I like to think of MiSTer FPGA as hardware emulation vs the software emulation I’m used to. The MiSTer suite of cores and utilities are designed to be installed on the Terasic DE10-Nano FPGA board, and various add on boards to support more USB components or video/audio output. MiSTer FPGA is a project that coordinates different ‘cores’ (e.g. old computer systems or game consoles) and applies them to the FPGA board, effectively instructing the FPGA board to act as the chipsets of these old retro computer and console systems.

FPGA itself stands for ‘Field Programmable Gate Array’. It is a type of integrated circuit that can be programmed by the user to perform specific functions. So think of it like a blank slate chip that you can program to act as another chip. That’s how we do the hardware emulation. Since this reprogramming of the chip can happen without having to manufacture a new chip, we can use the term ‘Field Programmable’ – you can reprogram it in the field, outside of a chip manufacturing plant.

Why MiSTer FPGA?

I wanted to try MiSTer FPGA because I’ve never messed with hardware emulation. It’s always been on the real deal or with software emulation (like DOSBOX or VICE). My understanding is that lag is nearly non-existent when compared to emulators, and the ‘cores’ (the systems we’re emulating) run more true to the original hardware than their software emulating counterparts. Want to know some of the cores directly supported? Check out the core list here.

My motivation for doing this is because while I like to have genuine retro systems of the old systems I had as a child, I don’t care to try to own an Apple IIe, or an Atari ST. I was a Commodore guy, so while I want to tinker with those systems, I definitely don’t want to hit up e-bay and start trying to build my own piece-by-piece setup for a system I never owned or had no vested interest in. (See how I through that line in there? I never owned a Commodore PET, but I wouldn’t turn a free one down)

The MiSTer Wiki page has excellent information, tutorials, and references.

The Parts List

So from the hardware standpoint, we need at a minimum the Terasic DE10-Nano board. This is the specific model of FPGA board that the open source MiSTer FPGA project software (Mr. Fusion) expects to be installed on, so it’s a must. After that you have all sorts of add ons and adapters (adapters to even hook up old console specific adapters like light guns) to enhance your retro gaming experience. I went with the following (links to where you could find them included – not necessarily the only place, but at least one place)

• Terasic DE10-Nano board – The bare minimum as stated above. I ordered mine from Terasic directly.
• USB Hub V2.1 for MiSTer – This gives us more USB ports to connect keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc. to the Terasic board. It’s a powered HUB that is designed to mount underneath the Terasic. It comes with a splitter power cable to split your power supply between the USB board and the Terasic (but if you use the digital IO board you don’t use the splitter, see that part for more detail)
• 128MB SDRam Module – Not required for all the cores, but it is required for enough of them that I wanted to mess with. This slides into the top part of the Terasic board. You can see the cores that require SDRam here.
• I/O Boards: There are typically two I/O boards that people use for this. I’m going to try both, but you only install one at a time. Generally, for those that want to stream HDMI but play on a CRT, you’ll get the Analog board. The Digital board offers some extra expansion capabilities, though. Regardless of which one you get, this board sits on TOP of the Terasic, so when combined with the USB hub below, the Terasic is in the middle. Of note are the three switch buttons on top to easily access Reset, OSD (On screen display), and user defined functions. Cases for these are also available, and assume you have the standard 3 board setup (USB board + Terasic board + IO Board)
  • MiSTer Digital IO Board v1.2 – The MiSTer FPGA Digital IO Board v1.2 provides the following features: a dedicated power switch to turn the unit on and off with over-voltage protection, a 3.5mm audio jack for ADC In (Tape Input) a separate ADC-In addon board is not required, 3.5mm Mini-TOSLINK & Digital TOSLINK Connectors, a secondary microSD card slot the functionality depends upon the core being used, a fan speed control jumper providing 3.3 volts or 5 volts, three status LEDs (red, yellow, green), three large push buttons providing system reset, on screen display menu and game reset, an expansion connector in the form of a USB 3.0 connector however this is not for standard USB devices. If you use this board, it comes with a cable so you power your entire setup through this board, power goes through the GPIO pins into the Terasic, and then you use the included barrel cable to go from the Terasic to the USB board. So one power cable powers all three boards connected together. Acrylic Case Link
  • MiSTer Analog IO Board v6.1 – The MiSTer FPGA Analog IO board v6.1 includes the following useful features: a VGA (DB15) connector allowing for the output of a VGA/RGB/YPbPr signal depending on the cable being used, a 3.5mm audio jack with Mini-TOSLINK providing analog audio output and digital audio output, a secondary microSD card slot the functionality depends upon the core being used, a fan speed control providing a 3.3 volt / 5 volt selector jumper, a status LED control jumper allowing switching on or off the built in LEDs, a Sync-on-Green switch, three status LEDs (red, yellow, green), three large push buttons providing system reset, on screen display menu and game reset, an expansion connector in the form of a USB 3.0 connector however this is not for standard USB devices. Acrylic Case Link
    • Configuration of the video output signal on the IO board is controlled via the MiSTer.ini file, more information on how to configure and download of the MiSTer.ini file see the https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Wiki_MiSTer/wiki/Configuration-Files configuration
• Wifi/Bluetooth USB Dongles – Generally, I think you can use whatever ones you may already have. Terasic sells some from their site, I used some I already had. They fit nicely into the USB board to give you connectivity as you desire. Not every dongle dangles properly, so here are some recommended adapters for Wifi and Bluetooth.

I also picked up some more ‘odd’ add ons for this as well, more specific to my gaming taste:

• MiSTer SNAC-IEC CBM 1541 Connector – I believe with this I can hook up a real 1541 drive to the kit and use it with the C64 core.
• Ultimate Dameon x2 Player MiSTer FPGA adapter – The Ultimate Deamon PRO USB Dual Encoder for ATARI / SEGA MEGADRIVE / GENESIS. This small form-factor USB adapter makes it possible to use SEGA MEGADRIVE / GENESIS controllers on your PC (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux), Raspberry Pi or MiSTer. The adapter has a native 1ms/1000Hz polling rate so input lag is minimal (the average is 0.75ms with a wired controller). Fully assembled in a Aluminium enclosure and includes USB-C cable to connect this adapter to your favorite setup. (from ultimatemister.com)
• MiSTer RTC Real Time Clock Board 1.4 – For cores that use a clock, mainly if your FPGA kit isn’t going to be internet connected for automatic time syncing, this one’s for you. I don’t believe you need this if you’ll have internet connectivity, though.

Putting the parts together

While you don’t *need* a digital IO board or USB hub connected to your DE10-Nano, it sure makes things easier. Our final configuration when this is setup will be the DE10-Nano sandwiched in between the USB hub board on the bottom, and the digital IO board on the top. Wrap the acrylic case around it and we’re done.

A note on orientation.

When I say ‘top’ or ‘right’, I’m orienting my Nano like the pictures on Terasic’s website. The ethernet adapter is on the right side when the board is facing up:

Heatsink

Nothing wrong with that. Picked mine up from https://misterfpga.co.uk/product/mister-fpga-ultimate-heatsink/, made to fit the Cyclone V SoC on the DE10-Nano board.

USB HUB Board

The USB Hub board sits below the DE10-Nano, and you’ll need to remove the standoffs from the Nano (I gently twisted with pliers, keep the screws for later but you’ll need to remove them) so that you can mount the USB board below it. On the ethernet side of the Nano, on the very top right, there’s the USB-Micro style OTG (On The Go) port, which is how we connect the HUB to the Nano. My board comes with a slick adapter that plugs into four pins of the USB board:

and then zig zags up and out to the plug into the Nano’s OTG port:

So with the standoffs screwed into each other (leaving the top screws since we’ll be putting the digital board on top), we’re ready to continue.

128MB SDRam Addon Board

I next installed the ram board. I could have done this prior to the USB board, but if nothing else I wanted to do it before a placed the I/O board on top of the Nano. The two large SDRam chips face the inside of the nano for my version, and there’s a label on the opposite side that says ‘this side faces outwards’, so that helps orient you. The SDRam goes into the pin header on the TOP of the Nano.

Digital IO Board (Or Analog if you have that)

Next up is the IO Board, but before we install it, (for Digital IO Boards only), we need to flip a switch on the Nano. Namely, SW3, and it’s right here (in our orientation, SW3 is on the left side of the bank, SW0 is on the right side)

After flipping it on (UP) (and ONLY for the digital IO board – for the analog IO board, all switches should be down/off), we’re ready to put the Digital board on top. Our orientation has the ‘green’ LED above the Red LED, this is how the IO board will look when putting it on top of the Nano if you’re using the orientation we are for our Nano (ethernet port on the right side). We also put another set of standoffs on top of the Nano for this to rest on.

One troublesome thing I noticed was there are more headers (holes) on the Nano then there are pins on the IO board, so you’ll want to be careful. With our orientation we’ve been using, the digital IO board carefully slides into the pins on the Nano. Gently make sure all of the pins line up. On the both top and bottom sides of the Nano, you’ll have more headers (holes) on the Nano then you actually will pins from the digital IO board. Here are some shots from the misterfpga.co.uk site that show the differences of top and bottom headers/vs pins:

At pretty much anytime during this install, we could have turned the whole thing on and tried things out (hooking up a keyboard, HDMI, and power), but we’re going to cover that later. For now, on to the Acrylic Case. (If you’re not using a case, you can screw the IO board into the brass standoffs it should be touching – but if you ARE using a case, no screws yet)

Acrylic Case

More parts! Don’t worry – it’s not uncommon that you will leave here with more brass standoffs than you started with, as individual parts often come with extras. My case is designed for the digital IO board AND USB board in the mix. There are other case variants that use the Analog IO board and USB board, naturally.

Put the top standoffs into your digital IO board now, before you start building your case walls. (You can do it afterwards, it’s just annoying). Rest the MiSTer on top of the bottom part of the case, and build your walls up by aligning holes to case sides. The tabs on the case sides slid together easily enough for me.

The part that was roughest for me was the three little separate plastic buttons that rest on top of the Digital IO board’s buttons. I found it easiest to put the buttons in the top side of the case, turn the MiSTer upside down, and align the case top and buttons that way.

With the case top on, and making sure the buttons were in place, I put the four screws in to the top of the case, securing the boards and case all together. We’re done assembling our FPGA sandwich!

Power setup

When using this style of kit, where we have the IO board on top of the Nano on top of the USB hub, we really only need to give power to one component, and then we daisy chain power down to the other two boards. We power the Digital IO board directly, which then gives power to the Nano, then we use the included Male to Male barrel connector to go from Nano to USB board. So my power side/HDMI side looks like this:

Don’t forget, the Digital IO board also comes with a power switch on the bottom left (a simple slider switch). I’m also using an inline switch power adapter, just make sure you’re turning all the right parts on. I just leave the digital board switch on and use the inline adapter switch, but you do you. 🙂 After this point, I hook up the HDMI, and USB keyboard/mouse and I’m ready to go… after we flash the SD card with the Mr. Fusion software.

Flashing the MicroSD card with Mr. Fusion

If you have your case on, you’ll notice that the SD card is a royal pain in the ass to get out easily. If I just trimmed my fingernails, I end up having to use a tiny pliers to grab the card after I release it with a push (it’s a spring-loaded-grabber SD Card type, but when releasing the card it *barely* clears the case if at all). This is another reason I want to avoid having to take the SD Card in and out of the kit, it’s too damn annoying. This is why I’m thinking most people would want to SCP into their MiSTer, use USB memory cards, or use network shares instead of ever having to remove the microSD card every time they wanted to add something. I’m going with the network mount for the purposes of this document.

So, if you haven’t yet, remove the SD Card and put it into your favorite PC. I like to use balenaEtcher, so I grab that and the latest Mr. Fusion release (at time of writing, 2.7), and let the etcher do its thing.

Putting this back into the MiSTer (the MicroSD card slot is on the bottom side of the Nano board, so you should make the gold contacts of the MicroSD face UP when you slide it in), we’re now finally ready to boot this thing up and configure some of the software.

First boot

If everything has gone okay (and why wouldn’t it, things never break or go wrong, right?), you’ll see this on your monitor:

This will reboot, and then come to a screen that at first, made me think the flashing didn’t work right. I didn’t know what to expect, so don’t be alarmed, and in fact, you should expect see this:

All this means is that you’ve loaded up Mr. Fusion and are looking at a blank core menu because, well, the initial flashing doesn’t install any cores. We’ll have to do that ourselves in a bit. First things first. Connectivity. Well, one more thing first. If the flashing static background starts annoying you, hit F1 on your keyboard to change it. This also easily screws up encoding, as I was streaming his at the time and all of the static made the rest of the stream overlays pixelate.

Initial Network Connectivity

If you’re hard wired in, you should already have an IP address. If not, you should hit Escape, which will bring up the system settings, and select the ‘Scripts’ directory.

At the warning, type yes (since you do want to run the script), and select ‘wifi’ and hit return. Assuming you have a wifi dongle plugged in (and if not, you should just go hard wired with ethernet), you’ll see the list of SSIDs – select yours and enter your password. After that point, you should get taken back to the main menu, but you’ll have a little ‘Wifi’ signal icon in the upper bar of your menu now.

Now we’re cooking. Next steps are to download the well known ‘update_all’ script (not the stock update script that comes with the install – which definitely works if you only want to use that) that downloads all the stuff that the update script does, as well as a lot of neat and/or experimental features should you desire it and performs general updates and downloading of additional scripts. But first let’s go over where I’m storing all of the files the downloader is going to download.

MiSTer file paths and network mount considerations

MiSTer FPGA has a fairly standard directory structure it uses to look up files, be it cores or roms. Whether it’s network storage or the SD Card itself, MiSTer mounts a well known directory structure referenced here: https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/cores/paths

to do any of the following, we need to login via SSH to our running MiSTer. To see these directories in action, you can use PuTTY to open up a terminal into your MiSTer. The default account is root and the default password is 1. (So… maybe we’ll change that later)

After you login, know that all of the directories MiSTer is going to care about are under /media. The basic key directories are:

You won’t have some of these directories yet because we haven’t downloaded anything with the update_all script yet (you’ll at least have a Scripts directory because we’ve already run files from there). Previously I mentioned that I did NOT want to constantly remove the MicroSD card to add content to my MiSTer. I would think most people don’t want to do this, especially with a case because getting those SD cards in and out easily is annoying. So, I figure I had these options:

• Use the SD card for primary storage, let the update_all script download cores to the SD card, and use SCP/SSH to transfer files to the MicroSD card to my computer. Doable, but slightly cumbersome
• Use a USB Stick (which the MiSTer should automount according to the core paths page referenced in the github link above. Here we can at least windows to do a little easier transfer, but we still have to move the stick between files.
• Use a Samba share – You can enable the Samba (Windows file share) service on the MiSTer and expose your SDCard over the network as described here: https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/setup/games/ Also doable, but I prefer to not really use the SDCard except for booting up the MiSTer and storing some configuration data.
• Use the CIFS mount scripts and download all cores and games onto my Synology NAS, and then have MiSTer mount those directories instead (even thinking it’s /media/fat, when it’s really talking to my NAS). I liked this because virtually all files are on my NAS, so I can use that from windows more easily than SFTP, and I’m not constantly writing to the MiSTer SD Card. This is the option this document will describe further down below.

So, my goal is to create a NAS share, and have MiSTer mount the FPGA directories for cores, systems, etc. on the NAS, but making it think it’s still under /media/fat (reason being if anything we ever install assumes /media/fat is used, it will just work). The primary directories we’ll leave on the SD card itself are /media/linux and /media/config, which are much more towards MiSTer even running things properly. The cores and games, however, will live on my NAS.

So I created a share and made a dedicate user for it, this way it wasn’t going to see any other directories on the NAS and things are neatly organized. For the CIFS mount to work, the directories must already exist, so I created the directories I needed by using a template.zip file from a forum thread I found on doing this exact thing, referenced here. However, I found I needed to add a couple of directories to that template, so I’ve created my own, which you can grab here. It’s just a zip file with empty directories to get you started. All I did was just unzip it to the root of my NAS MiSTer share.

(The reason we do this is that those directories must exist to mount them on the MiSTer, otherwise when the download runs it will download files to the /media/fat/games directory on the SD CARD, not the network mount that we want. We’re using CIFS to trick MiSTer into thinking /media/fat/games is on the SD card when it’s really on the network, remember.)

These are the empty directories included in the zip file. (Ignore #recycle, that’s from my Synology NAS)

Download and configure the CIFS_MOUNT scripts

Now that we have those directories created, we need to tell the MiSTer how to mount them. To do that, we’ll download to our /media/fat/Scripts directory (which will NOT be part of our NAS) the two scripts cifs_mount.sh and cifs_umount.sh from https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Scripts_MiSTer.

cd /media/fat/Scripts
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MiSTer-devel/Scripts_MiSTer/master/cifs_mount.sh
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MiSTer-devel/Scripts_MiSTer/master/cifs_umount.sh

Now, in that same directory, we need to create a cifs_mount.ini file. Here’s mine, you’d obviously use a real IP address for your NAS, a real username, and real password.

# NAS IP (If server name doesn't work, use IP)
SERVER="192.168.50.10"

#The share name on the NAS
SHARE="mister"
USERNAME="mister"
PASSWORD="mister"

#Local directory/directories where the share will be mounted.
LOCAL_DIR="*"

#mfsymlinks most likely is necessary so the update_all ArcadeOrganizer download works.
ADDITIONAL_MOUNT_OPTIONS="vers=3.11,mfsymlinks"

#"true" in order to wait for the CIFS server to be reachable;
#useful when using this script at boot time.
WAIT_FOR_SERVER="true"

#"true" for automounting CIFS shares at boot time;
#it will create start/kill scripts in /etc/network/if-up.d and /etc/network/if-down.d.
MOUNT_AT_BOOT="true"

#========= ADVANCED OPTIONS =========
BASE_PATH="/media/fat"
#MISTER_CIFS_URL="https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/CIFS_MiSTer"
KERNEL_MODULES="md4.ko|md5.ko|des_generic.ko|fscache.ko|cifs.ko"
IFS="|"
SINGLE_CIFS_CONNECTION="true"
#Pipe "|" separated list of directories which will never be mounted when LOCAL_DIR="*"
SPECIAL_DIRECTORIES="config|linux|System Volume Information|#recycle"

You can see in the SPECIAL_DIRECTORIES section we ignore config and linux, which we’ll always want to leave on our SDCard for stability. The rest of the directories are mounted from the NAS IF they exist on the NAS already.

So, saving that file, my scripts directory now looks like this:

/media/fat/Scripts# ls -l
total 160
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   911 Apr  6 00:18 cifs_mount.ini
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 12993 Apr  6 00:17 cifs_mount.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  1051 Apr  6 00:17 cifs_umount.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  4662 Jan  1  1980 update.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10638 Jan  1  1980 wifi.sh

I then invoked the ./cifs_mount.sh command to make sure it worked, and voila, here was my output:

./cifs_mount.sh

And now, all of these new directories appear on /media/fat (but most of them are on our NAS!)

Now, if you’re ever unsure as to whether or not the directory you see under /media/fat is local to the SD card or not, check out the mounts by doing a cat /proc/mounts. You’ll see output like this:

You can see all of the directories that are actually mounted to the NAS. These are the same directories our update_all script is going to download to (as well as config/linux/Scripts, but those stay local on the SD card because we’ve either ignored them or did not create a matching directory on the NAS).

You should be able to reboot your MiSTer and SSH into it again and see these mounts are still there.

Download and run theypsilon’s update_all.sh script

Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for… let’s get things updated and downloaded.

SSH back into your MiSTer if you rebooted, and in the Scripts directory download the update_all.sh script from theypsilon’s git hub.

cd /media/fat/Scripts
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/theypsilon/Update_All_MiSTer/master/update_all.sh

Then, execute it. The update_all.sh script takes a while to run – you may want to run it from the OSD on the MiSTer, or you can still run it via SSH if you prefer. On the MiSTer OSD you’d see this (Hit ESC to get to the System Settings menu, then select Scripts):

Select update_all and you’ll be greeted with a preamble. If you want to use default download options, just let it go, otherwise, hit UP ARROW and you can configure to download optional items. (If you’re on Wifi, this may take a while, might be best to do an initial update via ethernet cable)

I hit UP and was greeted to the main settings page. Where I enabled this and that, but regardless it’s going to download the primary cores, scripts, and folder setup structure for /media/fat/games.

You can always just take the defaults, ‘Exit and Run update all’, and run it later if you want to download Disabled items.

That runs for a looooooong time.

At the very end of the script, barring any issues, you’ll see this:

Your MiSTer will now reboot, and we’re done with the initial downloading. If you look at your NAS share now, you’ll see it holds plenty of files and takes up a bit more space:

Rebooting and final touches

A note on starting up your MiSTer now that you’re mounting a bunch of folders on your NAS: Now that you’re ‘tricking’ MiSTer into thinking /media/fat/<some of your directories> are local and not on the NAS, you may be occasionally surprised if you menu under ‘Arcade’, ‘Console’, or ‘Computer’ is empty when you first start up. Don’t be. Just go back to the root of the menu (hit that OSD button on your case, or just escape out), wait a tick for the cifs_mount.sh script to finish in the background, and then you’ll see your cores and games visible. It’s just on the initial boot up, and usually only takes a few seconds after the menu shows up.

Once that was all said and done, I went to the Scripts directory again and executed the timezone script to set my timezone properly.

Now, that pretty much concludes this round documenting my initial setup. Some good reference links:

HotKeys: https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/basics/hotkey/

Defining GamePads: https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/setup/controller/

MiSTer FPGA Documentation: https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/

MiSTer Wiki on GitHub: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Wiki_MiSTer/wiki

SMB/CIFS Mount Threads: https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=3246&start=30https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=4972

theypsilon’s Update_All_MiSTer repo: https://github.com/theypsilon/Update_All_MiSTer

The post MiSTer FPGA Initial Setup and Network Mounting appeared first on Krystof.IO.

Nevertheless, they’ve tweaked a lot of the DOSBOX settings for CPU cycles and such on their end already, so that should save me some heavy lifting and fine-tuning… hopefully.

Here are some of the software / utilities I used when bringing in some GOG games:

GOG install and personal tweaks to GOG’s DOSBOX

So, I installed GOG Galaxy, linked my account, and found the myriad of games I’ve purchased over the years. First stop, a personal favorite – Heroes Of Might and Magic. I’m going to focus on the first of the series, which uses DOSBOX.

Now, my personal flavors on DOSBOX gaming are that I’d like full screen (I’d prefer borderless window but that’s not something I’m sure I can do with DOSBOX) at the host machine’s resolution, so I don’t encounter a crap ton of resolution switching on my monitor if I want to look at manuals or reference cards.

In the past, I would manually tweak a GOG games unique DOSBOX config to my liking, with generally these settings:

[sdl]
fullscreen=true
fullresolution=desktop
output=opengl

[render]
aspect=true

GOG stores the main dosbox config for each game in the game’s dosbox<abbreviation>.conf file. So for Heroes of Might and Magic 1, that ends up being dosboxHOMM1.conf. I may automate some of these changes, but for now I’m manually doing these to see how things play out first. In fact, each GOG game gets its own DOSBOX copy stored underneath the game’s main directory:

The game loads up fine, though I do find it annoying that if I alt-tab out to look up a page in the manual and go back, DOSBOX reverts to the window, I have to hit alt-enter to go back to full screen. At least I don’t have the monitor itself changing resolutions on top of it. DOSBOX-X, thankfully, doesn’t do that, but we’ve not converted our GOG HOMM to DOSBOX-X yet.

DOSBOX-X install and initital configuration

Now, I’ve installed my generic DOSBOX-X copy in a single directory under my D:\Emulators path:

Now, as far as DOSBOX-X goes, I’ve edited the dosbox-x.conf that comes with the download and tweaked to my liking.

[sdl]
output=opengl
fullscreen=true
autolock=true
autolock_feedback = none

[render]
aspect         = true
aspect_ratio   = 4:3
glshader       = crt-lottes-krystof.glsl

You may notice the glshader entry in there. That’s a custom one I was tweaking – you can make your own or point to one of the built in defaults under the glshaders directory. Definitely something to play around with.

Swapping HOMM’s DOSBOX for my DOSBOX-X

If I run dosbox-x.exe, it works, and everything is happy. Now, the question I have… Can I somehow swap out the DOSBox that my GOG Heroes of Might and Magic usses to use my global DOSBox-X directly? It leads me to other questions:

• How do we point a GOG game to use my dosbox-X under D:\emulators\dosbox-x? What about configs?
• If we can swap a GOG’s dosbox to dosbox-x, can one dosbox-x config handle all the GOG games? Probably not
• How do we have a common config and allow overrides as needed with dosbox-x?
• How can we take a GOG’s customized DOSBOX-.74 config and overlay them on top of my global DOSBOX-X config?

First off, the manual approaches. Even if this works for one game, that doesn’t mean it will work for all, so I anticipate having to come back and make changes. Perhaps I can automate some of them.

HOMM GOG’s DOSBox has multiple configuration files:

The launcher link also calls this, and starts with the current directory set to inside it’s local DOSBOX folder:

"D:\GOG Galaxy\Games\HoMM\DOSBOX\DOSBox.exe" -conf "..\dosboxHOMM1.conf" -conf "..\dosboxHOMM1_single.conf" -noconsole -c "exit"

So we can see they’re already using overrides – the ‘single’ conf file overrides their HOMM global config file. We also have some relative paths in there, going to the parent directory (which is the HOMM install). The ‘single’ file seems to be more of the autoexec related work, and doesn’t try to override much in the way of rendering, though it does shut ipx off.

Brute Force – Duplicate DOSBOX-X and use it against the GOG HOMM’s DOSBOX 0.74 configs

How can I swap out the EXE? I could just copy all of dosbox-x and duplicate a game-unique DOSBOX install inside HOMM’s dosbox directory, which is effectively what they do. Let’s try that, and rename dosbox-x.exe to just dosbox. This means we won’t have to change the shortcut. I did that and to be sure, deleted any dosbox-x.config files in my HOMM dosbox copy. So now we have the DOSBOX-X binary being executed, but using the dosboxHOMM config files, which we know target the original DOSBOX-0.74 version. Just because we’re using DOSBOX-X binaries doesn’t mean we can assume DOSBOX 0.74 configs will just work 100% without flaw. At least I wouldn’t think so. Perhaps I have trust issues.

Result? Successful proof of concept. It worked – with a side note. I had to click into the program and heard an audible ‘click’ when I activated the window. I don’t recall that being a thing. But we aren’t taking advantage of any spiffy DOSBOX-X configs, and if there are any defaults in our global dosbox-x we set, we’re not picking them up, since we made a complete duplicate dosbox-x. It’s not what I want long term.

Next step – Overwrite dosboxHOMM1.conf with our dosbox-x global config contents.

I tried this just to see if it would still load. Now what this also means is that we would lose ANY HOMM specific dosbox configurations since we’re going to replace it with dosbox-x. So things like CPU cycle settings, sound card configs, xms,ems settings, etc. that GOG curators put in there would be lost. This probably won’t fly long term, just wanted to see how well it would work. So, I wiped did a copy and paste of the file contents of my global dosbox-x.conf into the file dosboxHOMM1.conf.

Result? Mixed but doable. We did get the shader working, but a couple of oddities. The mouse only worked in full screen mode. In window mode (for dosbox x you toggle full screen with F11-F) I couldn’t get a mouse cursor anymore. Switching back to fullscreen fixed that. To solve this, I needed to change my dosbox-x.config:

[sdl]
autolock=true
autolock_feedback = none

autolock_feedback set to none removes the ‘click’ when dosbox locks the mouse (that same audible click I heard the first attempt). Your call. You can hit CTRL-F10 to unlock the mouse again.

Dont’t forget, we copied our dosbox-x.conf contents into dosboxHOMM1.conf. That’s not a good long term solution, we’re just doing proof of concept.

So, that worked, but it worked this time... I totally expect some games to not tolerate this, because something in the game specific DOSBOX config would be lost if we did this for each game. You can see with the autolock we already had a deviation from the dosbox-x default, but in this case, I’m fine with changing it. However, it won’t always be the case – what if a DOS game wants EMS memory setup but another DOS game crashes because of it? I suspect I’ll have to handle those cases.

What would be useful is a program that parses dos box config files, looks for values that don’t match default or ignorable patterns, and reports just meaningful differences. Then we can take those differences, put them in the override dosbox config (e.g. dosboxHOMM1_single.conf), and still use our generic dosbox-x.conf as the primary for all of our games. That’d be great, because if we want a different shader, they automatically apply to all the games. We can still use the override file if we want to change it for a specific game, too.

What about those .lnk (Windows Shortcut) files? GOG is using those to launch from it’s launcher. If I import GOG games into LaunchBox, it’s going to use those .lnk files as well. I’d like to leave the link intact, but I may need to modify them if I want to try to make some global dosbox.config usable. But say I could do that, what does that look like?

Attempting to use a single DOSBOX-X install and base config for multiple GOG games

Let’s see if this even works before I worry about modifying Windows Shortcut links.

Resetting our GOG HOMM from scratch again…(Backups backups backups)

Recall our initial .lnk shortcut pointed this way and starts with the current directory set to inside it’s local DOSBOX folder:

"D:\GOG Galaxy\Games\HoMM\DOSBOX\DOSBox.exe" -conf "..\dosboxHOMM1.conf" -conf "..\dosboxHOMM1_single.conf" -noconsole -c "exit"

That means dosboxHOMM1_single.conf is referencing paths from the standpoint of our GOG HOMM’s DOSBox directory. So we must start our command there just like the link does. But if we want to use a global DOSBOX config in our D:\Emulators\dosbox-x, we’re at a bit of an impasse.

So, in a command line prompt, I switched to the GOG HOMM DOSBOX directory and ran this command line instead from the GOG HOMM DOSBOX dir:

D:\GOG Galaxy\Games\HoMM\DOSBOX> d:\Emulators\dosbox-x\dosbox-x.exe -conf "d:\Emulators\dosbox-x\dosbox-x.conf" -conf "../dosboxHOMM1_single.conf"

This actually worked. I was surprised, since I half expected it to not find my custom shader, but it looks like dosbox-x is looking in it’s folders appropriately. But what about any DOSBOX junk in the GOG HOMM folder left over? We’re not actually using that DOSBOX anymore, we’re just starting in that directory so the relative paths in our dosboxHOMM1_single.conf work.

My current plan is as follows for each GOG game, and summarizes the plan based on our results above:

• Modify the .lnk to point to our DOSBox-X base config, but still utilize the game-specific override config
  • I”ll look at this GitHub repo and maven artifact: https://github.com/DmitriiShamrikov/mslinks which seems to allow me to edit windows shortcuts programmatically.
  • Using that, I now have some throwaway-ish Java code that does the following:
    • Spin through GOG games via network share to my retro machine
    • Look for a shortcut in each game root folder
    • If shortcut has dosbox in its target, make backups of the GOG DOSBOX config files.
    • Point the first config in the shortcut to our dosbox-x global config under D:\Emulators\dosbox-x instead of the GOG game specific primary dosbox.config
    • Change the shortcut target to point to our dosbox-x.exe in D:\Emulators\dosbox-x
• If a game doesn’t ‘just work’ with DOSBox-X: Look at the now abandoned ‘GOG-specific’ dosbox config and determine if anything unique to that GOG game needs to be put in the override config. See if we can automate this looking for the most common reasons a DOSBox game would have issues (e.g. cpu cycles)
  • I’ll have to find a DOSBox properties parser or roll my own. We need to support [bracket] sections and retain linefeeds and comments. I searched around a bit and though I found some INI file parsers, they didn’t handle the DOSBOX autoexec section very well (since they’re not key-value pairs). Ended up rolling my own simple parsing mechanism that gets the job done.

Progressing through my GOG installs

After figuring out how to do this for Heroes of Might and Magic 1 and 2 (the rest in the series are native windows apps from GOG), I continued on with my other GOG installs. Anything of interest noted below:

DOSBOX Settings I take from the GOG install and put into the override file before pointing a GOG game at DOSBOX-X

My thought is that I only want to take certain settings out of GOG’s DOSBOX-0.74 config and put them into the override file. If I take everything, it would overwrite full screen and shader settings that I want to utilize with the DOSBOX-X binaries and my global config.

I thought it’d be an interesting exercise to look at ALL GOG DOSBOX configs at once and count occurrences of unique key value pairs. Here’s the raw dump:

Occurences of keys/values across all dosbox GOG configs:
83	 cpu.core.auto
4	 cpu.core.dynamic
3	 cpu.core.normal
9	 cpu.core.simple
1	 cpu.coretype.auto
5	 cpu.cputype.386_slow
5	 cpu.cputype.486_slow
86	 cpu.cputype.auto
1	 cpu.cputype.pentium_slow
3	 cpu.cycledown.100
88	 cpu.cycledown.1000
1	 cpu.cycledown.10000
2	 cpu.cycledown.20
1	 cpu.cycledown.50
2	 cpu.cycledown.500
2	 cpu.cycledown.5000
1	 cpu.cycles.10000
1	 cpu.cycles.100000
1	 cpu.cycles.11000
1	 cpu.cycles.15000
2	 cpu.cycles.19000
2	 cpu.cycles.20000
1	 cpu.cycles.300
1	 cpu.cycles.3000
1	 cpu.cycles.35000
1	 cpu.cycles.4000
3	 cpu.cycles.500
2	 cpu.cycles.5000
1	 cpu.cycles.50000
1	 cpu.cycles.7500
2	 cpu.cycles.8000
1	 cpu.cycles.80000
1	 cpu.cycles.9000
29	 cpu.cycles.auto
2	 cpu.cycles.auto limit 16000
1	 cpu.cycles.fixed 10000
1	 cpu.cycles.fixed 12500
2	 cpu.cycles.fixed 14000
1	 cpu.cycles.fixed 15000
2	 cpu.cycles.fixed 30000
1	 cpu.cycles.fixed 35000
1	 cpu.cycles.fixed 6000
1	 cpu.cycles.fixed 60000
1	 cpu.cycles.fixed 7000
1	 cpu.cycles.fixed 8000
33	 cpu.cycles.max
2	 cpu.cycleup.10
3	 cpu.cycleup.100
88	 cpu.cycleup.1000
1	 cpu.cycleup.10000
1	 cpu.cycleup.50
2	 cpu.cycleup.500
2	 cpu.cycleup.5000
1	 dos.automount.true
2	 dos.ems.false
97	 dos.ems.true
1	 dos.files.127
93	 dos.keyboardlayout.auto
6	 dos.keyboardlayout.none
99	 dos.umb.true
99	 dos.xms.true
98	 dosbox.captures.capture
98	 dosbox.language.
98	 dosbox.machine.svga_s3
1	 dosbox.machine.vesa_nolfb
83	 dosbox.memsize.16
9	 dosbox.memsize.30
3	 dosbox.memsize.32
3	 dosbox.memsize.63
1	 dosbox.memsize.8
1	 dosbox.vmemsize.4
1	 glide.glide.true
1	 glide.grport.600
1	 glide.lfb.full
3	 gus.dma1.3
3	 gus.dma2.3
96	 gus.gus.false
2	 gus.gus.true
96	 gus.gusbase.240
93	 gus.gusdma.3
93	 gus.gusirq.5
7	 gus.gusrate.22050
89	 gus.gusrate.44100
3	 gus.irq1.5
3	 gus.irq2.5
96	 gus.ultradir.C:\ULTRASND
1	 innova.innova.false
1	 innova.quality.0
1	 innova.samplerate.22050
1	 innova.sidbase.280
2	 ipx.Connection.0
2	 ipx.Enable.0
7	 ipx.ipx.false
98	 joystick.autofire.false
64	 joystick.buttonwrap.false
34	 joystick.buttonwrap.true
1	 joystick.joysticktype.2axis
97	 joystick.joysticktype.auto
95	 joystick.swap34.false
3	 joystick.swap34.true
6	 joystick.timed.false
92	 joystick.timed.true
1	 log.bios.true
1	 log.cpu.true
1	 log.dma_control.true
1	 log.dosmisc.true
1	 log.exec.true
1	 log.fcb.true
1	 log.files.true
1	 log.fpu.true
1	 log.gui.true
1	 log.int10.true
1	 log.io.true
1	 log.ioctl.true
1	 log.keyboard.true
1	 log.logfile.
1	 log.misc.true
1	 log.mouse.true
1	 log.paging.true
1	 log.pci.true
1	 log.pic.true
1	 log.pit.true
1	 log.sblaster.true
1	 log.vga.true
1	 log.vgagfx.true
1	 log.vgamisc.true
4	 midi.config.
4	 midi.device.default
94	 midi.midiconfig.
94	 midi.mididevice.default
98	 midi.mpu401.intelligent
1	 midi.mt32rate.auto
87	 mixer.blocksize.1024
10	 mixer.blocksize.2048
2	 mixer.blocksize.4096
98	 mixer.nosound.false
6	 mixer.prebuffer.20
3	 mixer.prebuffer.240
68	 mixer.prebuffer.25
1	 mixer.prebuffer.30
4	 mixer.prebuffer.40
1	 mixer.prebuffer.512
16	 mixer.prebuffer.80
5	 mixer.rate.22050
93	 mixer.rate.44100
1	 mixer.swapstereo.false
1	 ne2000.macaddr.AC:DE:48:88:99:AA
1	 ne2000.ne2000.true
1	 ne2000.nicbase.300
1	 ne2000.nicirq.3
1	 ne2000.realnic.list
1	 parallel.parallel1.disabled
1	 parallel.parallel2.disabled
1	 parallel.parallel3.disabled
1	 printer.docpath..
1	 printer.dpi.360
1	 printer.height.110
1	 printer.multipage.false
1	 printer.printer.true
1	 printer.printoutput.png
1	 printer.timeout.0
1	 printer.width.85
73	 render.aspect.false
26	 render.aspect.true
1	 render.char9.false
99	 render.frameskip.0
1	 render.linewise.false
1	 render.multiscan.false
1	 render.scaler.hardware2x
2	 render.scaler.none
96	 render.scaler.normal2x
1	 sblaster.dma.0
98	 sblaster.dma.1
1	 sblaster.hardwarebase.220
99	 sblaster.hdma.5
1	 sblaster.irq.10
33	 sblaster.irq.5
65	 sblaster.irq.7
4	 sblaster.mixer.true
4	 sblaster.oplemu.compat
89	 sblaster.oplemu.default
1	 sblaster.oplemu.old
96	 sblaster.oplmode.auto
2	 sblaster.oplmode.opl3
7	 sblaster.oplrate.22050
91	 sblaster.oplrate.44100
99	 sblaster.sbbase.220
94	 sblaster.sbmixer.true
93	 sblaster.sbtype.sb16
6	 sblaster.sbtype.sbpro1
98	 sdl.autolock.true
99	 sdl.fulldouble.false
5	 sdl.fullresolution.
74	 sdl.fullresolution.desktop
20	 sdl.fullresolution.original
99	 sdl.fullscreen.true
70	 sdl.mapperfile.mapper-0.74-2.map
16	 sdl.mapperfile.mapper-0.74.map
1	 sdl.mapperfile.mapper-SVN.map
2	 sdl.mapperfile.mapper.map
10	 sdl.mapperfile.mapper.txt
1	 sdl.output.OpenGL
5	 sdl.output.ddraw
1	 sdl.output.direct3d
5	 sdl.output.opengl
84	 sdl.output.overlay
3	 sdl.output.surface
1	 sdl.overscan.0
1	 sdl.pixelshader.none
98	 sdl.priority.higher,normal
95	 sdl.sensitivity.100
3	 sdl.sensitivity.500
98	 sdl.usescancodes.true
98	 sdl.waitonerror.true
99	 sdl.windowresolution.original
1	 serial.serial1.disabled
97	 serial.serial1.dummy
97	 serial.serial2.dummy
1	 serial.serial2.nullmodem port:23
98	 serial.serial3.disabled
98	 serial.serial4.disabled
1	 speaker.disney.false
97	 speaker.disney.true
9	 speaker.pcrate.22050
89	 speaker.pcrate.44100
98	 speaker.pcspeaker.true
98	 speaker.tandy.auto
9	 speaker.tandyrate.22050
89	 speaker.tandyrate.44100
1	 vsync.vsyncmode.off
1	 vsync.vsyncrate.75

I did this just to get a quick look at how many configs really change between all the GOG Games. As I suspected, we find a wide variety of cpu section settings. We had 2 that turned off EMS memory, and a few that changed the memsize. Quite a few twists in the joystick section, and a few other oddities here and there. So just by looking at this, I changed my program to take some additional overrides.

So, the little local snippet of code I wrote looks at my DOSBOX-X main config and each GOG’s DOSBOX config and compares the following, taking the GOG config and overriding just for that game.

While HOMM worked just fine without taking [cpu] settings, the next game I tried was Alone in the Dark, and with default DOSBox-X settings, it slowed to a crawl. Turns out GOG had tweaked their primary Alone in the Dark DOSBOX-0.74 config:

core -> simple
cputype -> pentium_slow
cycles -> 11000
cycleup -> 1000
cycledown -> 1000

This is why [cpu] is one of the sections I take from GOG’s curated game-specific configuration.

Game specific tweaks I had to make

Here’s the log of games I installed and any interesting tweaks I had to make to convert them to use my DOSBox-X install.

The post Retro Gaming PC Build Log Part 3 : PC Games with GOG appeared first on Krystof.IO.

Nibconv and .NIB disks

I have some disk images that are already the D64 or G64 type, and some that are .NIB. I need to convert those using the nibconv from the Nib Tools package first. A simple batch file that worked for me (drop it in the folder where you have nibconv.exe and .NIB files and it will handle the rest. It deletes the G64 file first since mine would lock if the file already existed.

for %%f in (*.nib) do (
	del "%%~nf.g64"
	nibconv "%%~nf.nib" "%%~nf.g64"
)
pause

VICE install

VICE doesn’t install – it just unpacks into a directory. I put mine in a common emulators folder D:\Emulators\SDL2VICE-3.6.1-win64. Underneath there are all sorts of binaries and such but the primary one is x64sc, and that’s what I’ll be configuring as I test out some games.

First LaunchBox import and adding VICE as an emulator

I put my Bruce Lee G64 file in a temporary directory just to try this out. I’m going to let LaunchBox manage the Commodore 64 ROM files necessary, so it will ‘move it’ into the LaunchBox Games directory on import:

Now here is where I may deviate from most. I like the idea of RetroArch, and perhaps I’ll revisit it in the future, but I found while I can create global configurations to be shared across multiple emulators, I really liked having features in the later versions of emulators that don’t have an updated RetroArch core, or the core has crippled some features I desire. So in general, I rarely use RetroArch at this time.

For starters, all I’m populating is the name (VICE 64) and the location to x64sc.exe (The VICE C64 binary)

I let it populate all the checkboxes for both LaunchBox and EMU Movies.

I leave these options as default:

After searching the online databases for media, I now show Bruce Lee in my LaunchBox main view:

Testing the first game – Failure and Fix

Double clicking on Bruce Lee does… nothing. I see nothing. I got nothing. What gives?

I decide to launch the emulator directly (x64sc.exe in the VICE directory) and it worked fine:

I then decided to load the G64 image directly through VICE, bypassing LaunchBox. Result:

Okay. So now I now there’s something up with LaunchBox dealing with VICE. I’m actually used to loading VICE first on my RetroPie and loading the image directly. So this means I’ve got a command line argument issue. Turns out LaunchBox tried to force my hand with RetroArch even though I wanted to configure the emulator manually!

Perhaps I should have set the emulator up first, but if you run into this, you’ll see in your emulator config under ‘associated platforms’ a WIDE list of items, and they also populate well known RetroArch cores.

I missed the little ‘pop up’ that stated it populated RetroArch for me. I wish it hadn’t done that, it caused me a small headache. So I went back into my VICE config and wiped out ALL of the associated platforms, left that tab, went back to an empty one (so it doesn’t show the RetroArch core column), and added one entry for Commodore 64 like so:

After that, VICE finally launched from LaunchBox properly:

Configuring VICE on Windows

Great, now we know we can launch at least one game from LaunchBox using VICE. Now I need to configure it to my tastes. First off, it’s a tiny window in the center of the screen, and not full screen. There are plenty of other things I like to configure for VICE, and here is where I’ll record those ‘default’ settings I immediately set into the VICE configuration when I first install VICE. I may tweak this over time but the settings below are my current reference settings of choice.

First off, VICE by default is storing it’s settings in C:\Users\<userid>\AppData\Roaming\vice. Underneath there is a sdl-vice.ini after saving the first time and vice.log for any interesting execution log statements. Good to know.

Side note: Try out wireless gamepads for the PC (Like XBOX controllers). Luna loves chewing cables.

Here are the highlights for my VICE 3.61 Windows SDL version’s settings that deviate from the known defaults.

• SDL audio instead of WMM – Things sounded horrendous otherwise.
• NTSC Mode vs Pal- I had NTSC, but sometimes images I have require PAL. So I set up both
• I set the VICE snapshots directory to the Snapshots directory I created underneath my C64 LaunchBox game folder for easier visibility.
• I set the drive sound emulation to 1. It’s just music to my ears.
• Joystick – I set by default, Joystick 2 to my game controller (a generic gamepad), and Joystick 1 to the numeric keypad. VICE by default sets my A button to Joystick firing, B button to bring up the VICE menu. I manually set the Y button to toggle WARP speed on and off, and the X button to ‘swap’ the Joystick ports. I also set the left trigger to the ‘Load snapshot’ menu, and the right trigger to ‘Save snapshot’ menu.

What I ended up doing was creating two emulator profiles – one for NTSC and one for PAL. The two config files allow me to tweak the two ‘versions’ of C64 emulation differently, and sometimes I just need to do that for some games.

VICE 64 – NTSC setup example (points to NTSC config)

VICE 64 PAL – PAL setup example (points to PAL config)

Current reference settings:

sdl-vice-ntsc.ini:

[C64SC]
SDLStatusbar=1
SoundDeviceName="sdl"
VirtualDevice1=1
MachineVideoStandard=2
IECReset=1
CIA1Model=0
CIA2Model=0
KernalRev=-1
VICIIFullscreen=1
VICIIModel=3
SidModel=0
JoyPort10Device=0
JoyPort9Device=0
JoyPort8Device=0
JoyPort7Device=0
JoyPort6Device=0
JoyPort5Device=0
JoyPort4Device=0
JoyPort3Device=0
JoyDevice1=4
EventSnapshotDir="D:\LaunchBox\Games\Commodore 64\Snapshots\"
GlueLogic=0
DriveSoundEmulation=1

sdl-vice-pal.ini:

[C64SC]
SDLStatusbar=1
SoundDeviceName="sdl"
VirtualDevice1=1
IECReset=1
CIA1Model=0
CIA2Model=0
KernalRev=-1
VICIIFullscreen=1
VICIIModel=0
SidModel=0
JoyPort10Device=0
JoyPort9Device=0
JoyPort8Device=0
JoyPort7Device=0
JoyPort6Device=0
JoyPort5Device=0
JoyPort4Device=0
JoyPort3Device=0
JoyDevice1=4
EventSnapshotDir="D:\LaunchBox\Games\Commodore 64\Snapshots\"
GlueLogic=0
DriveSoundEmulation=1

LaunchBox specific settings:

Command line parameters:

• -chdir “D:\LaunchBox\Games\Commodore 64” (Sets the autostart image directory to our games folder)

Game Specific Settings

Game specific tweaks and oddities

The post Retro Gaming PC Build Log Part 2 : Commodore 64 appeared first on Krystof.IO.

It seems when I’m able to come anywhere near close to dusting off some retro gaming work, I boot up whatever RetroPie or Windows based system I’ve set up for some retro gaming years back and can’t for the life of me remember how I set things up from either a taxonomy standpoint, controller setup, emulator configurations, and more. I’m using these build logs to document my thought processes at the time and ‘Figure it out’.

The Hardware

Now, I’m not a retro gaming purist. I’m at best retro gaming purist adjacent. This means I love playing games on the older hardware, but with limited space, I can’t set up all the things. I can set up some retro systems here and there, but I can’t set up everything in one big retro corner. I’ve taken up enough corners in this house with my hobbies. In fact, I’m fresh out of corners. So, I’m going to emulate quite a bit, whether it’s Stella for the Atari 2600 or DOSBOX for Ultima Underworld. I very much enjoy playing games on the original hardware when I can – but when it comes to easily streaming live content or looking up videos and articles about the game, it is very much easier to do it on a PC running emulation software. Plus, I get to compare how the emulators compare to the real deal at my leisure.

Most of the time you don’t need a fancy machine to emulate old retro games – look at RetroPie for example. You can emulate a metric crap ton of games on a Raspberry Pi. The machine I chose is a bit beefier than I would need, but that’s because it’s available to me. Why not a Pi? I have a lot of DOS and Windows games as part of my ‘Bucket List‘ which rules out the Pi right quick – the Pi is great for certain computer and console emulation, but starts to have some issues in retro libraries of later eras (like Windows 9X games). Plus, some of those may require some video acceleration – and for that I’ve an NVIDIA card to take care of the heavy lifting. It’s not for the latest and greatest, but it will do for the oldest and greatest just fine.

It’s a 2018 ASUS GR8 II-6GT024Z VR Ready Mini PC Gaming Desktop with Intel Core i7-7700 and GeForce GTX 1060 6G Video Card. All things considered it’s a powerhouse when it comes to what I need for retro gaming, even if it’s not available for purchase anymore and won’t be supported by Windows 11.

Here are the basic specs:

Processor	‎4.2 GHz core_i7
RAM	‎16 GB DDR4
Hard Drive	‎1 TB SSD
Graphics Coprocessor	‎NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
Chipset Brand	‎NVIDIA
Card Description	‎Dedicated
Graphics Card Ram Size	‎6 GB
Wireless Type	‎802.11ab
Number of USB 3.0 Ports	‎4

So, while I type this, I’m performing that fresh Windows 10 install to start from scratch and begin the documentation process. While we wait for that, let’s talk about the primary front end I’ll be using.

Don’t forget to pack your LaunchBox

I’ve tried a few front ends over the years, and most of the time they’re targeting specific emulating systems (MAME for example, has plenty of front ends, but that’s assuming you’re primarily dealing with MAME things). I really adored HyperSpin in the mid 2010s, but I haven’t checked it out lately. I think I’ll still use HyperSpin for a dedicated MAME cabinet (Project Pedestal), but I’m not considering it for this round.

I played around with LaunchBox quite a few years ago when it was in the early years, and I’ve been enjoying seeing the updates and enhancements (like BigBox) since then. With the inherent support for multiple platforms and the capability for me to examine the datafiles (they’re stored in XML files inside the LaunchBox directory) easily, I can use LaunchBox to store configurations for the various games and I can also export that data to my ‘Bucket List‘ database, and from there I can auto populate my Twitch stream with box art, game metadata, and my personal high scores and playtime.

I also wanted to be able to have some custom data points, which LaunchBox supports. For example:

• Series Index – I use a field I call Series Index to indicate what order I should play a game when it’s part of a series. Sometimes the titles aren’t an indicator (looking at you, GoldBox RPGs), and while I could use release date, I liked having a dedicated data-point.
• Port Indicator – I don’t do this for all the games, but for some where I want to try out different versions, like say ‘BurgerTime’ on Atari 2600, Intellivision, Commodore 64, etc. – I use this to link together individual game/platform combinations together.

LaunchBox also has created a database to pull a lot of metadata down for recognized games, along with EmuMovies integration for video and additional art. We can also pull down manuals, which is a big help so I don’t have to find the ASCII text files or open my game boxes up needlessly.

So, I head over to the LaunchBox site, purchased a lifetime license, and went to work on the install. You can of course install the free version, but I purchased it a looooong time ago, so I’m going to use my permanent license.

I’m leaving some hard drive space for the OS, but most of my stuff will be installed on a D: drive so I can keep some parts separated from the main OS. We’ll see how well that works – ideally nothing should FORCE me to stay on the C: drive but you never know. Personal preference, really – I could do all this on C: if I really wanted to.

After launching LaunchBox, I attached my GOG profile and my EmuMovies account subscription for future game and metadata downloads.

That’s it for this round. Next chapters will probably be platform specific as I set up emulators and related utilities.

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