Homebrew Retroarch Emulation Thread (Nightly Builds Included)

[indionicarao]

I made a side by side comparison with the 3/4/16 nightlys of pocketsnes and catSFC on Superfx games (Starfox 2, starfox,yoshi island, stunt racer fx)

PocketSnes is much more solid as mentioned but cannot run starfox 2 or stunt racer fx for some reason.

Also ran some tests on the new picodrive on 32x/cd it's great beside polygonal games crash like virtua fighter

Spoiler: Comparsions Super Fx

Spoiler: Picodrive Sonic Cd, Virtua fighter, Knuckles Choatix

Thanks, Watched the video. I appreciate this.

 

[penguin00]

Hello, I'm on New 3DS with ReiNAND updated to the latest 3DS update. I've installed the CIAs of the stable builds, and for some reason when I open any of them I can't move anything. The controls don't work at all. However the frame counter continuously goes up so it's definitely running. If I try and run the .3ds versions however, the controls work fine. I've tried deleting the entire retroarch folder and reopening the CIAs but the problem continues. I think I'm missing a .cfg in the retroarch folder. All I have is retroarch.cfg and I swear the last time I had this working I had 2 cfg files. Can anyone check theirs for me and see if that's correct? If not, can anyone else guess what might be wrong? Thanks for any information!

 

[Kubba]

Hello, I'm on New 3DS with ReiNAND updated to the latest 3DS update. I've installed the CIAs of the stable builds, and for some reason when I open any of them I can't move anything. The controls don't work at all. However the frame counter continuously goes up so it's definitely running. If I try and run the .3ds versions however, the controls work fine. I've tried deleting the entire retroarch folder and reopening the CIAs but the problem continues. I think I'm missing a .cfg in the retroarch folder. All I have is retroarch.cfg and I swear the last time I had this working I had 2 cfg files. Can anyone check theirs for me and see if that's correct? If not, can anyone else guess what might be wrong? Thanks for any information!

Try deleting the retroarch.cfg file only, then restart the emulator.

Edit: Forgot to add some other stuff. You might try a clean install as well, like deleting all retroarch materials and then uninstalling the CIA's, then reinstall.

 

[ArugulaZ]

I've been out of the loop for a while. Anything new and interesting happen with this emulator?

 

[TecXero]

I've been out of the loop for a while. Anything new and interesting happen with this emulator?

You mean RetroArch? It's not really an emulator, just a front-end for programs. I wrote something for a website if you want a slightly better explanation.

What I'm saying is none of the cores will likely see direct improvements beyond bug fixes.

 

[ArugulaZ]

Thanks for the information. I'll be honest with you; RetroArch wouldn't be my first choice for emulation if I had alternatives. I would much rather have emulators built specifically for a given system rather than this all-in-one solution. But at this late point in the game, I'm guessing we're not going to see the same level of support that the PSP got.

 

[sj33]

The basic purpose of libRetro is to make easily portable cores. Portability is the key here. It's pretty much the opposite philosophy to optimising cores for specific platforms.

A certain degree of optimisation can be achieved. Picodrive increased in speed dramatically when ARM-specific optimisations that already existed in the core were enabled. And nothing is stopping people from stepping up and coding dynamic recompilers or GPU renderers from scratch. But as a general rule, optimising the cores is somewhat beyond the scope of porting libRetro.

 

[TecXero]

Thanks for the information. I'll be honest with you; RetroArch wouldn't be my first choice for emulation if I had alternatives. I would much rather have emulators built specifically for a given system rather than this all-in-one solution. But at this late point in the game, I'm guessing we're not going to see the same level of support that the PSP got.

Yeah, with Androids and other opensource handhelds becoming more common, I doubt we're ever going to see a homebrew platform quite like the PSP again. RetroArch already uses the hardware rather well. It'd probably take a lot of work to squeeze out anything significantly more out of it. Take a look at the work going into blargSnes if you want any reference.

On another note, the GameGirl might be interesting.

 

[HenryLeonheart]

Solved my issue. The bios file had a bad MD5.

 

[SLiV3R]

Personally, I prefer RetroArch on my N3DSXL than all the emulators available for the PSP. Every day of the year. Why? Well, RetroArch is equally fast. Has all the options I need. The N3DS has superior building quality. N3DS has superior screen and buttons. The PSP was really cool 10 years ago. But I wouldn't even think about playing with emulation on the PSP today....

 

[penguin00]

Try deleting the retroarch.cfg file only, then restart the emulator.

Edit: Forgot to add some other stuff. You might try a clean install as well, like deleting all retroarch materials and then uninstalling the CIA's, then reinstall.

Thanks! The second option worked. I completely deleted the retroarch folder, including a file in my main directory called something like "3DS Controller Options.cfg", and I uninstalled all the CIAs. I left my ROMS intact though. I then reinstalled all the CIAs and it worked! Thanks again.

 

[sj33]

Personally, I prefer RetroArch on my N3DSXL than all the emulators available for the PSP. Every day of the year. Why? Well, RetroArch is equally fast. Has all the options I need. The N3DS has superior building quality. N3DS has superior screen and buttons. The PSP was really cool 10 years ago. But I wouldn't even think about playing with emulation on the PSP today....

I think ArugulaZ means in relative terms, referring to the activity of the scenes.

It depends how you look at it. The PSP was the first mainstream handheld where emulators of 16-bit consoles were really fesible, and this was also before the days of libretro where we now take emulator portability for granted. The PSP might have been more powerful than the O3DS, but it would still appear to have been less powerful than the N3DS and thus more console-specific optimisations were required.

It could be argued that Retroarch running so well on the N3DS meant that developing 3DS-specific emulators became a bit redundant (and O3DS users lost out here). But on the other hand, very few emulators really appeared on the 3DS during the first year or so until Retroarch was ported. blargSnes is of course a miracle piece of work and a godsend for O3DS users, GameYob was a functional port of the DS version of the same emulator, a port of mGBA that seemed to be fighting against *hax half the time, and a couple of slow NES emulators appeared. But little else beyond that until Retroarch appeared and gave us so many emulators.

The sheer extra grunt of the N3DS gets around the relative lack of optimisatins, and make the N3DS probabky the best homebrew console.

 

[Doczu]

It could be argued that Retroarch running so well on the N3DS meant that developing 3DS-specific emulators became a bit redundant (and O3DS users lost out here).

So to get a better (not that the retroarch core is bad, it's great) PS1 emulator it should be coded from scratch and to the metal?

 

[SLiV3R]

So to get a better (not that the retroarch core is bad, it's great) PS1 emulator it should be coded from scratch and to the metal?

This is a common misunderstanding. That emulation is getting better, just because it is coded from scratch. Look how the ps1 emulator on the 3ds, that is coded from scratch works. Compare it to RetroArchs

The ps1 doesn't need to be coded from scratch to reach fullspeed. It just needs a lot of optimisation.

 

[sj33]

This goes back to the trend towards portability in the first place - the sheer amount of time, effort and resources required to code an emulator from scratch on a single relatively niche homebrew platform with low portability makes it unlikely that somebody will attempt it. Hence, open source, portable emulators save the day.

There is speculation that GPU acceleration would help speed up PCSX, but don't expect this to appear because it's quite a huge undertaking to develop a renderer from scratch.

 

[pdapanda]

because no one is acturally working on optimising the cores for 3ds， and maybe never will

 

[TecXero]

Personally, I prefer RetroArch on my N3DSXL than all the emulators available for the PSP. Every day of the year. Why? Well, RetroArch is equally fast. Has all the options I need. The N3DS has superior building quality. N3DS has superior screen and buttons. The PSP was really cool 10 years ago. But I wouldn't even think about playing with emulation on the PSP today....

Yeah, N3DS is great, but given a choice of emulation on the PSP or o3DS, you'll probably have a better time with the PSP. NesterJ, MasterBoy, and PicoDrive still work great; TempGBA4PSP and Snes9xTYLmecm_mod work great as well and they're still getting updates. I'd rather just use my PSP Brite instead of invest $150 for slightly better emulation. I'm sure I'd prefer a N3DS over my PSP as RetroArch is nicely polished on the 3DS, but I have an o3DS and don't think the investment is worth it.

 

[hobbledehoy899]

Any cores that actually save without savestates yet?

 

[Flusteredcustard]

Any cores that actually save without savestates yet?

I thought most of them did. I know that GPSP holds a save, because I beat Nightmare in Dreamland on it. Gambette also saves. Pocketsnes saves, because it keeps my Kirby Superstar save. Can't confirm any others though.

 

[hobbledehoy899]

Pocketsnes saves

Thank you.