Hi everyone,

I am new to Recalbox, and really enjoying it; nice and intuitive, and games are working really well. Even my gamepad was automapped.

My question ... I have loaded several Playstation games onto my Recalbox, and they are working fine. However, I was wondering whether it is possible to have the Playstation startup/boot sequence play whenever I load a game. I'm referring to the sequence which would play whenever you booted up an original Playstation., with the tune, logos etc.

Functionally, this isn't necessary. It's just that it was a big part of my childhood, and it would be nice to have in my Recalbox. More of a quality-of-life thing really.

Does this make sense? Not sure how better to explain it.

Thanks to anyone who can advise.

Cheers.

Hello Everyone,

I am attempting to create an override at the directory level for all of my Megadrive games. Essentially, I want all of the games in my "megadrive" folder to use the 3 button pad input, as opposed to the default of 6 buttons. This is because some games, such as King of the Monsters, don't work with a 6 button pad, so it seems easier to have the 3 button configuration for the whole directory as all titles work with this, to my knowledge.

I followed the guide at this link:
https://wiki.recalbox.com/en/advanced-usage/configuration-override

I created a file called ".retroarch.cfg", and placed it in my "megadrive" folder. Because I'm using macOS, I had to show hidden files before the file could be named properly. I also ensured that the file is plain text; I'm using the standard Text Edit app.

The contents of the file is as follows:

picodrive_input1 = "3 Button Pad"
picodrive_input2 = "3 Button Pad"

I have verified that Libretro_Picodrive is selected under "Run With" in Recalbox.

When I launch King of the Monsters, the input doesn't work. When I enter the RGUI menu, under Options>Input, both are still set to "6 Button Pad".

My Recalbox version is 9.1, running on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. It's newly flashed, apart from the Megadrive set with scraped metadata.

Wondered if anyone had any suggestions?

Any help gratefully received,

Cheers.

@zing Thanks for your reply, I've finally got around to playing with this further.

I'm pretty sure the roms should be compatible. Both discs are the European versions; They are standard Sega CD versions, not CD-32x as I've read that these definitely don't work for disc-swapping.

I managed to convert the .bin/cue images to .iso format by mounting them with Daemon Tools. The resulting .iso files ran correctly when I loaded them into Recalbox as separate disc 1 and disc 2 entries. Unfortunately, I still couldn't get the .m3u playlists to run under either of the Sega CD cores. Again, I generated the .m3u files using the button in ARRM, and verified that they are formatted correctly.

I haven't yet tried the roms in .chd format. I will need to devote some time to it, as I will need to learn the chdman tool.

Again, really appreciate all your suggestions. My suspicion is that I won't be able to get Sega CD disc-swapping to work; luckily for me, it's not a priority. Playstation games are far more important to me, and those work like a charm. Still, I'll have a go with Sega CD games in .chd format, just to see if it works.

Thanks for all your help.

Hi @zing, thanks for the link.

That's a really powerful tool, works well.

One thing I learned is that it seems to be the gamelist.xml, rather than Emulationstation itself, which dictates the file extensions which are displayed.

Using ARRM, I was able to generate .m3u files for both Night Trap and Prize Fighter. I did this by highlighting the entries for the separate discs, for example Night Trap Disc 1 and Night Trap Disc 2, and clicking "Generate .m3u". The file was created, and ARRM conveniently hid the separate .cue files; that's a really nice feature. I then saved the changes to the gamelist.xml file, replacing the existing version with the one created by ARRM.

Unfortunately, though, the games don't actually run on Recalbox. The entries do appear in the list of games but, when I launch one, it doesn't load, instead kicking me back out to ES. I have tried running them with both cores; LR_Picodrive and LR_Genesis Plus GX. The only difference with the latter is that it sometimes fails to revert to ES, instead remaining on a black screen. I am able to manually return to ES with Hotkey+Start, as expected.

So, essentially, while .m3u files are now, seemingly, being displayed, they can't actually be played.

I have checked my bios files, and everything seems fine; under "bios Checking", Recalbox shows everything as green. I have "bios_CD_EU", "bios_CD_US", and "bios_CD_J" all present.

I have checked the contents of the .m3u files, and they seem to be pointing to the correct .cue files, in the correct order. I have also verified that they are in plain text.

I have found that the separate discs do run properly on Recalbox; IE, I can load Disc 1 on its own.

Are there any other things I can try?

Cheers.

@zing Thanks for your reply.

The first of these links mentions that disc swapping for Sega CD works the same as for Playstation.

All of my multi-disc Playstation games are loaded through .m3u files, as recommended in the Recalbox documentation, and they all work perfectly:
https://recalbox.gitbook.io/documentation/emulators/consoles/playstation-1

When I attempt to achieve the same result with Sega CD games, the .m3u files are not displayed. So, even if Genesis Plus GX does support .m3u files, it seems that Emulationstation is not configured to display them for Sega CD games.

I was able to open the es_systems.cfg file, and can verify that .m3u is not listed under "Extensions" in the Sega CD section.

A further search of the Recalbox forum returned the following result:
https://forum.recalbox.com/topic/17186/problem-custom-es_system-cfg/3?_=1633475250525

From this topic, it seems as though editing of es_systems.cfg is no longer supported. As such, it may not be possible to have .m3u files displayed by either of the Sega CD cores. Is this correct? If so, is there another way I can achieve this?

I believe .chd was listed as a valid extension. Can disc-swapping be accomplished through this format?

Many thanks again.

Hello Everyone,

I would like to be able to add Night Trap and Prize Fighter to my Sega CD collection, and both games have two discs.

For Playstation games, this is fairly easy; create an .m3u file which references the .cue files of each of the discs. This allows for disc swapping, using the "Disc Index" option within the RGUI menu.

Unfortunately, when I added such games to the "segacd" folder, they did not show up in my Recalbox.

Is disc-swapping possible for Sega CD games under Recalbox; is this supported by either Picodrive or Genesis Plus GX? If so, is .m3u the best way to go?

I attempted to add the .m3u extension to the Sega CD section in /recalbox/share_init/system/.emulationstation/es_systems.cfg. However, I have thus far been unable to do this. Using "Nano", I am able to open the file directly through a Terminal on my Recalbox. However, when I attempt to save/write out, I receive a filesystem read-only error. I tried "mount -o remount,rw /recalbox", but this seemingly had no effect.

I am running Recalbox from an SSD, as I am using the NesPi4 case. As such, I removed the SSD, and connected it to my MacBook, using a USB-C to SATA adapter. Due to MacOS being unable to read Linux filesystems — to my knowledge — I installed the trial of extFS for Mac. However, the only additional volume found was called "Overlays". Neither this, nor the "Boot" or "Recalbox" volumes, contain a "share_init" folder that I can find.

I then tried to access the drive from a Ubuntu virtual machine, through VMWare Fusion Player; this didn't work either. When I attempted to connect the device through the Virtual Machine menu, I received the following message:
"The device was unable to connect to its ideal host controller.
An attempt will be made to connect this device to the best available host controller. This might result in undefined behavior for this device". I clicked "Okay" anyway, but the drive didn't show up under "Files" in Ubuntu.

I am unsure what else to try. Presumably, if I SSH through Ubuntu, the filesystem will still be read-only? I do have another Raspberry Pi on which I run Homebridge. How about if I purchase a USB to SATA adapter, connect my Recalbox SSD to the other pi, and attempt to amend es_systems.cfg in this way?

Would really appreciate some insight/guidance; even if Sega CD disc-swapping is currently unsupported, at least I know not to pursue it further.

Any help gratefully received.

@zing Thanks for that link, was able to follow the instructions therein and they worked perfectly.

Seems to have stuck as well, so now I have the correct time️.

Sorry, I should mention that I didn't actually include the " quote marks in the .conf file, just in the above post.

Cheers.

Hi everyone,

I'm unable, seemingly, to change the timezone to reflect that of the UK.

I have the clock displayed in the Emulation Station menu, and it always shows an hour ahead.

I first tried changing the timezone from "Europe/Paris" to "Europe/London" in the Recalbox Manager and the Recalbox.conf file. This didn't work.

I then connected to my Recalbox via SSH and entered "ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/" to display possible time codes. from this list, I have tried all of the following in recalbox.conf, without success:
"GB", "GB-Eire", "GMT", "GMT0", "GMT-0", and "GMT+0".

In all cases, after rebooting, the time was still shown as an hour ahead. The only exceptions were the cases where Recalbox couldn't connect to the internet after reboot; in such cases, the clock switched to 02:00.

Following advice in another topic, I changed the time in Kodi and, although Kodi now prominently displays my local time, it is still not reflected in the Emulation Station menu.

Does anyone have any further suggestions which I can try? I did find another topic which stated that this is a known bug; is this still the case?

Any help gratefully received️.

Hi everyone,

I really like the 8BitDo SN30 Pro+ but, after reading the topic at the following link, understand that Recalbox doesn't currently support the vibration function of this controller
https://forum.recalbox.com/topic/13127/vibration-8bitdo-sn30?_=1621538681533

So I was wondering whether Recalbox supports the vibration function of any controllers at the moment and, if so, what would be the best one to get?

Not a major issue, as the controller is great apart from that. It's just that if vibration is available, I might as well use it, especially for PSX games..

Any advice appreciated.

So, I was able to fix the issue, and the script is now working perfectly. Below, I will outline the steps I needed to take in the hope that it will prove helpful to anyone else who may be experiencing similar issues.

Firstly, it's worth double-checking the "Safe Shutdown" switch inside the case. In my previous post, I stated that it was set correctly; it wasn't. Turns out that I routed my cables poorly during my first assembly attempt, and this repositioned the switch, so definitely double-check that. There is, apparently, a really helpful diagram in the manual. However, for people like me who are unable to read it, there is an easy enough way to verify that the switch is set correctly. Set the case in front of you, with the SSD compartment and USB ports at the front, and the power, Ethernet etc ports at the back. Then ensure that the "Safe Shutdown" switch is positioned towards you. After I fixed my mistake, the script installed properly.

However, I then ran into another issue. The buttons on the front did invoke the script. Problem is that the system would crash before properly shutting down. The only way to break out was to pull the power cord. Luckily, a solution is offered in this Github issue:
https://github.com/RetroFlag/retroflag-picase/issues/101

Essentially, it's necessary to ensure that you have the correct firmware installed for the top case/SSD bay, Otherwise the script won't run correctly. There are separate firmware versions for booting from a Micro SD card and booting from an SSD. You need to use the firmware which matches your boot configuration. For example, if you're booting from a Micro SD card, it's necessary to ensure that the matching firmware is installed.

It seems that the process can only be carried out on a Windows machine; for me, a Windows VM was sufficient. You'll also need to first disconnect the top case from the Nespi4, and connect it to your computer.

The firmware can be downloaded from the following page. Just scroll down and select "Firmware Download":
http://www.retroflag.com/nespi-4-case.html

You'll end up with a zip file, which will need to be extracted. You'll then have a folder called "How_to_boot_from_SSD". Open this, followed by "Method 2 update firmware". Run the "FwUpdateTool_v1_19_16_24.exe" file, doesn't require installation. In the update tool, click the "Load File" button, and browse to the "Firmware" folder in the aforementioned directory.

This is the crucial bit, as you need to select the correct firmware according to your boot preference. If you want to boot from a Micro SD card, choose "JMS578_STD_v00.02.01.04_UAS.bin". If you want to boot from an SSD, choose "JMS578_STD_v00.02.00.09_NO_UAS.bin". Then click "Run", and wait a few seconds for the firmware to install. Click "OK", and safely remove the top case from the computer.

After connecting everything back together, the script should run without any problems. Just to be safe, I started with a fresh installation of Recalbox, and installed the script.

Of course, all of this may be thoroughly detailed in the manual; I wouldn't know.

Anyway, I hope that this is helpful to someone.

Cheers️.