I have heard in a few discord servers about how the people who make RetroArch have been harassing other devs... Is this true? And is there a thing I can read about it?
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No hate from my side, but I'm not a big fan of huge applications that has to have everything.
This is total hearsay, but I've heard on and off that devs like the mGBA guy, Duckstation dev, and Near were being harassed by the RA team. Looks like MVG has also heard bad things about the team, too, after googling it for a bit. Hard to find definitive proof as to what exactly they've done, though.
DuckStation development ended from alleged RA harassment - ResetEra
Anti RetroArch sentiment seems to be growing - GBAtemp
Near/byuu drama roundup - Twitter
DuckStation development ended from alleged RA harassment - ResetEra
Anti RetroArch sentiment seems to be growing - GBAtemp
Near/byuu drama roundup - Twitter
It always was hated because it paved the way for sloppy unoptimized one size fits none emulators just to say "I ported it to my toaster!". Back when we had single emulators made for devices and designed to squeeze every inch of processing power and did it really well. Now just getting the XmB boot screen and 9 FPS in SNES emulation equals a win.
Don't get me wrong its got better over time but still quite sloppy and it killed loads of solo projects that could've offered far better emulation due to actually being optimized.
Don't get me wrong its got better over time but still quite sloppy and it killed loads of solo projects that could've offered far better emulation due to actually being optimized.
Even if that would be the case, I think it's valid for someone to be off put by knowing people behind something are pricks. If you support what they made you're supporting them.
Also that's two words.
The thread mostly devolves into how people feel about the software, but I did skim a few to relate back to devs.
Some of this is covered by obnoxious "waah cancel culture" types, I'm also limited in that I haven't slept at the time of writing this. I'm also going to vaguely reply to somethings because I'm bitter.
Byuu committed suicide in June of last year, which lead to people talking about what pushed them to such a state. A few tweets I've found have brought up the Retroarch team as a source of abuse, and then that leaped into talking about their bullying as a whole or towards specific developers.
I wasn't aware in this space so I can't speak to this but when responding, libretro did say "we certainly acting very different these days," which is a confirmation of at least something. Side note, but no one is saying they outright caused it or was the direct reason. But if their abusive behavior is true, that could still weigh on a person.
Someone does link to chatlogs in the thread on page 3 with weird warnings I'm probably not awake enough to understand. I haven't read them myself but they are dated to 2017, which wasn't/isn't too far away.
The MVG tweet linked by Chary also has a reply mentioning that there are logs up to 2021, but I haven't done my own search.
So nothing too distant, and even if that was the case, there's no reason to assume the individuals (as not everyone on the team couldn't possibly be involved) just got better. Time passing by itself doesn't mean anything. Libretro going "we have all made mistakes" also personally irks me, since not all "mistakes" are equal.
Never used it, now I don't have to think about using it.
Some of this is covered by obnoxious "waah cancel culture" types, I'm also limited in that I haven't slept at the time of writing this. I'm also going to vaguely reply to somethings because I'm bitter.
Byuu committed suicide in June of last year, which lead to people talking about what pushed them to such a state. A few tweets I've found have brought up the Retroarch team as a source of abuse, and then that leaped into talking about their bullying as a whole or towards specific developers.
I wasn't aware in this space so I can't speak to this but when responding, libretro did say "we certainly acting very different these days," which is a confirmation of at least something. Side note, but no one is saying they outright caused it or was the direct reason. But if their abusive behavior is true, that could still weigh on a person.
Someone does link to chatlogs in the thread on page 3 with weird warnings I'm probably not awake enough to understand. I haven't read them myself but they are dated to 2017, which wasn't/isn't too far away.
The MVG tweet linked by Chary also has a reply mentioning that there are logs up to 2021, but I haven't done my own search.
So nothing too distant, and even if that was the case, there's no reason to assume the individuals (as not everyone on the team couldn't possibly be involved) just got better. Time passing by itself doesn't mean anything. Libretro going "we have all made mistakes" also personally irks me, since not all "mistakes" are equal.
Never used it, now I don't have to think about using it.
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Hating official Wii port of RetroArch Wii nowadays.
It's just too broken comparing to old versions... (which i've posted them here)
For use RetroArch on Wii nowadays, i just love using this awesome mod which is 100% optimized for Wii RA-HEXAECO by SuperrSonic
It's just too broken comparing to old versions... (which i've posted them here)
For use RetroArch on Wii nowadays, i just love using this awesome mod which is 100% optimized for Wii RA-HEXAECO by SuperrSonic
IMHO I don't know what happened if they harassed people or not, but the app itself works very well in what appears to be the age of emulators that completely forgot to implement the most basic interactions for couch play ( exit button shorcuts, automatic fullscreen at launch, etc).
Most modern emus are roughly coded to work but in the end, they are very unpractical from a real world use standpoint. Playing on couch? you have to get to the keyboard to exit. Playing on bed? have to go to pc to exit and load another rom, switch to fullscreen (on some emus).
Retroarch, like it or not, solved these issues by making the setup process very easy (looking at you, mame) and giving the overlay the power to close emulation and exit to desktop easily, change controls, navigate all with the gamepad... it feels more polished than the window of an emu in your desktop that you have to control with your keyboard or mouse. They targeted what others forgotten: ease of use.
Sorry, I don't know about the drama, but the app is awesome.
edit (hate me all you want):
PS: Again I don't know the facts but; this smells like cancel culture full throttle. I've been reading at least 5 completely different reasons on why retroarch devs were the worst, from harassing people (don't know exactly how they feel so touched because everyone is a ***khead in all social networks) to the comment above claiming there's even a suicide (and somehow retroarch is being accussed). The only reason that I've seen more than twice is that mame got mad at them, and even then, the reason of why varies from comment to comment. Too many reasons, too many histories... smells fishy.
It all seems to end in the classic open source community extremism realm that I was suspecting.
Most modern emus are roughly coded to work but in the end, they are very unpractical from a real world use standpoint. Playing on couch? you have to get to the keyboard to exit. Playing on bed? have to go to pc to exit and load another rom, switch to fullscreen (on some emus).
Retroarch, like it or not, solved these issues by making the setup process very easy (looking at you, mame) and giving the overlay the power to close emulation and exit to desktop easily, change controls, navigate all with the gamepad... it feels more polished than the window of an emu in your desktop that you have to control with your keyboard or mouse. They targeted what others forgotten: ease of use.
Sorry, I don't know about the drama, but the app is awesome.
edit (hate me all you want):
PS: Again I don't know the facts but; this smells like cancel culture full throttle. I've been reading at least 5 completely different reasons on why retroarch devs were the worst, from harassing people (don't know exactly how they feel so touched because everyone is a ***khead in all social networks) to the comment above claiming there's even a suicide (and somehow retroarch is being accussed). The only reason that I've seen more than twice is that mame got mad at them, and even then, the reason of why varies from comment to comment. Too many reasons, too many histories... smells fishy.
It all seems to end in the classic open source community extremism realm that I was suspecting.
Last edited by Gran_Hampa,
I don't hate RetroArch, I just don't use it. I prefer standalone emulators instead.
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I only use standalone emulators for commonly known consoles, but RetroArch on the other hand I use for systems that don't have a standalone emulator made for it.
Last edited by SylverReZ,
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Same.
On the Wii, there are emulators for most stuff of retro but not for some consoles (such Pokémon Mini (PokeMini), 32X (PicoDrive), arcades (MAME, FBA), etc.)
Considering every system is dominated with retroarch with very little options for alternative, it's hard to get something like a stand alone emulator on them. Wii u choices are basically.
- Use virtual console (Which excludes many not nintendo sysems)
- Use wii mode to load other emulators (That may not have updated emulators and less processing power compared to wii u mode)
- Use a... unstable retroarch on wii u. (It does crash for me most of the time)
Regarding some of the controversies.
The drama involving Byuu/Near wasn't really one-sided. It happened some years back, he and the head of Libretro would get into arguments and some very nasty name calling was traded. This hatchet had largely been buried for a number of years though, and Near was on decent terms with (and respected by) the Libretro team prior to his death. The harassment that drove Near to suicide was from Kiwifarms.
There was another feud a couple years ago with a couple of people in the Dreamcast emulation community, particularly skmp. I personally witnessed this one go down, the libretro people aren't the villains there. At the time, a libretro developer called Flyinghead was pretty much the sole contributor to skmp's reicast project (and revived/fixed it). He ended up making a retroarch core, which pissed skmp off because skmp was planning on closing the source and monetizing it. So skmp started sending legal threats and harassment to libretro. Flyinghead ended up leaving reicast and made his own fork called Flycast, continuing standalone and core versions.
I also know there's a longstanding feud with the MAME developers. One of their primary gripes with libretro seems to be the fact that there are multiple different cores based on different versions of the MAME emulator from different years. The MAME devs don't like that older emulator versions are still being released and maintained. But the existence of these cores is for the benefit of lower spec handheld hardware that can't run the newer and more demanding versions of the cores. When asked how they would deal with this problem, a MAME developer said they wish ARM-based handhelds didn't exist for emulation purposes.
I've noticed the open source argument being a common thing that has cropped up in the libretro feuds behind the scenes. You have to pay more close attention to the discord communities to see this however, or else all you get is the out of context name calling and miss what led to that. Whatever faults they have, libretro are militantly supportive of open source. And having visited the discord channels of other emulators such as reicast and duckstation, that sentiment is often not shared. That to me is kind of a big problem and defeats a lot of the point behind emulation.
Setting aside the feuds and other controversies, Retroarch offers some important features to me that are still missing from a lot of standalone ones. There aren't a ton of other standalone ones that support shader multipasses, or the runahead feature to eliminate input lag.
The drama involving Byuu/Near wasn't really one-sided. It happened some years back, he and the head of Libretro would get into arguments and some very nasty name calling was traded. This hatchet had largely been buried for a number of years though, and Near was on decent terms with (and respected by) the Libretro team prior to his death. The harassment that drove Near to suicide was from Kiwifarms.
There was another feud a couple years ago with a couple of people in the Dreamcast emulation community, particularly skmp. I personally witnessed this one go down, the libretro people aren't the villains there. At the time, a libretro developer called Flyinghead was pretty much the sole contributor to skmp's reicast project (and revived/fixed it). He ended up making a retroarch core, which pissed skmp off because skmp was planning on closing the source and monetizing it. So skmp started sending legal threats and harassment to libretro. Flyinghead ended up leaving reicast and made his own fork called Flycast, continuing standalone and core versions.
I also know there's a longstanding feud with the MAME developers. One of their primary gripes with libretro seems to be the fact that there are multiple different cores based on different versions of the MAME emulator from different years. The MAME devs don't like that older emulator versions are still being released and maintained. But the existence of these cores is for the benefit of lower spec handheld hardware that can't run the newer and more demanding versions of the cores. When asked how they would deal with this problem, a MAME developer said they wish ARM-based handhelds didn't exist for emulation purposes.
I've noticed the open source argument being a common thing that has cropped up in the libretro feuds behind the scenes. You have to pay more close attention to the discord communities to see this however, or else all you get is the out of context name calling and miss what led to that. Whatever faults they have, libretro are militantly supportive of open source. And having visited the discord channels of other emulators such as reicast and duckstation, that sentiment is often not shared. That to me is kind of a big problem and defeats a lot of the point behind emulation.
Post automatically merged:
Setting aside the feuds and other controversies, Retroarch offers some important features to me that are still missing from a lot of standalone ones. There aren't a ton of other standalone ones that support shader multipasses, or the runahead feature to eliminate input lag.
Last edited by granville,
The settings are the problem for me. I like separate emulators because I can use different controllers for each system and I won’t have to load particular configurations for each controller. I’ll be honest, I haven’t used retroarch in a long time, so maybe it’s better now. Still, setting each emu up, individually, isn’t my favorite. Retroarch does look nice, though.
RetroArch can be setup to autoload a preferred config upon emulator launch. So it's been great for quite a while.
yeah, I only have retroarch on my series x, both retail and devmode. you can backup the retroarch.cfg from local state iirc, but each requires its own configuration, if using external, as E is the media drive in devmode, while it's D in retail mode.
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