Win32

Win Quickstart

Short version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1S8nSA0OGc

1. Download installer and libretro-cores.
2. Run installer, open installation directory and go to the resources subdirectory.
3. Copy the libretro-cores into the target directory, rename them to look more pretty (e.g. snes.dll rather than libretro-git-snes9x.dll) and perhaps a mame/ume.exe.
4. Create folders with names matching the targets (mame.exe -> mame etc.) in games
5. Copy/Move all roms into their respective folders.
6. Run the "Build DB" shortcut, with large mame romsets this will take a while.
7. Run the "Arcan (Welcome)" shortcut, check that the games you added were detected.
8. Copy the images you want to be shown into the screenshots folder.
9. Copy any snapshot videos you want to be shown into the movies folder.
10. Run the "Arcan (Gridle)" shortcut, you should now be up and running. Enjoy.

If internal launch performance is sluggish, try and experiment with VSYNC (-v), Waitsleep (-V) and vsync-falign (-F). The 'welcome' theme has a list of supported command-line arguments.

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Detailed

1. Download the prepackaged .exe installer, run it and make a note of where on your harddrive you’ve installed things. If you are upgrading from a previous version, make sure to uninstall the old version first. The uninstaller however, does not remove files that were created after the program was first installed, so you may have to delete the ‘themes’ and ‘resources\scripts’ folder for things to go smoothly.

2. Try and launch the Arcan (‘welcome’) shortcut — this will show basic information about your current configuration, which kinds of controllers were detected and so on. It should look something like this:

If any LED controllers were detected, you should be able to see the program cycling through any attached LEDs one at a time.

Note that if you get a message box that says: “openal32.dll” was not found — try and rerun the oalinst.exe that's hidden away in your installation directory.

Note that if the #games shown in the welcome theme is 0, most other themes will refuse to run. The reason is quite simply that your database doesn't find any games. Possibly because nothing has been added to the resources folder, see Configuration below.

If you just get a window that appears and quickly disappears again, it seems like the OpenGL support on your installation is too primitive (check graphic card drivers and all that).

Configuration

Next step would be to add some games. The ‘Build DB’ tool will try and do this automatically (if you are feeling brave, fire up a terminal window and look through all the different options that the tool ‘arcan_romman.exe’ accepts) or check out [Database Tool] for a more detailed description. This tool can also try and automatically fill out more detailed game information, download additional artwork assets, generate thumbnails etc.

However, this tool also requires a certain structure for things to go smoothly. Open the folder where you installed Arcan and look inside the subdirectory marked ‘resources‘.

There are two directories of immediate importance, ‘games’ and ‘targets’. In ‘targets’ you add the executables (or symlinks to them) e.g. mame.exe. snes.dll, ...

Then you create a corresponding subdirectory in ‘games’ that has the same name (excluding extensions), so for this example, you’d get a ‘games\mame’ folder.

Copy or move all the roms that you own and mame can play into this folder and re-run the ‘builddb’ shortcut again. If all goes well, it will auto detect that it is mame you are trying to add and run a specialised parser which will extract information (and optionally validate) and add it to your local database.

When the ‘builddb’ step finished, relaunch the ‘Arcan (welcome)’ shortcut. Now, there should hopefully be a number in the #games field that corresponds to the amount of roms you added.

This means that we can now launch some other themes, where the main one of interest is ‘Gridle’ (the rest are hidden in the Test menu folder). The little blue box asking for you to press a few keys is the autoconfiguration for your input. If you ever want to redo this mapping, there are two ways (if the theme doesn’t have settings menus that would help you with it).

One is to simply delete the <installpath\themes\themename\keysym.lua> file. This will prompt a reconfiguration upon next launch. Another is to launch the theme with the argument ‘forcekeyconf’ added at the end.</installpath\themes\themename\keysym.lua>

Now you can try and launch a game, hopefully things will ‘just work’ ;-)

Add media

Things may still look a little dull. We can fix this by adding screenshots and moviesnapshots. This is as simple as copying the images and videos you want associated with a game (assuming they match the ‘setname’ of the game of course), into the corresponding
folders in ‘resources’.

There are quite a few options to how you want to organize media files, and some are dictated by the specifics of whatever theme you are using. The pattern used by the [resourcefinder.lua] supportscript are:

\group\setname
\group\target\setname

where (group) can be screenshots, movies, videos, snapshots, bezels, models

64-Bit support

There's no 64-bit version available and thus, the windows build won't run 64-bit libretro cores as we currently lack a proper, working, 64-bit cross compilation tool-chain. The main application should be fully 64-bit compliant as it is with minor changes to the Windows specific parts of the code in arcan_general.c/h.

The toolchain used to build and package the windows version however, isn't. The engine code is compliant with the age-old ISO/IEC 9899:1999 standard which Microsoft have explicitly stated that they will not ever support. Any configuration / build-system manager experienced with CMake/MinGW64 should feel free to contact the dev-team if you care to help out.

That said, the only tangible benefits here would be a possible increase in performance for libretro cores. 64-bit applications can still be launched externally and the engine itself shouldn't be performance sensitive enough for it to matter until the more advanced 3D stages in the Roadmap have been reached.

Hijack- support

The library and injection mechanism used to hijack 3rd party targets have not been ported to the windows platform. Due to the limited number of OpenGL and/or SDL compatible applications it would make more sense to develop a similar one for Direct3D/Direct Input using the support functions part of the frameserver as a template, or make a specialized SDL build altogether.

As the current dev-team has little access or use for Windows outside of VirtualBox and VMWare, which doesn't support enough OpenGL features for this to be successfully developed, it would be a good starting point for any senior/master w32 developer to help out.