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Roms

Adding ROMs🔗

NextUI creates a Roms folder at the SD Card Root containing folders for each console currently supported.

You can rename these folders as you like; however, you must keep the uppercase tag name in parentheses in order to retain the mapping to the correct emulator.

Example: Nintendo Entertainment System (FC) can be renamed to Nintendo (FC) or NES (FC) or Famicom (FC)

If multiple folders share the same name, eg. Game Boy Advance (GBA) and Game Boy Advance (MGBA), they will be combined into a single menu item containing the ROMs from both folders.

A ROM selected from this combined menu item will launch using the emulator in the tag of the folder is lives in.

Disc-based games🔗

To streamline launching multi-file disc-based games, place your BIN / CUE files in a folder with the same name as the CUE file.

NextUI will automatically launch the CUE file instead of navigating into the folder when selected.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 (USA)/
  Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 (USA).bin
  Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 (USA).cue

For multi-disc games, follow these steps.

  1. Create a folder for your disc files.
  2. Put all the disc files into this folder.
  3. Create a .m3u file that matches the name of the folder created in step one.
  4. Edit the .m3u file and add the relative path to each disc's .cue file, one file per line.

NextUI will automatically launch the CUE file instead of navigating into the folder when selected.

For example, Final Fantasy VII has three discs:

Final Fantasy VII (USA)/
  Final Fantasy VII (USA).m3u
  Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 1).bin
  Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 1).cue
  Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 2).bin
  Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 2).cue
  Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 3).bin
  Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 3).cue

The .m3u file for FF7 would contain:

Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 1).cue
Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 2).cue
Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 3).cue

When you are playing a multi-disc game, the NextUI in-game Menu will display the current disc.

Use left or right on the D-Pad to change discs.

NextUI also supports .chd files and .pbp files under 2GB.

Multi-disc games share the same memory card and save state slots across all discs.

Collections🔗

A collection is just a text file containing an ordered list of full paths to rom, cue, or m3u files. These text files live in the "Collections" folder at the root of your SD card, eg. SDCARD_ROOT/Collections/Metroid series.txt might look like this:

/Roms/GBA/Metroid Zero Mission.gba
/Roms/GB/Metroid II.gb
/Roms/SNES (SFC)/Super Metroid.sfc
/Roms/GBA/Metroid Fusion.gba

If you disable all visible folders under 'Roms', the 'Collections' folders contents will populate the main menu instead of being nested in the 'Collections' folder in the UI.

Display names🔗

Certain (unsupported arcade) cores require roms to use arcane file names. You can override the display name used throughout NextUI by creating a map.txt in the same folder as the files you want to rename. One line per file, rom.ext followed by a single tab followed by Display Name. You can hide a file by adding a . at the beginning of the display name. eg. The 'Collections' folder needs its own map.txt file as well.

neogeo.zip  .Neo Geo Bios
mslug.zip   Metal Slug
sf2.zip     Street Fighter II

Doom PWADs🔗

Warning

The PrBoom core requires the prboom.wad IWAD file - which is treated as a Bios file - and that file is available for download here. It can be placed in /Bios/PRBOOM.

NextUI supports Doom via the PrBoom Libretro Core, and loads Doom PWAD - or patch wad - files as it's game format. It also uses IWADs (internal Doom WADs) as the Bios files.

Note

The following documentation will use the fictional NextUI Doom.wad (Doom 1) and NextUI Doom 2.wad (`Doom 2) as the PWADs Megawads being loaded.

To setup a PWAD, place it in the /Roms/Doom (PRBOOM) folder on your SD Card.

/Roms/Doom (PRBOOM)/NextUI Doom.wad

PWADs all depend on a particular IWAD as the base for running the PWAD. IWADs are placed in the /Bios/PRBOOM folder, and a list of them is available in the Required BIOS section. If all your PWADs use the same IWAD - for instance, doom1.wad then the IWAD can be placed directly in the /Bios/PRBOOM folder, and PrBoom will load the PWADs as expected.

/Bios/PRBOOM/doom1.wad

Note

All IWADs must be named using lowercase characters, including for the file extension.

In many cases, you will want to load specific PWADs with specific IWADs. Due to how PrBoom detects IWADs and lacking information about which IWAD is required by a PWAD, PrBoom may load the incorrect IWAD for your PWAD. To combat this, NextUI supports using a doom.version file to specify the correct /Bios/PRBOOM subdirectory to reference. Omitting a doom.version text file will result in the default PrBoom using the default IWAD detection algorithm. It is recommended to use a doom.version text file in conjuction with the m3u text file format commonly used for Disc-based games to tie PWADs to have a clean directory structure.

Using NextUI Doom.wad as an example, we would have the following directory structure in our Roms folder:

/Roms/Doom (PRBOOM)/NextUI Doom/NextUI Doom.wad
/Roms/Doom (PRBOOM)/NextUI Doom/NextUI Doom.m3u
/Roms/Doom (PRBOOM)/NextUI Doom/doom.version

The contents of the newly created NextUI Doom.m3u text would contain:

NextUI Doom.wad

While the newly created doom.version text file would contain the following:

doom1

The doom.version text file maps to a subfolder in the /Bios/PRBOOM folder that should be used to load dependencies, such as the IWAD or custom mp3 files. In the case of Doom 1 (Commercial), the commercial IWAD would be placed on the disk like so:

/Bios/PRBOOM/doom1/doom1.wad

Music for particular IWADs can also be customized by placing the correctly named files into the correct /Bios/PRBOOM subdirectory:

/Bios/PRBOOM/doom1/intro.mp3
/Bios/PRBOOM/doom1/e1m1.mp3

To load our NextUI Doom 2.wad megawad with only the title music changing, the following would be a sample file structure:

/Roms/Doom (PRBOOM)/NextUI Doom/NextUI Doom 2.wad
/Roms/Doom (PRBOOM)/NextUI Doom/NextUI Doom 2.m3u
/Roms/Doom (PRBOOM)/NextUI Doom/doom.version
/Bios/PRBOOM/doom2/doom1.wad
/Bios/PRBOOM/doom2/dm2ttl.mp3

The contents of NextUI Doom 2.m3u text file would be:

NextUI Doom 2.wad

And the doom.version text file would have the following as it's contents:

doom2