Adding an already existing emulator as default emulator if RocketLauncher doesn’t recognize your system’s name.

When you add a system to RocketLauncher you have to choose the default emulator – but what if RocketLauncher doesn’t list the emulator you want to use? Note: this is not how to add a new emulator/system if the emulator was not previously added. That has been covered on the RocketLauncher page here.

rl_defaultemulator

As you can see above, my System names (left column) don’t all correspond with “traditional” RocketLauncher names. In this case it’s because they were imported from LaunchBox. You can see that rather than being called “MAME”, the name (circled in green in the left side of the screenshot) is “Arcade”. While that is because it was imported from LaunchBox, it’s a more descriptive name for the non-initiated. Not that someone would be messing with RocketLauncher if they didn’t know what MAME was, but anyway.

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Retro gaming / Emulation

I’m a big fan of emulation on the PC of old(er) games; arcade, home systems, even older computer games.

This will be organized by topic concerning some of the larger groups that either allow you to play the games (i.e. the hardware emulator) or allow you to play them more easily (i.e. front ends or collections).

Generally speaking, you use a hardware emulator to run the game software for a specific system. If you only want to emulate arcade video games, you could use the hardware emulation built into MAME to run the software for each video game. If you want to run games on the Wii or GameCube you could use the Dolphin hardware emulator.

The hardware emulator is like having the actual console or arcade inner workings on your computer. You still need the actual game to play ON the hardware emulator – a ROM for an arcade game, or one of the CDs/DVDs/cartridges from the home systems. Just like you plug in a cartridge into a Supre Nintendo (SNES), you load the game software into the SNES hardware emulator.

If you want to emulate multiple hardware devices, it is convenient to have a front end. You choose the game you want to play, and it loads the correct hardware emulator and loads the software of the game into that hardware emulator.

Finally, in between the hardware emulator and the front end there are some systems – I call them launchers – that add to the experience either by allowing the front end to be used by you more easily, or adding features such as pausing, passing commands to controllers (i.e. using an Xbox360 controller with your Dolphin emulator to simulate using a Wii controller), etc.

I’ve added a separate page to keep these posts organized, rather than having to search through posts.

Note that I will not attempt to duplicate some of the fantastic training and set-up videos by such stalwarts as Simply Austin or the LaunchBox team. My intent is initially to add tweaks/fixes for these systems and games that I’ve found so I don’t have to remember them each time. I’ve found that some challenges I have are more common than one might think, so I’m collecting them in this page.

Without further ado, you can go to the tab for the retrogaming page at the top of the blog or simply click here: Retrogaming page