A few newbie Retropie questions

[scoularis]

Alright, so I got my Raspberry Pi 2 last night and configured it for Retropie. Everything is working pretty great so far, but I have a few lingering questions:

• Holding X when booting into a ROM doesn’t do anything. I see people everywhere claiming that it should bring up a menu that let’s you choose the emulator/core as well as setting resolution output for a given emulator. I have the controls set to the defaults for Retropie, and I’m using a Buffalo SNES controller.
• I can’t seem to access the service menu in the default lbr-fba-next emulator for Neo-Geo. People seem to be able to do it, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how. I just want to access it for things like turning blood red in Metal Slug games and setting the region.
• When people are suggesting 720p for improved performance, do they mean setting their actual Raspberry Pi to output all the time at 720p, or would it suffice to set specific emulators (like SNES, for example) to output at 720p? I’m just asking because with everything at default games like Yoshi’s Island on Snes9x-next have a few hitches here and there that I’d like to iron out.
• I’ve noticed with my NES directory in particular, running sselph’s command-line scraper usually encounters a fatal error somewhere during the process, which fails to create a gameslist.xml even if it was nearly finished. It seems to error out at different points in my ROMs list, so I don’t think it’s hitting a particular problematic ROM. So far I haven’t encountered this problem with SNES, Genesis, Neo-Geo, or GBA. Maybe it’s because I have over a thousand NES roms in that directory?

For reference I’m running on a Raspberry Pi 2 and using the Pi 2 overclocking setting.

[herbfargus]

Did you follow this guide?

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/First-Installation

This should answer your first 2 questions:

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/runcommand

and as far scraping goes have you made sure all processes of emulationstation are killed before you scrape?

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/scraper

[scoularis]

Yes, I followed the setup guide on the Wiki down to the letter, but the runcommand menu simply won’t come up no matter what button I press on my controller during a ROM’s startup.

As for scraping, I’ll try killing the EmulationStation processes first before I run it on NES again. What’s the easiest way to kill them all?

[dankcushions]

1) i think you need to tap X rather than hold it. i just mash it until the menu appears.

2) two ways – change the core options to use the unibios and access dipswitch settings via a button combo during the neogeo logo, or update to the latest version of the emulator which puts all the dip switches in the core options in the RGUI (which is better as you can save your setup to a .cfg for that game). both of these mean you need to go into the retroarch GUI – do you know how to do that?

3) i assume they mean the retroarch render resolution, which is accessed via the menu in 1). however i don’t think that really applies to the Pi2 as you’re not going to be GPU bound in most cases, unless you use a shader. i run everything in ‘output’ resolution, which matches my display, which is 1080p.

[scoularis]

Good news: scraping my NES directory worked fine after I killed all Emulation Station processes. Thanks for the tip!

2) Ah, so the latest version of fba-next lists all the service mode options under Core Options? That sounds ideal. You said I can update the emulator through the RetroArch GUI? You mean the one that comes up with Select + X? I wasn’t aware that you could update an emulator through that interface. I think I can also update individual emulators through the Retropie Setup menu, right?

[dankcushions]

[quote=111138]
2) Ah, so the latest version of fba-next lists all the service mode options under Core Options? That sounds ideal. You said I can update the emulator through the RetroArch GUI? You mean the one that comes up with Select + X? I wasn’t aware that you could update an emulator through that interface. I think I can also update individual emulators through the Retropie Setup menu, right?

[/quote]
you can! i would do it via the retropie-setup menu – i’m not sure if it’ll work properly through the RGUI. also, you need to update from source, as this change isn’t in the binaries yet. it’s an option when you do the ‘update individual emulators’ thing (and it takes about 1hour!) – probably a good idea to back up first if you can.

i still haven’t full tested with it but i think it’ll do what you want it to do – i can experiment later tonight and report back!

[scoularis]

Oh, didn’t notice that you said the update wasn’t in the binaries yet. I guess I’ll wait until it hits the binaries since I’m more comfortable with updating that way rather than from source.

Also, I found out how to access the runcommand menu. For some reason on my setup it’s the A button on my controller that triggers it. Thanks again for all your help.

Now that I can access the runcommand menu I might just switch over to GnGeo and set it to Unibios and AES mode for the time being. See if it performs well enough to leave it on that instead of fba-next.

[herbfargus]

It’s coded to js0 so whichever button corresponds to 0 on your gamepad. It differs depending on what type of gamepad whereas any key on a keyboard will work.

[dankcushions]

the latest version of fba-next is only for the dipswitches in the core options – you can switch to AES/unibios in RGUI in your version FYI. it’s in the core options menu.

[scoularis]

Yeah, I looked in core options for fba-next the other day and didn’t see any way to set it to Unibios. I’ll look again when I get home later today.

[scoularis]

Alright, so I’ve tried everything short of updating to the latest lbr-fba-next from source, and I can’t seem to find any way to access the service menu for Neo Geo ROMs.

I’ve seen mention online of a supposed “Enable Diagnostics” toggle in the Core Options for fba-next, but that’s not present in my Core Options. Was it removed in a recent version or something?

I’ve also seen mention of a hotkey (similar to the one used to access the unibios menu) that can be used to jump right to the service menu, but nothing I’ve tried thus far has worked.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I just want to turn on blood in games like Metal Slug 1-3.

[scoularis]

UPDATE

Alright, I finally figured out how to access the service menu in lbr-fba-next thanks to some random forum poster back in early 2014. Pressing B+C+D after soft rebooting through Unibios brings me to the service menu, and best of all it even saves my changes!

So I’m pretty much all good now. Figured I’d post my solution in case some other poor soul finds themselves wasting time like I did last night.

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