Lunar Magic has support for launching your ROM right into the emulator of your choice to quickly jump into your hack for testing and RetroArch is increasing popular among hackers but it requires a bit more setup than most emulators to work.
Emulator Setup in Lunar Magic
First, open the Setup Emulator dialog by navigating to File > Emulator > Setup Emulator... in the menu. Here you'll see a field to specify your emulator's executable, click Browse... and pick your RetroArch executable (this may be in a hidden AppData folder in your Home directory on Windows if you've installed it for a single-user).
Once you've chosen your executable, you'll see this dialog also has a field for Command Line Arguments. This is the key bit for getting RetroArch to work as you will have to specify the emulator core that you want to use for playing your hack. (The cores directory for RetroArch can be found in the same folder as the retroarch.exe).
Be sure to check the "Use above Custom Command Line Arguments" box to make the field active.
Command Line RetroArch
From the command line you can tell RetroArch to load a rom with the
So how this translates to something usable in Lunar Magic's command line arguments field would be:
In the above:
If all is done correctly, hit OK and you should now be able to launch RetroArch right from Lunar Magic (either from the menu or by pressing F4) with the core of your preference.
Emulator Setup in Lunar Magic
First, open the Setup Emulator dialog by navigating to File > Emulator > Setup Emulator... in the menu. Here you'll see a field to specify your emulator's executable, click Browse... and pick your RetroArch executable (this may be in a hidden AppData folder in your Home directory on Windows if you've installed it for a single-user).
Once you've chosen your executable, you'll see this dialog also has a field for Command Line Arguments. This is the key bit for getting RetroArch to work as you will have to specify the emulator core that you want to use for playing your hack. (The cores directory for RetroArch can be found in the same folder as the retroarch.exe).
Be sure to check the "Use above Custom Command Line Arguments" box to make the field active.
Command Line RetroArch
From the command line you can tell RetroArch to load a rom with the
-L flag, so in normal command-line usage it will look something like:retroarch.exe -L C:\path\to\libretro\core.dll game.rom
So how this translates to something usable in Lunar Magic's command line arguments field would be:
-L C:\path\to\libretro\core.dll "%1"
In the above:
-L specifies the load command for RetroArch, C:\path\to\libretro\core.dll specifies the path to the libretro core, and "%1" is how you refer to your ROM file in Lunar Magic. So when you figure out all that for your installation of RetroArch, put it all into the Command Line Arguments field.If all is done correctly, hit OK and you should now be able to launch RetroArch right from Lunar Magic (either from the menu or by pressing F4) with the core of your preference.