Select ‘Load’ and then the ‘shaders_glsl’ directory.Press F1 whilst in-game to bring up the core options menu.A quick and easy way to get a CRT-looking shader with scanlines on your Genesis / Mega Drive games is to do the following:. One feature which is very much a standard in emulation today is the use of shaders to recreate older screens such as CRTs. Since this is emulation, we can benefit from increasing things and removing sprite limits in games (which prevents sprites flickering when there’s loads of action on screen for example). Press F1 to suspend the game and go back to the RetroArch menu, you will find here lots of useful tools and features, such as save states, control options, video shaders and emulator options. Advertisements Step 6 – Additional Core Options To boot a game, select a game and press ‘Run’ to start the game. Scroll across to the right (or down, depending upon which theme you are using) and you will see the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis playlist that has been created along with your games. Otherwise, you’re ready to play! Step 5 – Playing GamesĬlose down the desktop menu and go back to the RetroArch frontend. This can take some time if you have hundreds of games, so maybe go make yourself a tea/coffee whilst it’s doing its thing.
If you want to download artwork thumbnails for when you are browsing your games, go to the Genesis / Mega Drive playlist that has been created, right-click and select ‘Download all thumbnails’ then select ‘This Playlist’. RetroArch also displays the box art / screenshots of games if you wish. Advertisements Step 4 – Download Box Art Thumbnails This will now ensure that when you boot a Genesis / Mega Drive game, PicoDrive will be used as the emulator core. We now want to let RetroArch know which emulator core to use when playing Sega Genesis / Mega Drive games by default, so right-click on the Genesis / Mega Drive playlist you have created and go to ‘Associate Core’ then select PicoDrive. Step 3 – Select Default Genesis / Mega Drive Emulator If you are looking for inspiration for what games to play, check out our Best Sega Mega Drive Games article. Go back to the Playlists tab and you will now see a Genesis / Mega Drive playlist has been created along with the games in your folder/archive. Next, find your Genesis / Mega Drive ROMs via the File Browser tab, right click and select ‘Scan Directory’. Go to the main menu and select ‘Show Desktop Menu’, this will display the desktop window where it is easier to access some more of the set-up options. One of the great things about RetroArch is its ability to create playlists for systems, keeping your game collections nice and organised. Step 2 – Scan for Games & Create a Genesis / Mega Drive Playlist Next, we are going to select ‘Update Core Info Files’ and ‘Update Databases’ to ensure everything is as up-to-date as possible regarding any existing cores and associated databases. Once you have downloaded PicoDrive, go back to the main menu and scroll down to ‘Online Updater’. To download, go to ‘Load Core’, then ‘Download a core’ and select ‘PicoDrive’. Not only does PicoDrive emulate the Genesis / Mega Drive, but it also covers pretty much the whole range of Sega systems of this era including the Master System, Game Gear, Sega CD / Mega CD & 32X, so it’s an excellent choice. In this guide, we are going to use ‘PicoDrive’. We’ll then locate and download our Sega Genesis / Mega Drive core of choice. Buy on Amazon Step 1 – Download Sega Genesis / Mega Drive Core