Hacking Emulation RetroArch/Libretro Thread: PS Vita Edition! Nightlies Included

[Metoroid0]

The slowdown across all iterations of FBA have always occurred with the Metal Slug series because the original MVS and AES hardware experienced slowdowns on those titles as well. At the time of Metal Slug titles releasing on the original SNK hardware, the boards at the time were pushed to their limits on metal slug titles and these slow downs would occur on the arcade machines when many sprite animations would occur on screen (explosions, super fast movements, etc...)

Retroarch FBA cores showing the slowdown on metal slug is actually indicative of how faithfully they emulate the hardware.

HEY! i always wondered that why some nes games slows down when i have beast of a PC. i always thought my pc isnt good enough for nes emulation xD so is there any way to tovercome that?

 

[Quackington]

Hi there,

I'm finally getting back into Vita homebrew (last dabbled in Summer 2016). I've downloaded RetroArch version 1.7.3 as instructed in the OP and have run it on my system. Back when I was using Homebrew in 2016, I just had a single SNES 9X 2005 core installed, as I didn't need anything else. This latest 1.7.3 version seems to have everything. I can't seem to find a setting for video resolution within version 1.7.3 so I can change resoltuon betwen 4:3 and 16:9 amongst others. I've gone through the quick menu and other parts of it too. All I can find for video settings are to change it between PAL/NTSC/auto.

Can someone please help? Thanks.

EDIT: found it! I didn't know you could scroll left and right in the RetroArch menu to find other settings, I was just scrolling up and down.

 

[NANASHI89]

Are TurboGrafx-CD, PC-FX, and Neo-Geo CD supported??

 

[rsn8887]

I updated the Downloadlinks for "Retroarch Nightly" on http://vitadb.rinnegatamante.it .

The download files are now updated every night, at midnight, PDT, to the latest buildbot release files from https://buildbot.libretro.com/nightly/playstation/vita/ .

This should make updating Retroarch to the latest nightly a bit easier, especially since the buildbot.libretro.com page is almost impossible to navigate with mobile devices.

I haven't checked how long it takes to install the app using Vita Homebrew Browser yet. It is possible that it will take a while, since the data files are contained in a zip file with almost 4,000 small files.

 

[rsn8887]

I tried the install of Retroarch via Vita Homebrew Browser. It takes a while to install, but it is not too bad: about 5 - 10 minutes or so. This is a very convenient way to update to latest nightly.

 

[DaveC1964]

I tried the install of Retroarch via Vita Homebrew Browser. It takes a while to install, but it is not too bad: about 5 - 10 minutes or so. This is a very convenient way to update to latest nightly.

Are any of the persistent bugs fixed? I am unable to bring up the MAME setting screen (the one where you set control etc) in MAME 2000.

 

[rsn8887]

Are any of the persistent bugs fixed? I am unable to bring up the MAME setting screen (the one where you set control etc) in MAME 2000.

This works but it is not obvious. In Mame 2000 and Mame 2003, the native Mame Menu is brought up with “R2”. To press it on the Vita, you first have to enable touch controls.

Go to settings, input, and set “enable touch” to “on”.

With this setting, L2, R2, L3, R3 are mapped to touch panel top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right areas

The default is to use the rear touch panel. If you prefer front touch you can set “prefer front touch” to “on” here.

Now you can bring up the Mame settings menu by simply touching the top right area of the touch panel of your preference.

Note you can also change the Retroarch menu hotkey to use touch. In input settings, change it from start+select+l+r to l3+r3. Now you can bring up the Retroarch menu by pressing the bottom left and bottom right touch areas with your fingers simultaneously. I find this much more convenient than l+r+start+select.

 

[Lord M]

This works but it is not obvious. In Mame 2000 and Mame 2003, the native Mame Menu is brought up with “R2”. To press it on the Vita, you first have to enable touch controls.

Go to settings, input, and set “enable touch” to “on”.

With this setting, L2, R2, L3, R3 are mapped to touch panel top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right areas

The default is to use the rear touch panel. If you prefer front touch you can set “prefer front touch” to “on” here.

Now you can bring up the Mame settings menu by simply touching the top right area of the touch panel of your preference.

Note you can also change the Retroarch menu hotkey to use touch. In input settings, change it from start+select+l+r to l3+r3. Now you can bring up the Retroarch menu by pressing the bottom left and bottom right touch areas with your fingers simultaneously. I find this much more convenient than l+r+start+select.

LOL i mapped Quick Menu to Start button (in Hotkey settings) and map the games Start button to L3 (bottom-right front touch) Much better.

 

[DaveC1964]

I remember trying that but it didn't work with 2000. No matter where I touched the panel, nothing. It did work on 2003 but because the emulation is a bit slower I preferred 2000. I updated MAME a few months later but it just crashed when I tried to load a game. I had to downgrade to early version. I kind of gave up on it because of the issues. Are the newer ones fixed or do they still have crash issues etc?

 

[Bonny]

Does anyone know, if there exists a Retroarch Version (Nightly) for the Vita (TV) who actually supports xerpi's viimote plug-in? - https://github.com/xerpi/viimote

 

[rsn8887]

I remember trying that but it didn't work with 2000. No matter where I touched the panel, nothing. It did work on 2003 but because the emulation is a bit slower I preferred 2000. I updated MAME a few months later but it just crashed when I tried to load a game. I had to downgrade to early version. I kind of gave up on it because of the issues. Are the newer ones fixed or do they still have crash issues etc?

It all works now. No more crashes for me at least.

 

[rmzalbar]

what you mean with "able to map button modifier"?

I was thinking a shift-button that you would hold down in order to modify the behavior of other buttons.

The Vita has 8 buttons aside from the directional pad. If you need more buttons than this, you could assign one of the buttons such that while you hold it down, other buttons can have an alternate mapping.

For example, the Stella emulator (Atari 2600) needs six buttons to emulate setting the positions of the important, but seldom changed, Color/BW and both difficulty switches alone. On top of this, to get to the Retroarch menu you have to mash a combo like [select + start + L1 + R1], throwing all those switches out of whack and/or resetting your game, something you definitely don't want to do on that system. With a modifier key, you could map all those switches off onto an alternate mapping that's only active while you hold down a particular button.

It can allow for cleaner, uncluttered mappings. The difference between this and Hotkey Enable is that it would apply to in-game buttons too, not just hotkeys.

I thought this was a feature available in most of the other implementations of Retroarch, but missing in the Vita version - but on review I found that isn't true. Since I wrote that, I discovered that it's not part of Retroarch in general; my memory was playing tricks on me. It would have to be new feature for RA and therefore not something I could add myself to the main branch. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any way to implement it without reworking RA's interface in a major way, which is not going to happen. It *can* be done via an alternate joypad driver without touching RA itself.

 

[DaveC1964]

I do wish RA had a more direct way to load games of a particular system faster. Like when I start up MAME it would just automatically go to the folder I set for MAME ROMs show me the list, I would just pick a game and it would work. As it is now I need to always browse through folders to get to the MAME directory then it asks a bunch of dumb questions half of which I don't get (browse archive, what?) then asks me to pick the emulator again even though I already loaded the MAME module etc. RA is great but has to have the most tedious interface ever.

 

[rmzalbar]

I do wish RA had a more direct way to load games of a particular system faster. Like when I start up MAME it would just automatically go to the folder I set for MAME ROMs show me the list, I would just pick a game and it would work. As it is now I need to always browse through folders to get to the MAME directory then it asks a bunch of dumb questions half of which I don't get (browse archive, what?) then asks me to pick the emulator again even though I already loaded the MAME module etc. RA is great but has to have the most tedious interface ever.

Your wishes are granted: Set up playlists.

You can use the playlist creator in post #3166 from this thread

Divide your ROMs in separate folders for each system. You can quickly generate playlists for each system using the tool above, it will generate a list from the actual files in your rom folder. The playlists will show up right on your main RetroArch menu as scrolling lists labelled by system. RetroArch will automatically launch the ROMs with the cores you selected when you created the playlists.

Much better than opening content manually, or trying to use the built-in retroarch database scan that never finds anything.

 

[Lord M]

I was thinking a shift-button that you would hold down in order to modify the behavior of other buttons.

The Vita has 8 buttons aside from the directional pad. If you need more buttons than this, you could assign one of the buttons such that while you hold it down, other buttons can have an alternate mapping.

For example, the Stella emulator (Atari 2600) needs six buttons to emulate setting the positions of the important, but seldom changed, Color/BW and both difficulty switches alone. On top of this, to get to the Retroarch menu you have to mash a combo like [select + start + L1 + R1], throwing all those switches out of whack and/or resetting your game, something you definitely don't want to do on that system. With a modifier key, you could map all those switches off onto an alternate mapping that's only active while you hold down a particular button.

It can allow for cleaner, uncluttered mappings. The difference between this and Hotkey Enable is that it would apply to in-game buttons too, not just hotkeys.

I thought this was a feature available in most of the other implementations of Retroarch, but missing in the Vita version - but on review I found that isn't true. Since I wrote that, I discovered that it's not part of Retroarch in general; my memory was playing tricks on me. It would have to be new feature for RA and therefore not something I could add myself to the main branch. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any way to implement it without reworking RA's interface in a major way, which is not going to happen. It *can* be done via an alternate joypad driver without touching RA itself.

If you need six buttons and dont like the combo for Menu, just disable it and set Quick Menu on a single button with Hotkey. You can also set Quick Menu on one of four analog stick direction, either left or right sticks.

 

[gnatydnac]

hmm...now button remapping to xy isn't available. I used to remap 'start select' to 'x y' but it takes no effect anymore.hope to be fixed

 

[pralima87]

I updated the Downloadlinks for "Retroarch Nightly" on http://vitadb.rinnegatamante.it .

The download files are now updated every night, at midnight, PDT, to the latest buildbot release files from https://buildbot.libretro.com/nightly/playstation/vita/ .

This should make updating Retroarch to the latest nightly a bit easier, especially since the buildbot.libretro.com page is almost impossible to navigate with mobile devices.

I haven't checked how long it takes to install the app using Vita Homebrew Browser yet. It is possible that it will take a while, since the data files are contained in a zip file with almost 4,000 small files.

Wow this is really nice!

 

[rsn8887]

If you need six buttons and dont like the combo for Menu, just disable it and set Quick Menu on a single button with Hotkey. You can also set Quick Menu on one of four analog stick direction, either left or right sticks.

And/or you could just use touch it gives you four extra buttons L2, R2, L3 and R3 that should be enough.

 

[silversyams]

Hi..is there a way to map A+B to L and C+D to R in FBA Neogeo...thanks.

 

[rsn8887]

No, not at the moment.