Questions about M3U and GPU Settings by Core

George Spiggott

I have have attempting to recreate the official Retropie front end on my Windows PC as closely as possible. I have had variable success and If nothing else it has shown me just how much goes into Retropie for even the, apparently, simple processes. So extra kudos to the developers on that part. With that in mind my questions are not specifically related to my official Retropie build but they are sufficiently generic that the answers may be of some use to the Retropie community. For this reason I have not included any specs.

Is there a good guide to creating .M3U files anywhere? I'm actually trying to create them for the Dolphin Libretro core so no doubt I will need to port these same files over to a Pi at some point.
Is it possible to set the GPU driver (eg. Open GL, Vulcan etc.) by core? Some cores, such as PCSX2 don't support Vulcan but others ~~like Citra~~ work on it exclusively. Again this may have some medium term benefits for the Pi as both the Pi and some cores gain Vulcan support while other do not.
Are there a specific commands for EmulationStation that are used to load games from non Libretro Cores? I'm looking to use CXBX Reloaded, Dolphin (exclusively for Wii games), Cemu and RPCS3 in this manner.

Thanks in advance.

dankcushions

@george-spiggott

i am not convinced it's appropriate to open up this forum to 'support for emulation on windows' - we have enough to be getting on with, but i'll give you some pithy one liners :P

Is it possible to set the GPU driver (eg. Open GL, Vulcan etc.) by core? Some cores, such as PCSX2 don't support Vulcan but others like Citra work on it exclusively. Again this may have some medium term benefits for the Pi as both the Pi and some cores gain Vulcan support while other do not.

on what? retroarch? yes it's possible. see the settings > drivers menu. you can set it as a core override as normal. note that some core may need their core options adjusting to utilize vulkan code paths.

Are there a specific commands for EmulationStation that are used to load games from non Libretro Cores? I'm looking to use CXBX Reloaded, Dolphin (exclusively for Wii games), Cemu and RPCS3 in this manner.

it's bespoke for every standalone emulator. for example: https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/blob/master/scriptmodules/emulators/dolphin.sh#L70 which would generate a launch command of
/opt/retropie/emulators/dolphin/bin/dolphin-emu-nogui -e %ROM%"

George Spiggott

@dankcushions Thanks, once I found it could be could be done it didn't take much to sort it. For anyone else looking you need the 'save new configuration' option to create one specific to a core. I'll take my time adding new cores I think so that's two problems solved for now.

M3Us are now plaguing me on my actual Retropie Pi4 build since I converted all my PS1 games to .CHD. How do you make it so that only the .M3U file show in the game listing? Changing filename extensions to .CD1 etc just breaks the game and stops it loading.

Short solution for the PS1 here may be just keeping all my two disk games in PBP format.

dankcushions

@george-spiggott as always, i can't diagnose support issues such as failed loads without all of https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first including verbose log.

Zering

@george-spiggott Using CHDs in that way works on the Pi, i run all my multi disc games that way and ironically the only one that doesn't is the only one I've got in .bin/.cue. There must be an issue on your end.

George Spiggott

@zering Hi, I can get them to work I just can't get Emulation Station to hide the actual .CHD disk files. as a result the games show up three times in Emulation Station.

Zering

@george-spiggott That shouldn't be an issue either i don't think. I've changed my chd extensions to CD1 and so forth and it's had no negative effect on the games, but you said it breaks yours?

George Spiggott

@zering Yes I changed both the filenames and the m3u file entries from .chd to .CD1 (and so forth).

George Spiggott

Quick update. For unrelated reasons I had to rebuild by system. I tried this again, renaming files and M3U entries .CD1-2 etc. Everything now works as expected.

I was totally convinced this was user error on my part. Apparently not. Queries resolved. Thanks all.