Homebrew RetroArch - A new multi-system emulator

corey89 · Sep 6, 2012

Strangely I can't get most CPS1 or NeoGeo roms to work either. The only game I got to run was Final Fight (ffight.zip), but games like Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (dino.zip) just gives an error.

CPS2 seems to run all the games smoothly though, just ran through Street Fighter Alpha with no hiccups

catuligbat · Sep 6, 2012

CPS1 (Yes cadillacs dinosaurs works without problems) and NeoGeo roms works in my case but i have neogeo bios for mame 0.139 and have this roms set for finalburn Finalburn 029726 size around 10gbs

AppleCrow · Sep 6, 2012

LibretroRetroArch said:
Dogway said:

You did care about that post of mine because it was a perfect bait to joke with, but I can see how you just ignored several others I did, for example I first commented about CCPro input lag, but you only started talking about it much later when it already was a common issue, same for the controller configuration, and much recently my question about saving service menu options, (apart of rom paths too which have been commented several times.

Click to expand...

What makes you think I am ignoring any of those issues?

They're duly noted and they will be looked at - but you will have to wait until 0.9.8 to see fixes for those unless you are willing to compile from source (assuming you know how to do it - if not, either get somebody who does know to do it regularly or learn it yourself - unlike other authors, I support people doing unofficial WIP builds every once in a while - it's a good way to track bugs/problems before an official release comes up).

LibretroRetroArc · Sep 6, 2012

AppleCrow said:
LibretroRetroArch said:

Dogway said:

You did care about that post of mine because it was a perfect bait to joke with, but I can see how you just ignored several others I did, for example I first commented about CCPro input lag, but you only started talking about it much later when it already was a common issue, same for the controller configuration, and much recently my question about saving service menu options, (apart of rom paths too which have been commented several times.

Click to expand...

What makes you think I am ignoring any of those issues?

They're duly noted and they will be looked at - but you will have to wait until 0.9.8 to see fixes for those unless you are willing to compile from source (assuming you know how to do it - if not, either get somebody who does know to do it regularly or learn it yourself - unlike other authors, I support people doing unofficial WIP builds every once in a while - it's a good way to track bugs/problems before an official release comes up).

Click to expand...

Hielkenator · Sep 6, 2012

corey89 said:
Strangely I can't get most CPS1 or NeoGeo roms to work either. The only game I got to run was Final Fight (ffight.zip), but games like Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (dino.zip) just gives an error.

CPS2 seems to run all the games smoothly though, just ran through Street Fighter Alpha with no hiccups

You need compatible roms.
Compatible with finalburn.

Jacobeian · Sep 6, 2012

nding on the ROM we're about to load.

There's basically lots of work involved in every libretro port because most of the time these emulators/games were not really made with consoles and limited RAM usage in mind - memory leakage is also a major problem in most emus that has gone unnoticed because PCs have a lot of memory to waste before it becomes a potential hazard, thus leaks like that tend to get overlooked.

Well, except fba, all these emulators have been ported to gamecube and wii (which probably have the less memory available of all those supported consoles) without any memory issues or heavy modifications to original core, so original code is likely much more robust and easier to port than what you are implying. No, the difficulty is more that they have obvipusly never been designed to fit within a multi-emulator framework in the first place, which explain all the difficulties you have been facing.

And about statically allocating rom buffer to max size, it's actually very common design requirement in real-time onboard programming, more than on pc actually. This way you have full control on the memory reserved to the program at compilation time, and does not rely on dynamic allocating/freeing each time a new rom is loaded. I agree portable emulators should however make this size configurable though as you could want to limit supported features on platforms with limited RAM.

yaketyJack · Sep 6, 2012

I am glad we are a big happy family once again, I was getting a bit worried there...I think biting our collective tongues when we get annoyed would be the correct way to stay positive, just like in real life! LibretroRetroArch (do you have a first name?), we really appreciate your hard work. You are building something that makes people happy, which is the concept behind Nintendo and it's games.

I love how everything runs so smoothly and 60fps. The gameboy advance emulator is miles ahead of the previously available ones. It's what makes it hard to tell that it's not the real machine. Only the blurry filtering gives it away, but I assume you have some tricks up your sleeve :-) I have shown people from work and they all now are on their way to hack their wii's to use this arcade emulator and buying tatsunoko arcade controllers. I know you have mentioned that the wii is not your real priority, but remember that it's the most easily hacked system with the largest install base...that should definitely count for something, right? And all of us here love our wii's so it breaks our hearts when you say that ;-)

It takes a special kind of person to work so hard on this and it is really appreciated. So just remember that many people are having a lot of fun thanks to you. Keep up the good work!

-Joseph

LibretroRetroArc · Sep 6, 2012

Jacobeian said:
nding on the ROM we're about to load.

There's basically lots of work involved in every libretro port because most of the time these emulators/games were not really made with consoles and limited RAM usage in mind - memory leakage is also a major problem in most emus that has gone unnoticed because PCs have a lot of memory to waste before it becomes a potential hazard, thus leaks like that tend to get overlooked.

Click to expand...

Well, except fba, all these emulators have been ported to gamecube and wii (which probably have the less memory available of all those supported consoles) without any memory issues or heavy modifications to original core, so original code is likely much more robust and easier to port than what you are implying. No, the difficulty is more that they have obvipusly never been designed to fit within a multi-emulator framework in the first place, which explain all the difficulties you have been facing.

Well, actually no, it is what I've been saying. For instance, VBA GX uses virtual memory paging -

https://vba-wii.goog...ource/vmmem.cpp

which we definitely don't do - and it's best off not resorting to virtual memory anyway unless you really need it (since its slow) - so yes, the memory issues are indeed very much there if you want to do it without VMM.

The latest version of VBA Next (committed to Github but not released - you'll have to compile yourself) fits 32MB ROMs into memory so it doesn't seem we will have to bother with VMM for VBA on Wii. The cutoff point for VBA Next might be Wii/Xbox 1 anyway since the Gamecube definitely does not have the CPU power to really run it well.

LibretroRetroArc · Sep 6, 2012

yaketyJack said:
I know you have mentioned that the wii is not your real priority, but remember that it's the most easily hacked system with the largest install base...that should definitely count for something, right? And all of us here love our wii's so it breaks our hearts when you say that ;-)

What I hope to encourage more than anything else (and it seems I forgot to mention this and I might have started off on a bad note, but nevertheless) - is to try to get developers/porters to look into the libretro API. I see it as a way of futureproofing their own emulator/game ports so that when they want to move beyond the Wii, they can just as easily run it on PC or on a PS3 without having to write any platform-specific code more or less (don't get me wrong, you can put all the platform-specific optimizations that you want in the libretro port - it's just that you don't have to bother writing a Gx, audio and input backend by yourself - neither do you have to do it for PS3 or 360 or Xbox 1 for that matter either.

Really, the chief aim here is making sure that we have all these codebases ready to go that can be easily ported in one fell swoop to a new platform - say the PS Vita usermode loader comes out tomorrow and somebody did a RetroArch port to that - with a few minor modifications all the libretro ports would just 'work' out of the box. It's kinda hard not to see the advantages in something like that.

IMHO, too many standalone emulators ported to one specific console die out over time and it either never gets maintained anymore or something better takes its place for a while and then that gets deserted as well - with libretro, the ports are constantly updated because it isn't just a Wii or a PS3 port - it's also for PC - so there's a lot more incentive to keep updating it since your 'audience' is not just a niche limited to one console, but nearly all platforms.

Morpheus_72 · Sep 6, 2012

seam said:
Morpheus_72 said:

Many thanks guys for this awesome emu. Great job. I tried a lot of CPS-2 games (from mame set 0.144) and my all-time favorites Pitfall II and Sunset Riders. It was pure fun to play them on a TV. Normally I play these games on my Caanoo with FBA 0.2.97.24.

But for some reasons I cannot get NeoGeo ROMs to work with RetroArch. I tried several different neogeo.zip bios and ROMs from different mame sets. Where do I have to store neogeo.zip ? In the RetroArch system folder on my SD card or along with the game ROMs on my USB hard drive ? Can I store it zipped or do I have to unzip it ?

Help from this forum would be greatly appreciated.

Click to expand...

i had this problem too with neogeo. i eventually had some people SEND me their EXACT bios and roms they used(which they had working) and it STILL didnt work for me... which doesnt make any sense. so i was forced to give up. all the other cores ive tried booted games just fine though. loving being able to play cps 1-2 and some cave games on my wii

corey89 said:
Strangely I can't get most CPS1 or NeoGeo roms to work either. The only game I got to run was Final Fight (ffight.zip), but games like Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (dino.zip) just gives an error.

CPS2 seems to run all the games smoothly though, just ran through Street Fighter Alpha with no hiccups

The strange thing is I just installed FBA 0.2.97.26 on my Notebook (Win7) and this version is working perfectly with the bios neogeo.zip and rom set that does not work with RetroArchs NeoGeo core 0.2.97.26. I always get a load error.

I have no issues with the FBA_CPS1 core, FBA_CPS2 core (every game worked) and FBA_alpha core (tested with Pitfall II and Sunset Riders)

GBA, SNES, PC-Engine, Genesis games also worked fine.

LibretroRetroArc · Sep 6, 2012

Morpheus_72 said:
seam said:

Morpheus_72 said:

Many thanks guys for this awesome emu. Great job. I tried a lot of CPS-2 games (from mame set 0.144) and my all-time favorites Pitfall II and Sunset Riders. It was pure fun to play them on a TV. Normally I play these games on my Caanoo with FBA 0.2.97.24.

But for some reasons I cannot get NeoGeo ROMs to work with RetroArch. I tried several different neogeo.zip bios and ROMs from different mame sets. Where do I have to store neogeo.zip ? In the RetroArch system folder on my SD card or along with the game ROMs on my USB hard drive ? Can I store it zipped or do I have to unzip it ?

Help from this forum would be greatly appreciated.

Click to expand...

i had this problem too with neogeo. i eventually had some people SEND me their EXACT bios and roms they used(which they had working) and it STILL didnt work for me... which doesnt make any sense. so i was forced to give up. all the other cores ive tried booted games just fine though. loving being able to play cps 1-2 and some cave games on my wii

Click to expand...

corey89 said:

Strangely I can't get most CPS1 or NeoGeo roms to work either. The only game I got to run was Final Fight (ffight.zip), but games like Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (dino.zip) just gives an error.

CPS2 seems to run all the games smoothly though, just ran through Street Fighter Alpha with no hiccups

Click to expand...

The strange thing is I just installed FBA 0.2.97.26 on my Notebook (Win7) and this version is working perfectly with the bios neogeo.zip and rom set that does not work with RetroArchs NeoGeo core 0.2.97.26. I always get a load error.

I have no issues with the FBA_CPS1 core, FBA_CPS2 core (every game worked) and FBA_alpha core (tested with Pitfall II and Sunset Riders)

GBA, SNES, PC-Engine, Genesis games also worked fine.

the libretro FBA port seems to be more strict on the kind of ROMs that need to be present than FBA for Win32. I'll try to get that solved.

Nevertheless, Neo Geo should definitely works - does over here.

quepaso · Sep 7, 2012

If your games are not working like mine were even after using clrmamepro, its the romset. The wii port is way more strict then the pc version. I had to get a neogeo.zip from someone directly and that worked when no neogeo games would ever load at all period. All the CPS1 games that did not work (sf2) now work with proper roms i got from some online sites. Trust me, everything works exactly as described with the games, i tested the majority of them.

the_randomizer · Sep 7, 2012

Can't wait for version 0.9.8, but 0.9.7.1 is more than enough to keep my occupied!

DJPlace · Sep 7, 2012

i just wish there was some way to get split screen on the VBA on wii just like VBA Link that would be sweet me and my friends playing kirby's nightmare in dream land mini games man this is some good shit but it will never happen. i do rember seeing one GB emulator allowing split screen... but it's ran so damn fast and there was no way to slow it down.

Hielkenator · Sep 7, 2012

Check usenet for a full romset for FBAnext

LibretroRetroArc · Sep 8, 2012

Going to be releasing an updated version of SNES9x Next today that has the bugs ironed out that the_randomizer and others pointed out. It will also play Tales of Phantasia. There are also some slight performance improvements that you may or may not notice in some of the edge case games. Overall, it's a good enough improvement to release.

Also - I think I have a solution for those people that have been complaining about ZIPs - it will be in the next release (not the SNES9x Next update but the next RetroArch version) - there will be an option so that it will 'directly load' the first ZIP file - it does this by doing behind the scenes 'extract file to current directory first, load it into RAM, then delete it immediately again since we no longer need it'. Now, of course, this won't work for ISO files put into ZIPs, but really, I've never seen any emulator in my life support that, so I don't think people will expect this to work in either case.

I think this might take away most of the complaints to do with ZIPs - I mean, the only thing that still might worry you is if you have not enough space available on your harddrive/SD card to temporarily extract that file to the current working directory, but other than that, it should be transparent and it should work about the same to you as 'directly loading' the contained file in the ZIP archive into a buffer.

Also - to the guy complaining about Star Fox 2 not running really well - I think I should point out that most ROMs run better if you run that ROM first after you start up the libretro core. This especially applies to games like Star Fox 2 and Star Fox that really tax the CPU. I have found only minuscule and very irregular slight sound pops here and then - but overall, it is really playable considering that prior to the speedhacks, this would run at 45fps on a PS3/360 (Star Fox 2 and Vortex are the most demanding games on SNES9x 1.52 - even Vortex prior to the speedhacks would run at say 45-50fps on 360). So considering that, the performance is a vast improvement considering it also has no frameskipping to 'rely on'/'cheat with'.

Hielkenator · Sep 8, 2012

Great! Can't wait to try it!
Awesome job, thank you very much!

Gamecuber · Sep 8, 2012

LibretroRetroArch said:
Going to be releasing an updated version of SNES9x Next today that has the bugs ironed out that the_randomizer and others pointed out. It will also play Tales of Phantasia. There are also some slight performance improvements that you may or may not notice in some of the edge case games. Overall, it's a good enough improvement to release.

Also - I think I have a solution for those people that have been complaining about ZIPs - it will be in the next release (not the SNES9x Next update but the next RetroArch version) - there will be an option so that it will 'directly load' the first ZIP file - it does this by doing behind the scenes 'extract file to current directory first, load it into RAM, then delete it immediately again since we no longer need it'. Now, of course, this won't work for ISO files put into ZIPs, but really, I've never seen any emulator in my life support that, so I don't think people will expect this to work in either case.

I think this might take away most of the complaints to do with ZIPs - I mean, the only thing that still might worry you is if you have not enough space available on your harddrive/SD card to temporarily extract that file to the current working directory, but other than that, it should be transparent and it should work about the same to you as 'directly loading' the contained file in the ZIP archive into a buffer.

Also - to the guy complaining about Star Fox 2 not running really well - I think I should point out that most ROMs run better if you run that ROM first after you start up the libretro core. This especially applies to games like Star Fox 2 and Star Fox that really tax the CPU. I have found only minuscule and very irregular slight sound pops here and then - but overall, it is really playable considering that prior to the speedhacks, this would run at 45fps on a PS3/360 (Star Fox 2 and Vortex are the most demanding games on SNES9x 1.52 - even Vortex prior to the speedhacks would run at say 45-50fps on 360). So considering that, the performance is a vast improvement considering it also has no frameskipping to 'rely on'/'cheat with'.

What about Gamecube port? Are you going to release a Gamecube version of RetroAch today? I can't wait to see its performance on Gamecube.

LibretroRetroArc · Sep 8, 2012

Gamecuber said:
LibretroRetroArch said:

Going to be releasing an updated version of SNES9x Next today that has the bugs ironed out that the_randomizer and others pointed out. It will also play Tales of Phantasia. There are also some slight performance improvements that you may or may not notice in some of the edge case games. Overall, it's a good enough improvement to release.

Also - I think I have a solution for those people that have been complaining about ZIPs - it will be in the next release (not the SNES9x Next update but the next RetroArch version) - there will be an option so that it will 'directly load' the first ZIP file - it does this by doing behind the scenes 'extract file to current directory first, load it into RAM, then delete it immediately again since we no longer need it'. Now, of course, this won't work for ISO files put into ZIPs, but really, I've never seen any emulator in my life support that, so I don't think people will expect this to work in either case.

I think this might take away most of the complaints to do with ZIPs - I mean, the only thing that still might worry you is if you have not enough space available on your harddrive/SD card to temporarily extract that file to the current working directory, but other than that, it should be transparent and it should work about the same to you as 'directly loading' the contained file in the ZIP archive into a buffer.

Also - to the guy complaining about Star Fox 2 not running really well - I think I should point out that most ROMs run better if you run that ROM first after you start up the libretro core. This especially applies to games like Star Fox 2 and Star Fox that really tax the CPU. I have found only minuscule and very irregular slight sound pops here and then - but overall, it is really playable considering that prior to the speedhacks, this would run at 45fps on a PS3/360 (Star Fox 2 and Vortex are the most demanding games on SNES9x 1.52 - even Vortex prior to the speedhacks would run at say 45-50fps on 360). So considering that, the performance is a vast improvement considering it also has no frameskipping to 'rely on'/'cheat with'.

Click to expand...

What about Gamecube port? Are you going to release a Gamecube version of RetroAch today? I can't wait to see its performance on Gamecube.

Not today - it's all but done but I will need -

1) to focus on a faster SNES9x port - something based on v1.43 or 1.50 for Cube - Cube runs 1.52 very well but not enough to play most games at fullspeed all the time - Donkey Kong Country dips from 60fps to 43fps in levels such as World 2-1 - as expected in a way but it still runs way better than expected at the same time. Color addition/subtraction seems to be what is hurting it most in those scenes and there hasn't really been any effort (by either the main developers or by outside forces) to try to optimise that code - that's if it can be optimised beyond the current state in the first place.
2) I want to get the big Final Burn cores working on Cube as well and to see performance with CPS1/CPS2, which leads me onto 3)
3) I will need to focus on virtual memory implementations on Cube especially since there's so little RAM available even a Doom WAD can't fit into RAM - so at the moment while all ports 'work', some ROMs are simply too big that easily fit in the Wii's RAM.

So while everything just 'works' right now there is still a lot of work to be done. We've got the libretro core switching working now at least on Cube and in terms of performance it once again beats its contemporaries - PS2 - hands down - Xbox 1 is clearly superior though and 'just' a bit slower than Wii, but I guess that was to be expected.

yaketyJack · Sep 8, 2012

sweet! I was happy with the other snes emu on wii, but I guess having choice never hurts!

Homebrew RetroArch - A new multi-system emulator

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The Temp's official fox whisperer

going hire Ronald McDonald To Gun Down Nintendo.

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