'm going to download the 64-bit version here there is an installer version which will actually install it onto your computer but we're going to download the other one which is the roaming version instead now once i have that download i'm going to put it into my games folder and then i will extract that file so that i have the retroarch folder at that point i can delete the 7zip file and i just have the retroarch folder itself and inside here you're going to find a bunch of folders and it's going to be pretty intimidating but all you really need to remember is that it has a retroarch.exe file and your setup might look a little bit different depending on the platform you're installing this on now some of these folders are important for example you can see there's a place for your save games and your save states and so this will be a great place to refer to if you're going to transfer your save files from one platform to another additionally there is the system folder which is typically where your bios files are going to go so you have one of two options here you could just move all your bios files directly into the system folder or we could go into the retroarch settings and tell it to look in the other folder that we already created and we'll do that method later on but i'm getting ahead of myself let's actually start up retroarch and see what it's like and so this is what retroarch will look like when you first set it up and this is a controller friendly menu and so let's start with actually adding a controller first in general retroarch works really good with modern controllers things like a ps4 or an xbox controller typically will work just fine you just need to pair it to whatever device you're using for example on a pc you would set it up via bluetooth and same thing with like a phone in addition to just a regular wireless controller you could use other ones that are wired for example this 8bitdo xbox controller works really well with a retroarch because not only does it have the same kind of connection as an xbox controller but it has a really nice d-pad for retro gaming too but of course you might have a different style controller and so we're going to use one of these instead this is a b top controller here which does not automatically get recognized by retroarch and so we're going to go the hard route and use this one instead so i can show you what it's like to set it up now when i first plug this controller in it's gonna say that there is no configuration available and that's no problem what we'll do instead is configure it ourselves so i'm gonna use my mouse here to navigate through the retroarch menu you may have to use an external mouse or maybe your finger if you're using a touchpad but go into the settings then input section and then scroll down to the port 1 control section here and then you'll find an option here that says set all controls and as expected what you're going to want to do here is press the corresponding button to the prompt and this will essentially force the mapping of your controller within retroarch and then once you've mapped everything your controller should start working right then and there and of course if you make a mistake here you can individually map each of the buttons as you go along too now another thing you may want to do is go into the menu controls here within the input settings and then you can swap your ok and cancel buttons depending on what type of controller you're using it may be the a button or the b button it's up to you and that's where you would change it now after we've made some settings changes we're going to want to save those settings and this is probably the most important part of this entire video is how to save your configuration what you want to do is go into main menu and then configuration file and then select save current configuration now in general retroarch is governed by one specific file it's called retroarc.cfg and this file basically sets all of your global settings across the board so things like button mapping like we just did or maybe your overall appearance all these things that affect the entirety of retroarch will be done via that save configuration menu there are other ways to save things and we'll go over those later in the video but for now just remember save current configuration is the way to save global settings okay so now that we've saved that button mapping configuration let's put it to the test we're going to quit retroarch here and then i'll reboot the retroarch system and then let's play around with the controller and as you can see here it is properly mapped so it saved all our configuration we're good to go so now we're going to make some other configuration changes and i want to do these in a specific order so next we're going to do our file directory system this is basically going to tell retroarch what folders to look into for certain functions we're going to go back into the settings tab then scroll all the way down to the directory section and within here you're going to see a list of all the different directories that it's looking in probably the first one you're going to want to mess with is the system bios folder if you remember we created a bios folder of our own and that was within my f drive and as you can see there's a bios folder here so i'm going to select bios folder and then use this directory now it's going to look in that bios folder for the bios files and so this function can be used in many different ways for example let's change the file browser location as well right now it's just going to look within the retroarch folder but if i change this to the f drive instead and then select use this directory it's now going to look in my game's hard drive for all of my game's folders that's going to save me time and navigation and so across the board if there are specific folders that you want retroarch to look in this is the way you would set it up for now we're not really going to mess with this but in the written guide i have some examples where it might be relevant one function could be your save files and your saved states right now it's just going to save it on your computer but one thing you could do is actually have these located in a folder that's synced with something like google drive or dropbox and what that could essentially do is give you a cloud save function so that way if you had a different platform that was using retroarch it could access that same folder and now you're going to share save files between these two platforms so this would be great if you want to pick up a game at the same spot on a different platform than your pc anyway that's more of an advanced feature but i do want to just kind of show some of the possibilities you have within this folder structure and of course after we made some changes we're going to go to main menu configuration file save current configuration that's going to save all of our global settings okay now that we have our controls working correctly and we have our file directory set up now let's start updating retroarch itself and this will be under the online updater tool and you only need to do this once at the beginning and then periodically in the future but within here you can update things like your core info files and your assets and things like cheats and overlays and stuff like that in general i just recommend going through and hitting update on each of these just to make sure you have the latest and greatest with retroarch while we're also in here we can start downloading cores and cores are basically different emulators that work within retroarch and when you first navigate through this it's probably going to be a little bit intimidating well on my written guide i've gone ahead and listed all of my preferred retroarch cores based on popular systems and so if you're not really sure what you're supposed to download in terms of emulators or what you really want to play i'll have that listed in the written guide to help get you started and you can download as few or as many of these as you want at a time and you can always go back and download them again as well but for now i'm just going to kind of go through and download all those cores that i just mentioned in the written guide and i would recommend to download these one at a time if you try to queue up a bunch of downloads at once it can make retroarch a little bit confused so just do them one at a time and that's really about it you just want to download the cores that you plan on using in the future so now let's do a couple other settings changes before we actually get into the gaming side of things first let's go ahead and change the appearance of retroarch itself and to do that we're going to go into settings and then user interface and within here there's going to be an option called menu and here there are four different menu drivers or themes for retroarch by default it's using ozone but i personally prefer the xmb one this is modeled after the playstation 3 cross media par so i'm going to change it to xmb and then i'll go into configuration file save current configuration now when i exit retroarch and then open it back up again i'm going to have the xmb menu instead to me i like this one better it has a more horizontal vertical hierarchy but a lot of these settings tabs up here on the top we actually don't need so we can actually hide these as well we're going to go back into the user interface section and then under menu item visibility we can toggle on and off certain settings for example i don't really want to see the explore option and it's up to you whether or not you want to show favorites but i'm going to leave that one on and then i can turn off things like images and music and videos too from there i'm going to save my current configuration quit out of retroarch and then jump right back in and as you can see here a bunch of those menu items on the top are no longer visible and of course i can always add those on later if i want to see them but it just makes things a little bit more clean now this isn't the only thing you can do in the user interface you can change the overall appearance pretty easily and this will be under the appearance setting in the user interface section here you can do things like adjust the size of the font and even change the type of animations that you see in the background and things like that probably one of the easiest things you can do is change the menu color theme and there's all sorts of colors that you can choose from whatever suits your fancy on top of that the menu shader pipeline will change the background image and you can also change your icons and things like that anyway once you've made something you like you would go in and change your current configuration personally i'm going to leave it on the default one so as not to confuse anyone but anyway that's how you would change your appearance and there's a lot of cool tweaking you can do here but that's a little bit more advanced so let's go with another basic option we need to work on next and that is our different hotkeys hotkeys are basically shortcuts that you're going to use while you're playing a game so you don't have to jump in and out of the menu all the time and you can find this under settings then input and then hotkeys there's quite a bit of options here the first one here is confirm quit this basically means that you need to press the quit hotkey twice in order to quit or just once i'm going to turn it off because i only want to press it once another thing you can do is have a menu toggle controller combo and if you set any of these combos what that means is if you press them it's going to bring up the menu while you're in a game so if i choose hold start for two seconds when i hold start for two seconds it'll bring up this menu during a game and you could also set up the same to quit retroarch using a specific controller combo too personally i don't use this one but if you want to use it here it is now the most important one is actually your hotkey enable button this is basically the button that will work in combination with any other button for the rest of the menu generally people like to use the select button for this function and i'm going to use that one as well and so now select plus any of the other buttons that i configure here it's going to trigger that hotkey function for example if i want to have fast forward i'm going to set that to r2 now select plus r2 will fast forward the game same thing with rewind i'm going to set this to l2 now select and l2 is going to work in that same way for save and load state i'm going to set those up as well save state for r1 and load state as l1 and so here's a nice little graphic which is also on the written guide that shows you some of my recommended hotkeys when it comes to retroarch you can see the save state and rewind and fast forward up here on the top but then i also set things like the reset button with b pause for a frames per second with y and then the retroarch menu itself with the x button and i have all this explained in detail in the written guide but one thing i do want to talk about is the select and start combination in order to quit retroarch you actually have a couple different options here the first option is actually called close content what this not as my main available interface but if you're using a different front end something like launch box what you'll want to do is quit retroarch every time you close out of a game and so you have the ability to set this up either way so anyway i'm going to go through the rest of the menu here and i'm going to toggle on all those different hotkeys that i showed in that graphic earlier and so now we're set up with our hotkeys we're going to go back to the main menu configuration file save current configuration okay a couple other configurations i recommend doing these are all completely random but i do want to bring them up the first is if you go into the on-screen display section and then on-screen overlay there's an option here that says hide overlay when controller is connected this is going to be really good if you're using retroarch on a touch screen display like on a phone or a tablet that way you're not going to see the overlaid like virtual buttons on top of your menu you'll just see the screen itself and so i prefer to have that one on by default another thing i recommend doing is going into the savings section here and then turn on auto save states in auto load states what this means is when you close out of a game it's going to set a save state file and then when you load up that game again it's going to load that save state so you basically can jump in and out of your game as if you would just put it to sleep and finally i recommend setting up retro achievements you're going to want to go to a website called retroachievements.org and then sign up for a free account after you've done that you're going to want to input your username and password here in retroarch and then also you want to consider whether or not to use the hardcore mode if you have hardcore mode turned on that means you're not going to be able to use save states or cheats or rewind or pausing or things like that personally i like to turn hardcore mode off anyway once you've made all those changes go ahead and save your current configuration okay two more things before we actually start playing games the first is we're going to set up our video configuration files and then we're also going to create some playlists here we're going to go into settings then video and then i want to go into the scaling option here now you have two main options here integer scaling and aspect ratio when you turn integer scaling on what that means is it's going to increase the size of the screen itself in increments of whole numbers so it's going to jump up from 1x to 2x and 3x and nothing in between this is going to give you really good pixel scaling so everything is nice and sharp but the size of the game window may not match your actual display on your monitor or computer or device so for now i'm going to leave this one off but i'll show you what it looks like when it's on later and then next we need to talk about aspect ratio aspect ratio is going to be the dimensions of the screen based on the original console itself by default it's set to core provided what that means is that each of the emulators will decide what the aspect ratio should be and that's a really good thing because the common aspect ratios of handhelds and home consoles is all over the place and so the easiest thing to do is just to let the emulator determine what the best aspect ratio is as you can see from these charts here it's all over the place now if instead you wanted to make sure that every game filled up the entirety of your screen you can do that in here as well say for example i'm using a 16x9 monitor here right now and so i can set the aspect ratio to 16x9 across the board that means that every game is going to stretch to fill up the whole screen but if you do something like this the emulation police are probably going to come after you because you're basically like committing a serious crime if you do this so i just recommend doing core provided and then everybody stays out of jail but either way that's where the option is okay so now let's actually focus on making playlists this is what we're going to use to navigate and launch our games what you want to do is find the import content tab here and you're going to have two options here scan directory and manual scan the scan directory one is the easiest but it can also be problematic in general you only want to use this option if you have unzipped rom files that have a unique file extension for example something like gameboy uses a gb file so this is one we could use i'm going to select scan this directory and what it did is it parsed through my gameboy folder and it found all my game files within and it recognized them as being game boy games and so we have them here but if we have rom files that are zipped or if it's not a unique name then we're going to want to use a manual scan and this one basically lets you set all the parameters for example under content directory we're going to navigate to the folder that has our game files and i'll just pick one at random here let's go with game boy advance and within here we'll select scan this directory under system name we're going to find game boy advance because that's what we're scanning so i'm going to go to nintendo then game boy advance under default core i'm going to find the game boy advance emulator now i have two different cores i downloaded let's use the mgba one and there are other options here for example you can indicate specific file extensions to scan for only but in general you're probably not going to mess with any of these other options so all you have to do now is just go down to the bottom and select start scan and this is going to do the same thing it's going to scan that game boy advance folder but it'll specifically only look for game boy advanced games and so now we have two different playlists here we have game boy advance and game boy games so let's start up a game and start messing with some of these settings we'll start with the game boy advance game first first thing you might notice is it has a retro achievements pop-up to let me know that i don't have any achievements for this specific game and by the way you need to be connected to the internet for retro achievements to work in the first place anyway we're going to start up the game here and let's mess around with some of those hotkeys so you can see how they work for example i can use the fast forward hotkey of select an r2 to skip past that cutscene right there but say i wanted to use the rewind function it's not quite as simple as fast forward which just works out of the box we actually need to set it up first we're going to press our menu toggle hotkey which is select an x and this is going to bring up the quick menu here and within here there's a rewind function what we want to do here is turn on rewind support now the thing about rewind support is that it requires system resources and so on some systems you actually don't want to use it that's why we're not going to make it a global setting instead we're going to set it up by emulator for example with game boy advance so now we've turned it on for game boy advance and we want to save it only for game boy advance and the way we achieve this is through something called overrides and this is available in the quick menu as well and as you can see there are three different override options available core overrides content directory and game overrides now as we mentioned before the configuration file retroarch.cfg that's the global setting so this is where you're going to make changes like your overall hotkeys and your menu appearance and things like that now underneath that are going to be those three overrides the core overrides is going to be specific to that emulator core so for example we have a global setting of having rewind support off but if we make a core override to have rewind support on that means anytime we open up this core which is mgba for game boy advance it's going to initiate an override over the global setting which will force the rewind function to be on now in addition to a core override we could use something like a content directory override this is very similar to a core override but instead of overriding everything within that core it's going to override everything that is opened within that one specific rom folder so for example if we have a emulation core that covers multiple systems you may only want to have rewind support on one of those many systems in that case you wouldn't want to use a core override you would want to use a content directory override instead and finally you also have game overrides as well this is going to be if you specifically only want to make settings changes for one game and you don't want it to apply to other games within that folder or the entire core so depending on your use case you may want to use any of these three overrides depending on the situation and one thing to note here this is a hierarchy so a core override is going to override the configuration file but a content directory override is going to override the core override as well as the configuration file along those same lines a game override is going to override everything else below it both the content directory override and the core override and the configuration file and i know it's kind of hard to wrap your head around that logic but that's how everything is structured now i don't want to complicate things further but there are other save files that are independent of this whole setup as well and that's going to be controller remap files as well as core options and then shader presets and all that really means is that you're not going to use that menu to make those saves you're going to do it within different menu and i'll show you a couple of these later in the video as well and so in summary if i save a core override here right now anytime i open up a game boy advance game using the mgba core it'll turn on the rewind support alternatively if i use the save content directory override anytime i open up a gameboy advance game regardless of what core i use it's going to have rewind support and then finally if i do a save game override only alien hominid is going to have rewind support the next time i open it up so here i'm going to choose save core override now let's navigate back to the quick menu and then select resume and we're back in the game and if i press select in l2 as you see at the top right here it's going to turn on the rewind function and this is basically going to rewind several frames behind in case you want to make up for some mistake that you made in the game it's a really handy feature for some of those really tough platformers i can also try out other hotkeys for example select an r1 is going to save a save state and then if i move around a bit and then press select and l1 it's going to load that previous save state so this is a quick way of saving your game and then jumping right back to it and it might take a bit to get oriented to the hotkey structure and they're completely optional but i do find that they save a lot of time and energy when you use them properly so now let's talk a little bit more about video scaling options we talked a little bit about this before but now that we have a game open i think it just makes a lot more sense so i'm going to go back to that settings section here while the game is loaded i'm going to go into video here and now i'm going to swap out the integer scale and as you can see here when i turn on integer scale it's going to give me perfect pixels but i am going to have black menu bars around all the sides and so it's going to be up to you what you tolerate do you like having really crisp pixels and don't mind having a black border or do you want to fill up as much space as possible at the expense of potentially having some distorted pixels and i'm using a 1080p screen right here so i don't really notice when i have distorted pixels so i'm going to turn integer scaling off but if you have a lower res screen it might start to bother you so there are a couple ways to mask this pixel distortion the first thing i'm going to show are called filters and they're within this video section as well all you have to do is select video filter and then there's any number of options here these will basically process the video signal and some of these may potentially fix some of those scaling issues for example if we turn on the scanline 2x filter here it's going to apply a scan line effect here but then also help balance those pixels too but the thing about filters that they use system resources so if you have a low powered device they may not be a good option instead you'll want to use something called shaders and these are located in a different place they're going to be under the quick menu under shaders here what you want to do here is turn on video shaders and then select load and you'll have a couple options here i prefer to use the glsl shaders myself and in here you're going to find a ton of options there's going to be all these subfolders and it's going to be a little bit overwhelming too in general if you're using a handheld system i just go into the handheld folder and then i mess around with a bunch of these so let's try this one here it's called lcd grid version 2 game boy advance color and motion blur what this is going to do is it's going to apply a grid as well as a color correction to the image and then also provide a motion blur as well this is supposed to better mimic the original game boy advance screen as if you were looking directly on the device and you might like this one or you might find that the colors are a little bit too muted so let's try a different one instead and of course we'll go back to that handhold folder but we'll try a different one let's do lcd 3x this is only going to give an lcd grid and it's not going to affect the color correction nor is it going to give you a motion blur and this one looks pretty good so let's save this one instead and this is one of those that has an independent save section instead of an override we'll go back into shaders and then into save and as you can see here they have different shader presets you can save you have a global preset that would affect every game core preset for everything under mgba and then content directory for every gameboy advance game we're only going to do this for alien hominid so i'm going to select save game preset now when i close out of alien hominid and then i go back into the game and start it back up as you can see here it did an auto save as well as an auto load back to the same spot i was at previously but i also have that lcd 3x grid so now let's load up a different game boy advance game this castlevania one instead as you can see this does not have an lcd 3x grid so for this one just as an example let's go into video and then video filter and let's turn on that scanline 2x filter for this game in particular and we'll go back and resume the game and as you can see here it now has that scanline filter applied so let's say we want to save this one instead this one is going to use an override so we'll go back into the quick menu go into overrides and this time in particular let's do a save game override so now theoretically alien hominid is going to use an lcd 3x shader and as you can see here when i load up the game that is what shows up and then when i load up castlevania instead it should show that scanline 2x filter and yeah just like that it's now showing the filter and so in general that's how you're going to customize the look of any of your games within the retroarch system okay so now let's mess around a little bit more with playlists first let's add some thumbnails to make the playlist look a little bit better we're going to go into the online updater section and then there's a playlist thumbnails updater section here and within here we can pick any of the playlists we've already created and then scan each of those playlists to download thumbnails and if the naming convention of those games matches the retroarch database it's going to download box art that you can then see in the playlist as you navigate through it and so then you can go through and scan these one at a time as you can see game boy has thumbnails but the other systems like genesis does not have any thumbnails because we didn't scan it now there's another way you could do this as well you go back into the online updater section and then you turn on on-demand thumbnail downloads what that means is that as you navigate through the system it's going to scan that game and then compare it against its database and it'll install box art if they match the easiest way to do this is just kind of scroll through one time through all the games and that'll trigger the download but it's not gonna work for every game as you can see here some of these don't actually have the thumbnails downloaded and that's because there's a mismatch between my game file name and the retroarch database but yeah that's how you would add thumbnails to your games you just need to make sure they follow the no intro rom set naming convention okay so now i want to show you how to set up a playlist for arcade systems because this one's a little bit more complex than the others we're going to go into manual scan here and i'm going to select my main folder this is a main 2003 plus rom set so i'm going to pick this one here and then select scan this directory under system name i'm going to go into maim and then find maim 2003 plus and then finally under default core i'm going to find the main 2003 plus core 2. it is absolutely important that the rom set matches the core that you're going to use to launch it otherwise your games are going to crash when you try to load them up now the other thing that's important with arcade rom sets is that you need to have a dat file and i'll explain this in detail in my retroarch written guide but essentially you're going to want to download one specific dat file that you'll find in the retroarch github page and so in my written guide follow the link here and then go to that download button and select save link as and you can save this wherever i'm just going to save it in my root games folder now i'm going to go back into retroarch and under arcade dat file i'm going to navigate to where i save that dat file which was in my root game folder here it is here once i've selected that now i can select start scan and what this does is it finds all those crazy abbreviated zip files that you find within arcade rom sets and it's gonna parse that out into the full title of that arcade name instead of that abbreviated name instead and so as we navigate through arcade playlist you can see it has the full names here and not every game is going to work perfectly but i would say at least 95 of them will get recognized appropriately from there it's just a matter of starting up your game and as long as your rom set matches the core your game should load right up okay a couple more things to show off here the first is going to be your core options available for each of these systems we're going to use game boy as an example because some of these are really easy to trigger so i'm going to start up a game here using the gombate core first thing you'll notice is that the gameboy boot logo shows up here and that's because i have the game boy bios file inside of the bios folder but you may notice that the game is in black and white and it's just kind of not very fun looking so we can go and change the colorization of this game through the core options we're going to go back into the quick menu here and then go into options and each of these options are gonna vary by whatever core that you open for gambatte they have a game boy colorization option we're gonna set this to internal and then within here we have all sorts of different palettes that we can choose from we'll keep it on the original dmg color palette first and this essentially is going to mimic the color of the original game boy now if we go back into the options section we can change it to a different palette instead for example i really like this one called special one to me it's just a little bit easier on the eyes now in addition to changing the colorization there are some other things we can do for example we can turn on some lcd ghosting that'll make the image look a little bit more like an original gameboy that'll be under the interframe blending section here and we're going to select accurate lcd ghosting and now as we move the sprite around you can see there's a little bit of ghosting behind it and it's kind of like how the original game boy was and i really like this effect now say we wanted to add some video shaders as well to really round out the whole experience we're going to go back into that handheld section and then turn on the lcd 3x grid so now we have some special colorization lcd ghosting as well as a nice shader too and this looks really great so let's go ahead and save it first thing i want to do is go back into the options setting here and as you can see here under manage core options there are different save options within here too this is one of those that is also independent of overrides by default as soon as you close this out it's going to save it as a core option but you could also specify to make it only a game option or a content directory option personally i'm good with this colorization and lcd ghosting working for all game boy games so i'm just going to leave it here as a core option so i'm actually not going to do anything here i'm just going to let it save as a core option by not touching anything but for the shader i do need to save that so i'm going to go in here and two shaders and then save and then i'm going to save it as a core preset and so now let's close out of adventure island and open up a different game boy game one that we haven't touched at all yet and so in opening up castlevania 2 you can see here the colorization the lcd ghosting as well as the lcd grid are all carried over onto this one and so that's how you would set up for example a game boy look and feel okay so now let's mess around with some cheats these are also available within the retroarch quick menu so i'm going to press select next to get to the quick menu and then i'm going to select cheats and within here i'm going to select load cheat file replace then navigate to whatever system you're using for example nintendo game boy then i'm going to scroll down all the way until i find castlevania 2. you can either press down a bunch left and right to go by page or you can use the bumpers to go by letter and within here you might find multiple cheat files for the same game for example the first one here is a game genie cheat file but there's also a game shark one and there are different versions of castlevania 2 that are also supported we're just going to load the first one here the game genie cheat file and once we select it it's going to take us back to the main cheat menu and now at the bottom you can see the cheats that are loaded we have 99 lives infinite health and infinite lives so i'm going to select infinite health and then under enabled i'm going to turn it on next i'm going to select apply changes now my character should have infinite health so let's close out of this cheap menu go back and resume the game and now look when i get hit by this crow i'm not losing any health at all and so that's how you would apply cheats to a game now say you want to turn off the cheats what you want to do is go back to the cheat section then find that infinite health section and then you could turn off the enable or if you wanted it to apply every time that you started up the game you could turn this one on here auto apply cheats during game load now every time you start up a game it's going to auto apply the infinite health cheat now of course in order for this to save we need to go and save an override so we're going to do save game overrides now let's close out of the game we'll start it right back up and because we have the auto save state and auto save load it's going to go right back to that same section and as you can see here when i'm getting hit by the crow i'm not losing any health and so that's how cheats work in retrowork and really that's essentially how it's going to work across the board what you want to do is make a playlist for each of your game systems make sure that you have a core downloaded for that specific system and then as you load it up you're going to want to go into the quick menu then go into the options section and see what kind of options you have available within each of these cores for example with nintendo 64 if we go into the glide n64 options here here we can upscale the resolution if we want so for example i'm going to pick this one 1440x1080 and once i make this change it's going to save it as a core option so what i can do now is close out of this game here and now when it starts it should be in a 1080p resolution and as you can see the car is much sharper looking and that's because it's running in an upscale 1080p instead of 480p previously and it's as simple as that as long as your system is capable of upscaling your games this is how you would change that function but if you're playing on a lower end system obviously you're not going to be able to do this let me show you a couple other examples so you get a feel for it for example here is dead or alive 2 on dreamcast i'm going to go into the quick menu then options and then video and within here there's an internal resolution option and i'll change this one to 1440 by 1080p as well on top of that there are other things i can mess with for example i can turn on auto frame skip or i could turn on widescreen hacks and cheats now same thing here i'm going to close the game and then start it back up and now not only will it be in 1080p but it's applied a wide screen cheat as well so now i have a wide screen version of dreamcast just like that and in general any of your 3d based systems this is how you're gonna go in and change things for example with psp i can change the internal resolution to 1920x1088 and then all of a sudden i'm now playing psp in 1080p of course you're going to need a pc that's beefy enough to handle this but this one works and of course the same method applies to other systems like sega saturn as well as playstation 1. now one thing to note here is that only certain cores are going to be capable of doing upscaling for example the yabasan shira core works the best for upscaling sega saturn and so for example here is virtua fighter 2 running at a 1080p resolution and the same method applies to playstation 1 as well in particular if you're going to be upscaling your games you're going to want to use the duck station or swan station course and within this you can change the internal resolution to 1080p and i also recommend turning on geometry correction which is going to help with some of the wobbly visual artifacts that can happen when upscaling playstation to 1080p and so yeah that's really going to be it for my retroarch starter guide essentially my goal here was to set you up with getting retroarch started learning how to create playlists and then also getting the freedom to be able to make some changes and learning how to save those properly and even though retroarch does seem really intimidating once you get these basics down the whole world kind of opens up for you and so this is how you're gonna mess around with things like filters and shaders and cheats and all that other kind of stuff and like i mentioned at the beginning of this video this is only really scratching the surface of all the things that retroarch can do but i hope that at the very least this is going to give you the tools you can use to get going on any different platform because fundamentally retroarch works the same across all of them so that's about it for this video let me know if you have any questions in the comments below and be sure to check out that written guide like i said before i'm going to keep this one updated over time as always thanks for watching be sure to like and subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music] you

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 968,320

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Id: icGYGriNkF4

Length: 39min 10sec (2350 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 28 2022