Emulation guide for Policenauts (2018 and beyond)

Talk about Kojima's hard sci-fi masterpiece.
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TheThrillness
Posts: 12
Joined: Thu Dec 05, 2013 8:14 am

Emulation guide for Policenauts (2018 and beyond)

Post by TheThrillness »

Hi all

I decided to make an updated emulation guide for the game. The guide by Snake Plissken is good but emulation has come leaps and bounds in the last few years.

So what emulator are we going to use for this I hear you ask. It's called RetroArch. It's a multi system emulator that incorporates many different "cores". Why RetroArch? From my testing it has zero issues with Policenauts be it in the display or audio department (ePSXe for example was giving me audio pops now and again). The current builds use a more refined version of Mednafen called Beetle. Not only that, mouse support is fully implemented. I remember a couple of years ago there was a thread about someone who packed Policenauts in a PCSX frontend to make mouse support work (I can't find that thread anywhere now). Here it's the real deal and works out of the box.

Unfortunately RetroArch is not that user friendly so I'll walk you through some quick steps to setting Policenauts up with mouse support.

Grab the installer for your OS from here: https://www.retroarch.com/?page=platforms

Once installed untick "Run RetroArch" as we are going to do some quick prior setup. Go to your RetroArch install directory and navigate to the system folder. In here we will put our JP BIOS. It has to be named scph5500.bin

If not already done, since Policenuats is a multi disc game it requires that the cue files be in a m3u file for proper loading and disc changing (although RetroArch supports not doing this but let's be safe). There is a good reference here on how to do this: https://forums.libretro.com/t/multi-dis ... iles/14161

Basically your file should be written in notepad with the txt extension changed to m3u: https://i.imgur.com/Bfukli5.png and be in the same location as your bin and cue files.

After this you can run the program from retroarch.exe in the main file directory or the shortcut on the desktop. You should then be greeted with something like this: https://i.imgur.com/Ftd0IcT.png

To navigate use the arrow keys and enter to select. Do NOT press Escape or it will close the program.

Select "Load Core" then "Download Core". Scroll all the way down (yes it has lots of entries) to "Sony - Playstation (Beetle PSX)". Press enter and it will download and install the core for you.

Press back on your keyboard then go to "Load Content". Navigate to where your files are and load the m3u file we made previously. The BIOS should play and then you should be greeted with Policenauts: https://i.imgur.com/CxZKjba.png (Space bar speeds this up if you are impatient)

Now click Command > Menu Toggle (Hotkey is default of F1). Scroll down till you get to "Controls" and the first option should read "User 1 Device Type: Playstation Controller". Press left 3 times and it should be on "Mouse": https://i.imgur.com/2QsQu7l.png

Now just go back to Command > Menu Toggle (F1) and your computer mouse should be working as a PS1 mouse! :D

Using the mouse in game also leaves your cursor moving around so to stop that you can go to Command > Mouse Grab Toggle (F11 default hotkey). If you require exclusive fullscreen the default hotkey is f. When it comes time to change discs, you can do this from the Disk Controls menu.

That's the basic emulation guide that the developers intended the game to be played with. Perfect display and audio. There are various methods to "improve" the visual fidelity using the Beetle HW core but I'm pretty sure Policenuats would not benefit from this and compatibility with graphic cards can apparently come into play.

If there is any questions feel free to ask.
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powderehss
Posts: 90
Joined: Sun Dec 31, 2017 4:09 am
Favorite Game: Policenauts <3
Kojima games owned: MGS HD Collection, ZOE HD Collection, Metal Gear Rising, MGS Portable Ops, MGS Peace Walker
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Re: Emulation guide for Policenauts (2018 and beyond)

Post by powderehss »

Thank you so much for this, Thrillness! :D
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Newtype
Posts: 45
Joined: Sun Aug 19, 2007 5:04 pm
Location: Canada

Re: Emulation guide for Policenauts (2018 and beyond)

Post by Newtype »

Thank you a lot of this. It's well explained and I think it should be stickied. Mouse control in the game isn't perfect, but I find that leaving it at Medium in the game's options and reducing Mouse Sensitivity to 85% in RetroArch makes things more tolerable.
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The Chosen
Posts: 63
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2009 5:34 pm
Favorite Game: Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake

Re: Emulation guide for Policenauts (2018 and beyond)

Post by The Chosen »

I've just started Policenauts for the Sega Saturn. Got it running smoothly using Yaba Sanshiro Saturn Emulator on my LG V50. The cool thing about the V50 is that there is a dual screen case accessory which allows you to run two apps simultaneously, one on either screen. Pretty cool for when you want to watch YouTube but have your emails/messages open at the same time.

But the real cool feature is that LG have included an app which allows one of the screens to be used as a joypad. And it's supported by any Android software which is compatible with a controller, such as emulators.

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Jyonasan Inguramu
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Favorite Game: Biohazard
Kojima games owned: Policenauts
Snatcher
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Re: Emulation guide for Policenauts (2018 and beyond)

Post by Jyonasan Inguramu »

I'm struggling lately with saturn cores and controls, hope someone still read and can help.
Spoiler:
I'm currently playing the Saturn version on Retroarch. I was playing with pad until now, but decided to switch to mouse (only for the shooting mode since mouse is more accurate and wanted to score more points). Here comes the issue.

Now when I switch back to pad, the cursor is always aiming up on screen (ingame and in start menu), basically the game recognizes the d-pad up button is pressed all the time - but all controls are fine other than that.
Except when I'm in shooting mode select where the pad isn't recognized at all (cursor doesn't move at all) and I can't have any inputs.
Fixed. The issue came from Retropad/Saturn pad confusion and analog to digital. Not that easy to grasp though.

Edit:

I can't make .cue work with Sanshiro, only with Yabause for some reason. I also can't make it run through beetle saturn (.m3u). At this point a tutorial for dummies is required since @TheThrillness tuto is still too hard for me.

Any suggestions?
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Hunka Junka
Posts: 18
Joined: Thu Dec 01, 2022 11:46 pm
Favorite Game: Earthbound
Kojima games owned: Snatcher (Sega CD)
Policenauts (PlayStation)
Metal Gear (NES)

Re: Emulation guide for Policenauts (2018 and beyond)

Post by Hunka Junka »

I had trouble getting Saturn Policenauts to emulate on Retroarch (Windows), too. I could get it running on the Yabause core but at some point early on it would crash (it's been a couple of weeks, can't remember if it would freeze or what it'd do exactly, but at some point very early on it wouldn't work). I finally gave up on and tried the Playstation version which worked OK for me.
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