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RetroArch just got a facelift, in a brand new 1.8.5 update. The latest version of the emulator frontend offers a new menu option, stylized after the Nintendo Switch's "ozone" menu. For those of you used to the looks of the XMB (PS3) style, fear not, as you can revert back to that in the options, under settings>drivers. A major bug has also been fixed in this update--users who were previously unable to boot RetroArch on certain Chromebooks should now be able to without issue. In addition, many smaller bugfixes were made, along with better performance on Linux via OpenGL. Feel free to check out the official changelog below, or grab the new version from the source below.

1.8.5

• 3DS: Keep the bottom screen hidden on sleep/wakeup. When the 3DS wakes back up after being closed, the bottom screen needs to be reinitialized. Adding the condition here will cause the screen to be turned on or off based on the state of ctr_bottom_screen_enabled, as you’d expect
• ANDROID/CHROMEBOOK/CRASH: Fix Chromebook crashes (on x86 x64) when touching the screen
• BUGFIX: Prevent double input when using ‘return’ key (hardware) to close on-screen keyboard
• BUGFIX: Fix mouse capture hotkey not working
• BUGFIX: Avoid overflow when calculating multiplying performance counter
• BUGFIX: Retroarch overlay displaying “Game remap file loaded.” on the overlay instead of “Core remap file loaded.” when only a core remap file is present
• CHEEVOS/BUGFIX: Achievement triggers could cause Retroarch to Crash
• CHEEVOS: Don’t block Sameboy core because it only exposes some memory
• CHEEVOS: Support for extended Sega CD memory
• CHEEVOS: Show RetroAchievements Hash in content information list
• CHEEVOS: If the core says it’s exposing SYSTEM_RAM, give it the benefit of the doubt
• CHEEVOS: RetroAchievements rich presence for RA.org website/Discord
• CHEEVOS: Reset token when username or password changes
• CHEEVOS: Display measured progress on locked achievements
• CHEEVOS: Queue multiple popups
• CHEEVOS: Add delay retries to leaderboard submits
• CHEEVOS: Prevent buffer overflow when encountering an unknown macro
• CORE UPDATER: Prevent hang when fetching core list if HTTP transfer fails
• DISK CONTROL: Add disk labels to ‘disk inserted’ notifications
• EMSCRIPTEN: Recreate input event listeners properly
• FFMPEG CORE: Fix crash on seeking when using HW decoding in some cases
• LIBRETRO: Add disk control interface API extension
• LINUX: Avoid possible crash when running retroarch at startup
• LINUX/GLX: Fix threaded video crashes/instability because of GLX OML sync callbacks
• LOCALIZATION: Update French translation
• LOCALIZATION: Update Korean translation
• LOCALIZATION: Update Polish translation
• LOCALIZATION: Update Spanish translation
• LOCALIZATION: Update Portuguese Brazilian translation
• MENU: Add Menu Scroll Acceleration option
• MENU: Automatically select currently checked item when opening drop-down lists
• MENU: Fix smooth (vertical) line ticker scroll speed
• MENU: Don’t flush on override/remap messages
• MENU/DATETIME: Adds some new timedate styles that follow the DD/MM/YYYY format, found in several European countries
• MENU/DATETIME: Modifies the existing translation files in order to accommodate the new options that are now available
• MENU/DATETIME: Reorders the timedate view options based on a decreasing order of the quantity of information displayed, so that they are more convenient to switch around and easily categorized
• MENU/BUGFIX: Fix bug – if you were in XMB and you would set menu driver to RGUI, you could no longer go to the left or right tab
• MENU/MATERIALUI: Add option to remove navigation bar
• MENU/OZONE: Add DPI-based scaling
• MENU/OZONE: Add rudimentary pointer support
• MENU/OZONE: Add ‘Nord’ and ‘Gruvbox Dark’ themes
• MENU/OZONE/POINTER: Pointer can be used to switch between sidebar and entries list
• MENU/OZONE/POINTER: Pointer can be used to select sidebar and entries list items
• MENU/OZONE/POINTER: Both sidebar and entries list can be scrolled by dragging
• MENU/OZONE/POINTER: Clicking/pressing the header or footer produces a ‘cancel’ action
• MENU/OZONE/POINTER: Cursor focus follows mouse pointer from sidebar to entries list (and vice versa)
• MENU/OZONE/POINTER: In entries list, item under cursor is automatically selected (with some fudging to ensure this doesn’t break mouse wheel scrolling)
• MENU/OZONE/POINTER: In sidebar, item under cursor is not automatically selected (this is too jarring)
• MENU/RGUI: Add ‘Flux’ theme
• MENU/XMB: New color themes ‘Cube Purple’, ‘Family Red’, etc
• NETPLAY/MENU/BUGFIX: Fix Netplay Stateless Mode doesn’t save. Affects other netplay settings which can be overridden by commandline option
• ODROID GO ADVANCE: Rotation support
• NETPLAY/ROOMS/BUGFIX: Prevent out-of-bounds array indexing when displaying/selecting netplay rooms in menus
• SCANNER: Add ‘Arcade DAT Filter’ Option
• SCANNER: Add scanning Korea and Asia PS1 discs
• SCANNER: Add support for scanning PSP Korean
• VIDEO: Set hardware ‘Bilinear filtering’ off by default
• VIDEO/WIDGETS: Widgets are now menu-independent
• VIDEO/WIDGETS: Allow notifications to use full screen width when not displaying menu
• VIDEO/WIDGETS: DPI-based scaling
• VIDEO/WIDGETS: Fix volume widget scaling
• VIDEO/WIDGETS: Add independent widget scale override settings for fullscreen/windowed modes
• VIDEO/WIDGETS/BUGFIX: Prevent improper display of (old style) OSD text when widgets are enabled
• VIDEO/WIDGETS/THREADED/BUGFIX: Fix issue – corruption of menu widgets when running some cores (e.g. VICE) with threaded video enabled
• WIFI/CONNMANCTL: Display more characters from SSID

Source

 

[Plasmaster09]

3DS can't handle Snes9x mainline, it's too weak

And yet it can handle Bubble2k's version, which is significantly closer to mainline. And runs leagues better, with the exception of one romhack that I can't seem to get to start (New Super Mario Land, a SNES remake of SML for the Game Boy. It starts, but after the opening "who made this" screen, nothing happens).

 

[m4xw]

Ah neat. I've been using Ozone for a while now on the Switch. Neat to see it ported to upstream/other devices. It's a very nice UI, but a bit unintuitive here and there, which I mostly blame on RetroArchs UI in general being extremely unintuitive.

Looks and plays good tho.

Its been around and working on desktop since it exists.
Only thing that changed is its now the default + some fixes.

@Chary slightly missleading title.

 

[Plasmaster09]

Its been around and working on desktop since it exists.
Only thing that changed is its now the default + some fixes.

@Chary slightly missleading title.

Pity they couldn't add Ozone or at least a lower res version of it to Retroarch 3DS... or at least fix the horrible overlapping text issues with the PS3 UI on 3DS.

 

[m4xw]

Pity they couldn't add Ozone or at least a lower res version of it to Retroarch 3DS... or at least fix the horrible overlapping text issues with the PS3 UI on 3DS.

We got no 3DS devs in the team, feel free to contribute or offer suggestions + testing on the Discord.
Honestly you'd have to write a complete new menu driver to have a good experience on 3DS, given the screen sizes.
It's also why we wrote ozone for switch.
Edit: Tho I am pretty sure it should be available.

 

[HulkWogan]

I know Covid 19 has the world all crazy and stuff but using 3DS as your emulation device in 2020? That is scraping the barrel.

 

[nolimits59]

I know Covid 19 has the world all crazy and stuff but using 3DS as your emulation device in 2020? That is scraping the barrel.

Defo, a PSP is far better for portable retro emulation, even just the form factor of the console make it so much better.

And it's cheap af.

 

[64bitmodels]

I know Covid 19 has the world all crazy and stuff but using 3DS as your emulation device in 2020? That is scraping the barrel.

dude i couldn't resist oot3d and mm3d, don't judge my purchasing decisions.
Plus i do have PC and Wii u as well so i'm not really scraping the barrel

 

[Ev1l0rd]

Its been around and working on desktop since it exists.
Only thing that changed is its now the default + some fixes.

@Chary slightly missleading title.

So this replaces xmb?

If so, I'm totally okay with that, it's much easier to navigate and looks far cleaner (plus the settings aren't a pain in the ass to configure like they are on xmb).

 

[Plasmaster09]

I know Covid 19 has the world all crazy and stuff but using 3DS as your emulation device in 2020? That is scraping the barrel.

Using a 3ds for emulation isn't crazy, especially since there are standalone cores that work fantastic- better than RetroArch cores on 3ds, may I add.

 

[m4xw]

So this replaces xmb?

If so, I'm totally okay with that, it's much easier to navigate and looks far cleaner (plus the settings aren't a pain in the ass to configure like they are on xmb).

It's the new default menu driver. Simple as that.
You can still access everything else in the drivers menu in RA settings, as always.
XMB isn't gone, neither is rgui, etc.

 

[the_randomizer]

And yet it can handle Bubble2k's version, which is significantly closer to mainline. And runs leagues better, with the exception of one romhack that I can't seem to get to start (New Super Mario Land, a SNES remake of SML for the Game Boy. It starts, but after the opening "who made this" screen, nothing happens).

Probably because it requires more accurate emulation of the the SNES hardware, his version is based off of 1.43, which is absolutely ancient. Mainline version is on 1.60.2, so it's old.

 

[Plasmaster09]

Probably because it requires more accurate emulation of the the SNES hardware, his version is based off of 1.43, which is absolutely ancient. Mainline version is on 1.60.2, so it's old.

Ah. Wonder if anyone's going to port mainline to 3ds or at least SOMETHING newer than that.

 

[the_randomizer]

Ah. Wonder if anyone's going to port mainline to 3ds or at least SOMETHING newer than that.

Like I said, O3DS has a 268 MHz ARM CPU, two processors. N3DS has one 268 MHz and 800 MHz core, used in the N3DS titles like Xenoblade Chronicles. Snes9x 1.52 would be the best bet as it's the oldest core with the superior audio emulation, 1.60.2 would be far too demanding on either one.

 

[justinweiss]

Ah. Wonder if anyone's going to port mainline to 3ds or at least SOMETHING newer than that.

Mainline can run on N3ds, but it's at least as slow, if not slower, than 2010. There's probably not much of a point, but I might try to get the core building at some point anyway.

 

[Plasmaster09]

Like I said, O3DS has a 268 MHz ARM CPU, two processors. N3DS has one 268 MHz and 800 MHz core, used in the N3DS titles like Xenoblade Chronicles. Snes9x 1.52 would be the best bet as it's the oldest core with the superior audio emulation, 1.60.2 would be far too demanding on either one.

Yeah, you're not wrong.
Wish someone would port that over.

 

[the_randomizer]

Yeah, you're not wrong.
Wish someone would port that over.

At least 2010 (based off of 1.52) should run decently on N3DS

 

[Plasmaster09]

At least 2010 (based off of 1.52) should run decently on N3DS

Oh, so 2010 is based off the best one to work on n3ds. Thanks! I decided to upgrade, and my n3ds xl should arrive today (I figured I may as well splurge while I'm stuck inside for the foreseeable future), so I'll definitely check that out.
The other RetroArch cores (mGBA, Gambatte, Nestopia, PicoDrive, etc.) should run well, right? No more inexplicable lagging in something like Super Mario Land 2 Colored?

 

[the_randomizer]

Oh, so 2010 is based off the best one to work on n3ds. Thanks! I decided to upgrade, and my n3ds xl should arrive today (I figured I may as well splurge while I'm stuck inside for the foreseeable future), so I'll definitely check that out.
The other RetroArch cores (mGBA, Gambatte, Nestopia, PicoDrive, etc.) should run well, right? No more inexplicable lagging in something like Super Mario Land 2 Colored?

Yes, but it needs to be seriously optimized to run well on ancient hardware, especially on an ARM CPU. Whether that'll happen or not remains to be seen.

 

[Plasmaster09]

Yes, but it needs to be seriously optimized to run well on ancient hardware, especially on an ARM CPU. Whether that'll happen or not remains to be seen.

...the Retroarch cores aren't actually well-optimized either? Well, crud.

 

[the_randomizer]

...the Retroarch cores aren't actually well-optimized either? Well, crud.

That's subjective, but to each their own. Snes9x, and many other cores work perfectly fine on PC, but I digress.