Bandai WonderSwan Color

The WonderSwan Color is a handheld game console designed by Bandai released in 2000, and was only available in Japan. While the original WonderSwan had only a black and white screen, the color version features 64k of RAM and a larger color LCD screen.

Prior to WonderSwan's release, Nintendo had a practical monopoly in the Japanese handheld market. After the release of the WonderSwan Color, Bandai took approximately 8% of the market share in Japan, partly due to its low price.

This system scrapes metadata for the “wonderswancolor” group and loads the wonderswancolor set from the currently selected theme, if available.

Quick reference

BIOS

No WonderSwan Color emulator in Batocera needs a BIOS file to run.

ROMs

Place your WonderSwan Color ROMs in /userdata/roms/wswanc.

Emulators

RetroArch

RetroArch (formerly SSNES), is a ubiquitous frontend that can run multiple “cores”, which are essentially the emulators themselves. The most common cores use the libretro API, so that's why cores run in RetroArch in Batocera are referred to as “libretro: (core name)”. RetroArch aims to unify the feature set of all libretro cores and offer a universal, familiar interface independent of platform.

RetroArch configuration

RetroArch offers a Quick Menu accessed by pressing [HOTKEY] + South button (B SNES) which can be used to alter various things like RetroArch and core options, and controller mapping. Most RetroArch related settings can be altered from Batocera's EmulationStation.

Standardized features available to all libretro cores: wswanc.videomode, wswanc.ratio, wswanc.smooth, wswanc.shaders, wswanc.pixel_perfect, wswanc.decoration, wswanc.game_translation

ES setting name batocera.conf_key Description ⇒ ES option key_value
Settings that apply to all cores of this emulator
GRAPHICS BACKEND wswanc.gfxbackend Choose your graphics rendering
⇒ OpenGL opengl, Vulkan vulkan.
AUDIO LATENCY wswanc.audio_latency Audio latency in milliseconds, turn it up if you hear crackles
⇒ 256 256, 192 192, 128 128, 64 64, 32 32, 16 16, 8 8.
THREADED VIDEO wswanc.video_threaded Improves performance at the cost of latency and more video stuttering. Use only if full speed cannot be obtained otherwise.
⇒ On true, Off false.

libretro: Mednafen_wswan

Batocera uses the standalone port Beetle Cygne based on Mednafen. Mednafen's WonderSwan emulation is based on Cygne, modified with bug fixes and to add sound emulation.

libretro: Mednafen_wswan configuration

Controls

Here are the default WonderSwan Color's controls shown on a Batocera Retropad:

The default button mapping to the WonderSwan Color is 1-to-1 with the Nintendo Game Boy. You can rotate the screen with the [SELECT] button.

Troubleshooting

Further troubleshooting

For further troubleshooting, refer to the generic support pages.

  • systems/wswanc.txt
  • Last modified: 10 months ago
  • by atari