Emulationstation (windows) .. how to launch retroarch?

[fuctfuct]

Been messing around with this for hours. I got everything working except launching a game. Every time i search Google for help i get only stuff about the raspberry pi.

<system>

<!-- A short name, used internally. Traditionally lower-case. -->
<name>nes</name>

<!-- A "pretty" name, displayed in menus and such. -->
<fullname>Nintendo Entertainment System</fullname>

<!-- The path to start searching for ROMs in. '~' will be expanded to $HOME on Linux or %HOMEPATH% on Windows. -->
<path>~\roms\nes</path>

<!-- A list of extensions to search for, delimited by any of the whitespace characters (", \r\n\t").
You MUST include the period at the start of the extension! It's also case sensitive. -->
<extension>.zip</extension>

<!-- The shell command executed when a game is selected. A few special tags are replaced if found in a command:
%ROM% is replaced by a bash-special-character-escaped absolute path to the ROM.
%BASENAME% is replaced by the "base" name of the ROM. For example, "/foo/bar.rom" would have a basename of "bar". Useful for MAME.
%ROM_RAW% is the raw, unescaped path to the ROM. -->
<command>retroarch -L ~/cores/libretro-fceumm.so %ROM%</command>

<!-- The platform to use when scraping. You can see the full list of accepted platforms in src/PlatformIds.cpp.
It's case sensitive, but everything is lowercase. This tag is optional.
You can use multiple platforms too, delimited with any of the whitespace characters (", \r\n\t"), eg: "genesis, megadrive" -->
<platform>nes</platform>

<!-- The theme to load from the current theme set. See THEMES.md for more information.
This tag is optional. If not set, it will default to the value of <name>. -->
<theme>nes</theme>

</system>

lvl2: EmulationStation - v2.0.0-rc1, built Jun 16 2014 - 15:46:26
lvl2: Creating surface...
lvl2: Created window successfully.
lvl2: Added known joystick USB,2-axis 8-button gamepad (instance ID: 0, device index: 0)
lvl2: Loading system config file D:/Emulators/EmulationStation//.emulationstation/es_systems.cfg...
lvl2: Parsing XML file "D:/Emulators/EmulationStation//.emulationstation/gamelists/nes/gamelist.xml"...
lvl2: Parsing XML file "D:/Emulators/EmulationStation//.emulationstation/gamelists/snes/gamelist.xml"...
lvl2: Parsing XML file "D:/Emulators/EmulationStation//.emulationstation/gamelists/genesis/gamelist.xml"...
lvl2: Parsing XML file "D:/Emulators/EmulationStation//.emulationstation/gamelists/gba/gamelist.xml"...
lvl2: req sound [detailed.launch]
lvl2: (missing)
lvl2: Attempting to launch game...
lvl2: retroarch -L ~/cores/libretro-fceumm.so D:/Emulators/EmulationStation//roms/nes/Super\ Mario\ Bros.\ \(World\).zip
lvl1: ...launch terminated with nonzero exit code 1!
lvl2: Creating surface...
lvl2: Created window successfully.
lvl2: Added known joystick USB,2-axis 8-button gamepad (instance ID: 1, device index: 0)
lvl2: Added known joystick USB,2-axis 8-button gamepad (instance ID: 1, device index: 0)
lvl2: EmulationStation cleanly shutting down.

I cant for the life of me figure out where to put retroarch or how to launch a game properly. I can get it to launch a game in a 'normal' emulator (eg. Nestopia) just fine. NFI what im doing with retroarch.

Halp?

Oh, and im doing this with the portable batch file so i can have everything in one dir.

[fuctfuct]

Took FOREVER to figure out..

<command>%HOME%\retroarch\retroarch -L retroarch\cores\name_of_core.dll "%ROM_RAW%"</command>

[GrouchoGlasses]

Front ends work very well with emulators like Retroarch. It will make you emulation function more like a program as a whole, where you will be able to select the games to launch directly.

Look into Hyperspin if you're interested. Others are Maximus arcade and Gameex. You can also launch games via Retroarch through Steam too.

Enjoy!

[chriso_10]

It is a bit frustrating that everything seems to be geared towards the raspberry pi, I was beginning to think I was the only person who uses this on Windows! I like the layout of it a lot better than any of the other front ends, even all the XBMC options that I've been using.

At the moment I'm stuck with figuring out how to get Saturn games to launch because they need to be mounted on a virtual drive for the emulator to read them. Having to play with batch files

[fuctfuct]

Took me a couple days to figure it out. Google is almost no help at all. I just tried stuff until it worked. Haven't tried any disc based games yet. Let us know how it goes. I might try mame next but I'm not looking forward to it. Hehe

[chriso_10]

I haven't attempted anything with retroarch, all the other emulators play pretty perfectly and I'm familiar with them so I haven't wanted to mess with it. Is it just convenience with having one emulator being able to play many systems or is there another reason to use it?

[fuctfuct]

Give it a go and find your own reasons.