I'm currently batch ripping the manuals I have to PNG with 300DPI.

Sadly, some of these scans are pretty low quality to begin with, so no matter what I do with them they're never going to be perfect. It's kind of ironic that aside from the NES Classic Mini manuals that I got my hands on, the Japanese manuals in the collection are generally in much higher quality than the US manuals. This is due to the fact that the Japanese scans are far more recent and there was much better and cheaper technology to get them done than when these US manuals were scanned. I find it kind of hard to believe that nobody ever really upgraded the US manuals in all of this time. Most of them seem to be the exact same ones that I had a decade ago with a few exceptions.

Even though they're much larger in disk space real estate at 300DPI in PNG format, I feel this is the way to go. Edits can then be made at any time to them without degrading the quality.

Some things I'd love to do at some point with these images are as follows:

Split the 2-page scans so every image is a single page. Make all manual images the exact same size. Clean up the images.

Ideally, with a lot of work, a ton of cleaning up could be done to these and many of them have the possibility of one day being as high quality as the NES Classic Mini scans. I don't know if I'd ever do this though, but after splitting the images I would at least like to remove the creases and staples from the bindings, as well as clean up the other three edges of the images.

This doesn't sound too bad when I'm looking at an 8 page manual, but it seems rather daunting when I'm looking at one of the manuals that are over 50 pages.... and then I start thinking about how I have about 1,000 more of these to do. :(

At any rate, it's never going to happen on my end with my current PC. Messing with files like this slows my work down to a crawl and I spend more time waiting on my PC than actually working and it just drives me crazy. At least with the PDF files ripped to the PNG/300DPI format, separated by folder and numbered correctly all of the materials will be there if I ever get a chance to upgrade my rig and decide to tackle this project.

In other news.... I re-ran the gamelist.xml script last night and I'm over 1/3rd of the way toward reversing the process for the 2nd time back to the [synopsis].txt files. So far out of around 700 txt files, 72 of them were different because of the new code changes I made the other day, and none of those differences were undesired or unexpected.

Differences so far on 2nd re-run are as follows:

Removed extra blank spaces at end of lines in Description: 69
Removed 2 extra blank lines at the end of the Description when there was no URL citation: 3

Once this is done re-running this time, I'll have 2,118 unique NES/FDS [synopsis].txt files with absolutely no strange characters or formatting errors that will look wonderful on the XBox.

Oh, and anybody that hasn't been following along... These new synopsis files are no longer the novels of information that nobody read that they used to be. Every one of them is 1kb or less in total, and the Game Descriptions now read like the "exciting" text you'd see for the game on the back of the box, or the story in the manual, or on an advertisement for the game.

For example:

The classic tale of horror comes to vivid life in this fast-moving video game! Dr. Jekyll succeeds in separating a man's personality into GOOD and EVIL - but he experiments on himself! Now, without warning, the kind Dr. Jekyll transforms into the monstrous Mr. Hyde. Follow Dr. Jekyll as he fights off enemies in hazardous 19th century London, only to be suddenly plunged into Mr. Hyde's World of Demons! But the excitement doesn't end there - as you do battle in each of the two worlds of this game, the worlds themselves are struggling with each other for control! Which will triumph - GOOD or EVIL? DR. JEKYLL or MR. HYDE?

Sure it's all lies, but it does make it sound like a game you'd want to play. :)

@giorgoc said in Question about ROMs / Compatibility:

This ROM plays quite well on the PC. But on RetroPie , it won't even start.

I'd suggest you go back to the docs pages and have a read. Mame requires specific romsets for specific emulators.

@hurricanefan yes, there are several other posts on this issue. From what I understand The pi doesn't have a battery so it loses its time when you power off....there is more to it than that, but you can look it up in a lot of other threads.

there are already compatibility lists for the PSP, dreamcast and n64 systems, but:

they are often pointless since those systems see active development so anything (not) working today will/won't be working tomorrow. without someone to babysit the google documents (like i, and previously @herb_fargus do for the mame lists) they quickly descend into gibberish. whatever cells you don't make read-only WILL turn into garbage on a bimonthly basis. hence: all the psp, dreamcast and n64 sheets are almost entirely garbage now.

so, good luck to anyone who takes it on ;)

@Darksavior actually snes9x2005 is not rendering jurassic park right. SNES9x2010 is actually doing it right. That game uses a kind of a fake high res mode that renders a 640x240 image, but the snes sends out a 320x240 image. So on a CRT TV, every other line blurs together making a kind of a fake transparency. It was a trick used in a couple of game including kirbys dream land 3. The problem is that emulators don't output down to 320x240, and show the full 640x240 image with every other line as a vertical line where there is supposed to be a fake transparency. There is a shader that does the blend, but makes the games look blurry during the 320x240 parts (kirby changes back and forth based on the level) and is slow on a Pi. Snes9x 2005 just ignores it all together and just shows a 320x240 image with no transparency. Bsnes on the other hand (not on the Pi) can detect it and add the blend when needed.

@windale i forgot to tell you this part to make stuff on the right analog like super sprints gas, brake to work on buttons, you want to add this to the retroarch files they can co exist with the existing settings. you need to add the button numbers you want to switch them to.

input_player1_r_x_plus_btn = " " input_player1_r_x_minus_btn = " " input_player1_r_y_plus_btn = " " input_player1_r_y_minus_btn = " " input_player2_r_x_plus_btn = " " input_player2_r_x_minus_btn = " " input_player2_r_y_plus_btn = " " input_player2_r_y_minus_btn = " "

Thanks ! I'll try that and report back with more details if not working.

As for now, the only true alternative to a physical collection are flashcarts along with an a mod like UltraHDMI.

@Muntic0re your welcome, will update it when i can with more games ive tried out

All you can do is update retropie and the pcsx core to latest and hope that fixes it. You might have to ask a libretro pcsx dev to look into it. Otherwise, there's always the gba version or fan translated on snes or FF2 censored official on snes.

@dankcushions >the docs are synced to the wiki... at some point.

They should be synced automatically ish. At least much quicker than once a week. :)

Well my Raspberry Pi 3 is on it's way to me as we speak, and my old Gravis GamePad Pro USB is all I have lying around that isn't permanently needed elsewhere. And boy was it dusty! But it still works after plugging it into my Mac. Some solid gaming hardware IMO :-)

I used to use it in Classic Mac OS and OS X from '99 through to the mid-2000's, with classic console emulators, before I began buying old console titles on my modern consoles, instead. Only I've gotten tired of buying my classic console game library over and over again with every new modern console generation and purchase. So I've returned to emulation, this time by buying a Raspberry Pi 3 to use with my living room TV as a dedicated emulation box (perhaps with BOINC running when I'm not playing as well).

Now while my Macs can see this GamePad, I did often have to use a third party driver in order to be able to assign button functions (USB Overdrive in my case). Few apps did this on their own. All of which led me to my current doubts as to whether it would just work with RetroPie.

I'm very pleased to hear from you - obsidianspider - that there's no problem. Cheers for that! :-)