Anti-RetroArch sentiment seems to be growing

[smf]

why haven't they yet?

We'd have to pay to do that out of our own pockets.

 

[Minox]

Luckily nobody is forced to use RetroArch so if they don't like it they can always use something else.

 

[Deleted member 668561]

Why not just create a custom Linux distro, tailored specifically for retro emulation.... literally double click the rom file, boots into the needed emulator like it was an exec

 

[Pineapplecake]

It has always been a love hate relationship. The devs did a good job hosing any kind of negative sentiment and continue to do so. Heck reddit doesn't even seem to allow any kind of negative view of RA. But as a coder and someone who has used computers for 40+ years, it is far from perfect and I am not sure why it receives all of the love and accolades it does at this point. Things it does well, downloads cores, borks itself with updates, throws out config data, freezes at the startup of games an emulator on a 486 could run. Things it does not do well, provide a consistently playable experience, run without issue when you are trying to play with friends, operate without substantial support from other users that read verbose logs and tell people they should have known they should need "xxxx.dll v2.9 not 3.4 why are you running the latest drivers anyway bro? Do you even lift? A very loud app and community that seems to be short on substance at this point. Tried and tried to get into RA because that seemed to be the way things were heading but it was just so bloaty and setup was such a consistent nightmare that I just went back to my tried and true .7z of emus from XP days. All work fine still and holy cow I did not even have to go online to figure out why the install crashed because of a bad line in .cfg To each their own and more RA fun for you guys I guess but I really still feel like this should be in beta and gonna stick to what works for me. I guess once my vintage emus start failing, I may move over and help with the RA project and start fixing a couple of things but until then I am just gonna enjoy playing games and not forum diving all day because the keybinding got reconfigged without prompt and it stays frozen and the myriad of other issues I encountered on a range of machines. Happy gaming to all

 

[Deleted member 569451]

From a user's point of view, retroarch offers at least a few good things that you don't normally get in other emulators.

* Resizable windows that automatically fit window tiles on tiling window managers. Floating windows are a pain on tiling window managers.
* Well-documented default config options in /etc/retroarch.cfg that can be selectively overriden in ~/.config/retroarch/retroarch.cfg. You can configure retroarch entirely in plain text files and bypass GUI configuration. This is a powerful feature for people who prefer plain text configuration to GUI config. Most emulators I tried don't make it easy to selectively override a few config options in plain text files.

I prefer standalone emulators, but most standalone emulators don't offer these two features.

I can probably live without well-documented plain text config options that can be selectively overridden in separate files because emulators usually don't need much configuration, but I really want resizable windows.

 

[FAST6191]

Never met the massive desire for windows like that before. Not even sure I can see the use case.
Most seemingly go for the 1x, whole number multiplication (plus filters of varying nature*), widescreen hacks if available (mostly a 3d affair or bodge with 2d) or fullscreen (and probably black bars or surrounding image).
Anything else then ends up looking like smeared nonsense.

*I would broadly split them into classic sai/supersai/eagle/..., any of the texture replacement stuff (includes HD rendering and widescreen as it all falls from the same underpinning tech), http://bogost.com/games/a_television_simulator/ and similar ilk, and maybe a fourth for the more aware filters like we saw specifically for mario platformers to bump res or fun ones for doing 2d widescreen.