How to upgrade from 1.6 to 2.1 without making a mess?

[kaneda23]

Hey guys,

I have a Mame / Hyperspin machine that I bought from Dream Home Arcades. Came with P64 pre-loaded and with all ROMS. The version of P64 is 1.6...I wanted to update it to 2.1...How would I do this without messing up everything? Would 2.1 write over 1.6? Or would I have to move all of the roms over, change of the path directories, etc? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Chris

[HatCat]

In my experience, if you install Project64 2.1 (or any other version besides 1.6 as far as I could tell), it will in no way alter your installation of Project64 1.6. They will be like separate programs. 1.6 is however in several ways more "stable" than 2.1 unfortunately, so you might choose to keep 1.6 installed for some games while continuing to use version 2.1 to fix the bad Mario Kart 64 core timing.

When you install 2.1, it will store its own ROMs location directory, its own save folder, its own plugins directory, etc., all apart from 1.6. If you want to transfer your saved game progress, however, you'll need to copy the .eep, .sra, .fla, .mpk or whatever necessary save files from the saves subfolder of version 1.6, to the saves subfolder of version 2.1. They also will need a change of file name since, after Project64 1.7, the emulator looks for "Mario Kart 64 (U) [!].eep" instead of "MARIO KART 64.eep" or whatever it was on 1.6.

But aside from transferring save data, it's as easy as you could expect. Just point 2.1 to where ever on your disk you keep the ROMs (may be the same folder you wanted 1.6 set to even), and from that point you should be able to directly proceed with the instructions I left in the other thread.