Zaparoo for Emulation Station

Emulation Station does not officially support Zaparoo but this can be worked around with help an additional program.

For the purposes of this guide its recommended you use Retrobat, a fork of emulation station, that has an automated setup process, scrapping functionality and the added benefit of supporting Windows titles (Steam games) as well as Emulators.

What you will need

This tutorial will assume you have already set up Emulation Station and the other programs installed. please do so before you proceed.

How To

Using, AutoHotKey language (.Ahk) you can create a program that, when executed by Zaparoo, will tell Emulation Station to Launch and/or Exit the requested title.

There are two possible approaches to this task;

Telling Emulation Station to find a specific title, then launching it.
Launching a game directly from Emulation Station

Option 1. is a slightly less smooth experience but is much easier to setup and maintain. Option 2. Is a smoother experience but is more time consuming to setup and when adding new titles.

Option 1 Method

In Emulation Station open the Main Menu and navigate to Controller Mapping via Control Settings>Controller Mapping

Using a keyboard, bind Q to the B button, W to the A button, E to the Y button and R to the X button. Positionally, it should be Q for the bottom button, W for the right button, E for the left button and R for the top button. The other bindings do not matter after these 4 buttons, just press and hold down a button to skip every subsequent binding.

Create a new .ahk script and use the code provided below.

#Requires AutoHotkey v2.0
; This top section allows the bottom section to work no matter what submenu is open in emulation station.
Send("e")
Sleep 50
Send("{Enter}")
Sleep 50
Send("r")
Sleep 50
Send("w")


Send("e")
Sleep 50
Sendtext("GameName") ; replace GameName with title of the game you intend to launch.
Sleep 50
Send("{Enter}")
Sleep 50
Send("i")
Sleep 500 ; This wait time is required but may vary depending on hardware. 
Send("q")

This code will open the Search Menu, input the game you wish to launch's name, confirm the selection, wait a few milliseconds and then launch the selected game

Using Ahk2Exe (comes with AutoHotKey), convert the script to a .exe file (using V2.0 32bit compiling), name it as the game you intend to launch, eg "Golden Eye.exe" and place it in your Zaparoo folder.

Edit the Zaparoo.ini to enable Zaparoo to safety launch the exe you just made.

Using the Zaparoo app, write a new card pointing to the exe we just made. it should look like "C:\Zaparoo\Golden Eye.exe"

Run Zaparoo.exe and EmulationStation.exe

With Emulation Station running, you can now launch a specific game by tapping your newly written NFC card. The will also close when pressing the combination of Start+Select by default.

But what if you want to be able to exit the game when tapping a new card?

Adding Exit game Functionality.

create a text file called gamelist.txt and place it in your Zaparoo folder. On each line in gamelist.txt, type in the exe of all the emulators you are using in Emulation Station. you can check the name of the emulator running by opening Task Manager and going into the "Details" tab.

It should look a little something like this;

retroarch.exe
dolphin.exe
flycast.exe
redream.exe
Project64.exe
PCSX2.exe
Xemu.exe
Ryujinx.exe

NOTE: This is an example, you will need to check the real .exe names of the emulators you intend to use with Emulation Station.

Now for some new code

#Requires AutoHotkey v2.0
FoundGame := False
GameList := FileRead("C:\Zaparoo\gamelist.txt")
GameList_array := StrSplit(GameList, "`r`n") ; why its needs split on both "carriage return" AND "line break" is a mystery to me but absolutely required.
For game in GameList_array {
	if (ProcessExist(game)){
		ProcessClose(game)
	}
}

;This code will check if any of your emulators are running (if a game is running) and close it.

Combining Everything

#Requires AutoHotkey v2.0
FoundGame := False
GameList := FileRead("C:\Zaparoo\gamelist.txt")
GameList_array := StrSplit(GameList, "`r`n")
For game in GameList_array {
	if (ProcessExist(game)){
		ProcessClose(game)
		FoundGame := True
	}
}

If (FoundGame == True){
	Goto Skip
}

Send("e")
Sleep 50
Send("{Enter}")
Sleep 50
Send("r")
Sleep 50
Send("w")

Send("e")
Sleep 50
Sendtext("GameName") ; Remember to change GameName to the game's name you intend to launch. MUST match whats listed in emulation station.
Sleep 50
Send("{Enter}")
Sleep 50
Send("i")
Sleep 500
Send("q")

Skip:
Sleep 10

; If a game is running, close it and skip to the end of the code. If a game is NOT running (FoundGame = False), search for the game intended and launch it.

If a game is running, it will require 2 taps of the NFC. First to close the game, second to launch the new game.

You COULD replace the FoundGame/ Skip functionality with a Sleep command so it only requires 1 tap but different programs take different amounts of time to exit, you would need to calibrate the Sleep for each system, maybe for each game and would also depend on your hardware. Two taps is a simpler compromise.

So for each game, use the code as provided, but change the GameName for the game name listed in Emulation Station. A new exe must be written for each game, each new exe must be added to be launched safetly in Zaparoo.ini and each exe must be written to the NFC via the Zaparoo app.

I intend to make a batch file to automate much of this process.

to be continued.....