Homebrew Retroarch Emulation Thread (Nightly Builds Included)

[DrFleming]

Yo im testing out ape escape. Is it possible to set the 3ds analog stick and n3ds c-stick as a dualshock? It can ONLY be played with an analog controller.

Hah, that would be a great feature! I hope some RetroArch people are reading this.

By the way, one thing regarding PSX emulation: my only issue in a (extremely short, admittedly) playthrough of FFVII was, literally, the sound. This may be a controversial opinion, but not having 60 fps (even if emulating) is unimportant as long as the framerate is *stable*. Don't forget that when playing them in an ACTUAL PSX, games like FFVII and Metal Gear Solid were... yes... 30 fps. So even if we get, say, 40 fps but stable, that'd be *improving* on the original hardware's performance. Don't forget it. Fixing sound (so we aren't bothered while playing and can enjoy Uematsu's score in its full potential) is paramount; 60 fps, not so much (again: my opinion).

And that's why I think we should have more than 1 alternative (VC), everyone wins.

This. GBA VC is awesome, but lacks save states. Why not look forward to that? The right attitude to have is to support any efforts regarding improvement in emulation. And I'm just talking about attitude: I've donated to some people in the scene (namely Plailect and nedwill) in order to economically support good efforts, but if one cannot/won't do that, the very least they can do is to NOT criticize people's work or say "Oh, but THIS is useless". Well, guess what, literally everything in the 3DS scene was useless just two years ago... Give it time, patience, work (if one can) and support, and it will bloom.

 

[Giodude]

no save states makes me feel like im playing on my gba again which I like, you can mod most gba roms to use a proper sleep mode, it takes 5 seconds to make a VC with no ghosting and proper brightness, vc performance is much better than gpsp

Actually i get perfect performance from gpsp. As long as vsynch is enabled everything runs silky smooth. It also isnt eating at my 300 game limit. Also the proper sleep mode patch needs to be triggerd by a button combo, where gpsp just sleeps. The biggest factor though is most bigger games cannot be sleep mode patched, Pokemon and mother 3 being the biggest examples of this. I play for very small increments, and go long periods without charging, so sleep mode is essential.

 

[deathblade200]

Actually i get perfect performance from gpsp. As long as vsynch is enabled everything runs silky smooth. It also isnt eating at my 300 game limit. Also the proper sleep mode patch needs to be triggerd by a button combo, where gpsp just sleeps. The biggest factor though is most bigger games cannot be sleep mode patched, Pokemon and mother 3 being the biggest examples of this. I play for very small increments, and go long periods without charging, so sleep mode is essential.

perfect performance isn't even possible with gpsp on the vita so please don't make false claims and gba mode uses MUCH less battery than retroarch as all its doing is clocking down the ds mode while emulation takes much more power so a bigger battery drain so sleep mode isn't THAT essential in gba mode

 

[Giodude]

perfect performance isn't even possible with gpsp on the vita so please don't make false claims and gba mode uses MUCH less battery than retroarch as all its doing is clocking down the ds mode while emulation takes much more power so a bigger battery drain so sleep mode isn't THAT essential in gba mode

Im not making false clains. With vsynch enabled on n3ds most games giver perfect performance. I get no frame drops and the sound quality rarely ever crackles. If ot does, putting it into sleep mode and back again fixes the issue. Also the battery isnt tje biggest deal, i just perfer to snap the 3ds closed when i need to vs a button combo.

 

[DominoBright]

I don't know what games you played, but the few that I have tried on 1.3.3 with Vsync enabled do get plenty of frame drops.

 

[Giodude]

I don't know what games you played, but the few that I have tried on 1.3.3 with Vsync enabled do get plenty of frame drops.

What games? I mostly play Mother 3, crazy taxi, and pokemon and they all run flawlessly. I can even enable filters and nothing changes.

 

[DominoBright]

What games? I mostly play Mother 3, crazy taxi, and pokemon and they all run flawlessly. I can even enable filters and nothing changes.

I used to have Astro Boy as one of the games that gave me trouble, but when I tried it again, it felt like the lag from the actual game, just that the music was playing tricks on me. Super Mario Advance 4 drops a lot between screen transitions from what little I've seen, but the gameplay itself is alright. Mother 1 and Super Dodgeball Advance are almost perfect. So I can say that some games do, in fact, work just fine as you've said. But it's not flawless as you claim it to be.

On that note, you say Mother 3 is flawless? That is one of the games that gives me some lag. Not too much, but it was enough to mess up a combo that I attempted. Other places were mainly from the opening and first chapter cutscenes. Another game that gave me trouble was Dotstream. Of all things to go slowly, THE HEALTH AND SAFETY WARNING AT 20 FPS. The gameplay would be fine for a while, with the occasional stutter, but it would drop when I would use a boost. Yep. But the worst part is that I was completely unable to see some blocks in two races, causing me to retire from the first and rage quit during the second. Third is Final Fantasy 4. Maybe it's just the airship sections and opening cutscene, but the former is part of the game, and it hits around 30 FPS.

Finally, there's one game that I find is simply not worth playing on gpSP. That game is Drill Dozer. The file select screen shows some lag when moving to the Sound and Rumble options. The opening cutscene has some too. Then you play the level and oh man. Using the drill brings the speed down quite a bit. Once you meet your first enemies and start attacking them, it slows to a crawl. At that point I stopped playing.

Again, this is 1.3.3 with Vsync enabled. If there's anything extra you've done to make performance as good as you are claiming, I'd really like to know, because using gpSP instead of injection would be nice.

 

[SlimPortable]

The latest nightly .cia build i have is from 2016-08-04.

EDIT: Nevermind ignore this I forgot my bios file.

 

[Giodude]

I used to have Astro Boy as one of the games that gave me trouble, but when I tried it again, it felt like the lag from the actual game, just that the music was playing tricks on me. Super Mario Advance 4 drops a lot between screen transitions from what little I've seen, but the gameplay itself is alright. Mother 1 and Super Dodgeball Advance are almost perfect. So I can say that some games do, in fact, work just fine as you've said. But it's not flawless as you claim it to be.

On that note, you say Mother 3 is flawless? That is one of the games that gives me some lag. Not too much, but it was enough to mess up a combo that I attempted. Other places were mainly from the opening and first chapter cutscenes. Another game that gave me trouble was Dotstream. Of all things to go slowly, THE HEALTH AND SAFETY WARNING AT 20 FPS. The gameplay would be fine for a while, with the occasional stutter, but it would drop when I would use a boost. Yep. But the worst part is that I was completely unable to see some blocks in two races, causing me to retire from the first and rage quit during the second. Third is Final Fantasy 4. Maybe it's just the airship sections and opening cutscene, but the former is part of the game, and it hits around 30 FPS.

Finally, there's one game that I find is simply not worth playing on gpSP. That game is Drill Dozer. The file select screen shows some lag when moving to the Sound and Rumble options. The opening cutscene has some too. Then you play the level and oh man. Using the drill brings the speed down quite a bit. Once you meet your first enemies and start attacking them, it slows to a crawl. At that point I stopped playing.

Again, this is 1.3.3 with Vsync enabled. If there's anything extra you've done to make performance as good as you are claiming, I'd really like to know, because using gpSP instead of injection would be nice.

I'll make a video of it when i get home. Again, n3ds with dynarec and vsynch.

 

[Vague Rant]

Don't forget that when playing them in an ACTUAL PSX, games like FFVII and Metal Gear Solid were... yes... 30 fps. So even if we get, say, 40 fps but stable, that'd be *improving* on the original hardware's performance. Don't forget it.

You're misunderstanding how this all works. The refresh rate of a PSX was 60Hz, and it's this that RetroArch's PSX core is failing to meet on 3DS. If RetroArch manages a stable 40FPS, it's still running at only 2/3 of full speed. This means if the original game was 30FPS, the 3DS will be running it at 20FPS, and that doesn't mean "less smoothly", it means "more slowly". The missing frames aren't just skipped, the whole system is basically operating in slow motion. In short: no, the emulator running at 40FPS is far, far away from an improvement over the original hardware.

 

[deathblade200]

You're misunderstanding how this all works. The refresh rate of a PSX was 60Hz, and it's this that RetroArch's PSX core is failing to meet on 3DS. If RetroArch manages a stable 40FPS, it's still running at only 2/3 of full speed. This means if the original game was 30FPS, the 3DS will be running it at 20FPS, and that doesn't mean "less smoothly", it means "more slowly". The missing frames aren't just skipped, the whole system is basically operating in slow motion. In short: no, the emulator running at 40FPS is far, far away from an improvement over the original hardware.

and this is why i just like using my vita to play ps1 games no they don't get the HD textures but they are accurate and even have better performance than the ps1

 

[DominoBright]

I'll make a video of it when i get home. Again, n3ds with dynarec and vsynch.

Whoa, hold on a sec. You have dynarec enabled? That causes the thing to crash. Or is 1.3.3 immune to it?

EDIT: Nope, it's crashing a bunch.

 

[Giodude]

Whoa, hold on a sec. You have dynarec enabled? That causes the thing to crash. Or is 1.3.3 immune to it?

EDIT: Nope, it's crashing a bunch.

I don't get very many crashes. Usually 1 or 2 games have issues with it, but it becomes predictable enough where if i save state before it has a chance to happen i can just load it and be fine.

 

[MarkDarkness]

which is, assumingly, the reason it likes to crash so much.
were you looking at the gpsp core? considering how its a fork of a fork of a differently languaged fork for an entirely different console, it wouldn't surprise me if its really confusing

Gpsp core, yeah. I guess I understood the general structure, but the syntax is sort of alien. It would be pretty illuminating if whoever did the port at least explained it.

 

[DominoBright]

I don't get very many crashes. Usually 1 or 2 games have issues with it, but it becomes predictable enough where if i save state before it has a chance to happen i can just load it and be fine.

Where 1 or 2 games suffer for you, I only tried these three and they all crashed: Astro Boy (during normal play), FFIV (during the Mysidia flashback), and Drill Dozer (right after choosing the save file). What's worse is that it's the kind of crash that forces you to shut the power off instead of the 3DS booting you to the home menu. And predictable? The two times I played Astro Boy they occurred without warning!

Dynarec, in its current form (and past form too lol), is just bad news. And personally, I see no point in trying/learning to predict when gpSP will crash, or generally dealing with it any further. VC injection, despite its lack of save states and usage of the limited 3DS game slots, is far more reliable.

 

[majoru]

Where 1 or 2 games suffer for you, I only tried these three and they all crashed: Astro Boy (during normal play), FFIV (during the Mysidia flashback), and Drill Dozer (right after choosing the save file). What's worse is that it's the kind of crash that forces you to shut the power off instead of the 3DS booting you to the home menu. And predictable? The two times I played Astro Boy they occurred without warning!

Dynarec, in its current form (and past form too lol), is just bad news. And personally, I see no point in trying/learning to predict when gpSP will crash, or generally dealing with it any further. VC injection, despite its lack of save states and usage of the limited 3DS game slots, is far more reliable.

agreed , got fed up with all the crashes that dynarec is causing , i switched to mgba since its faster than gpsp (dynarec off)

 

[Shin Akuma]

anyone got any idea how to enable unibios 3.2 on neo geo emu for 1.4? cant find the option

 

[geheim]

agreed , got fed up with all the crashes that dynarec is causing , i switched to mgba since its faster than gpsp (dynarec off)

Did you Switch to the RetroArch mGBA core or the standalone app?? Because the standalone app doesn't give me any audio on my N3DS, otherwise I'd switch to it as well...

 

[DominoBright]

Did you Switch to the RetroArch mGBA core or the standalone app?? Because the standalone app doesn't give me any audio on my N3DS, otherwise I'd switch to it as well...

Did you exit and tried again? That's how I got audio working. Yeah, it's weird.

 

[TimX24968B]

last time I tried mgba, I couldn't even get above 40 fps with 9 frameskip... audio sounded terrible. Aside from gpsp dynarec crashing, I have no clue why its recommended, unless its a N3ds only thing.