Hi guys.
Just felt the urge of sharing my experience at SNES mini + hakchi2 with you, and ask a few things in the process
I've been messing with hakchi2 tool in the last few days. I managed to add about 15 more games to my console and they all work flawlessly, from what I can tell (obviously I've only played each game just for a few minute, so who knows they may crash 3 hours deep into them XD)
The only game I haven't had the luck to make it work is Chrono Trigger with "Chrono Trigger +" patch applied (from romhacking.com). For those who don't know what it is, it's a patch that rebalances some parts of the game and adds back some things that were cut out from the official release, plus unlocking some things before time (without screwing game balancing) in order to add a bit of unlinearity to the game (you can visit 65.000.000 BC as soon as you get to the End of Time, as an example).
To be honest, the game runs, but when you try to leave Chrono's room, the transition to lower floor doesn't start, so you're stuck in Chrono's room with nowhere else to go. Since the patch alters the lowest floor picture by adding a door next to the kitchen (where a new room for Chrono's mother has been created), I think that the SNES mini built-in emulator has issues with the modified transition to the new lower floor.
I also noticed very long (10+ seconds) black screens between transitions (before the pendulum is loaded in the starting screen, after you press start to begin playing, after the view fades out from world map before switching to Chrono's room...). Every time there's a black screen ,it takes several seconds to load the following scene.
So, I installed RetroArch on my SNES mini using hakchi2, in order to see if the game would go past the room issue using an alternate emulator (even though RetroArch loses the display frames and rewind functionality on save states). I downloaded the retroarch_with_cores package and installed it in its entirety.
Question 1: when I go to "install extra modules" in hakchi2 none of the modules is checked, but I'm quite confident I've installed them all by dragging the .zip package onto hakchi2 window and flashing the console. Does it mean there's no way ATM to see which cores are installed on the console? Or is it enough for a core to be shown in the list to be currently installed in the console?
Like I said, I installed them all even though I'm only interested in playing SNES games on the SNES mini.
If I understand correctly, in order to use RetroArch instead of the built-in emulator on the SNES mini, I just need to append "--retroarch" to the command string for that game. Well, I did exactly that for Chrono Trigger and it doesn't start anymore. I select the game, press A, I get to a black screen and after a few seconds I'm back to the SNES mini game selection menu.
I maybe doing something wrong, but from the readme file inside RetroArch package it seems that appending "--retroarch" is all I needed to do.
Unsatisfied, I tried launching the ROM using snes9x emulator directly (--retroarch should also use snes9x as far as i know), by changing the command line in Chrono Trigger rom to /bin/snes <rom> <clover args>. This way the game started, the long black screens are gone and Chrono can finally leave his room.
Question 2: I'd like to try running the game also through RetroArch. Is there something else I should do besides adding "--retroarch" at the end of the command line to make the game run using RetroArch?
Thanks in advance for your time.
