Homebrew RetroArch - A new multi-system emulator

[Toad King]

btw just found out that setting screen resolution (not aspect ratio) to 640x480i fixed the display issue but still pressing Home then "+" exits instead of displaying the menu.
anyways, thanks for your help

Do you still get the crashes when in 640x480i? Also, does this happen on cores other than gambatte/prboom/fba?

 

[nakata6790]

Tested the latest version some more, here are my results, i only use the cores for the systems i use RA for:

prboom core
To whoever it may concern, I managed to get the following wads to work

Also music works good. I used the files from here and renamed them, while using the .mp3 extension.
Controls work very good, although pointer controls like WiiDoom would be nice.
Finally,wads like Batman, Quake, Hexen don't work yet (for me at least), DSDoom it is then.

I reverted to the previous fba core, seeing as it loads the same roms as the new one, plus some games like pacman etc. and others that hang on service menu on th new one.
I must stress that this is however ON MY PART, as i have yet to find updated fba romset.
(my old rom list that works)
Games that weren't working on previous fba core still don't

Gambatte palettes are a hit and miss for me, especially for games like Super Mario Land 2, while they work great in games like Kid Dracula. I haven't found how to disable them when i don't like the result, so I reverted to the old core. Again this is my personal experience.

Vba GX is great. While it still has speed issues in some games like Metroid Zero Mission, it now plays 32MB games like Legend of Spyro Eternal Night and especially Mother 3.

Snes 9x next works amazingly as well and now without the performance degradation after a certain time period.
Combined with the separate savestate/sram directories and .zip support it is much MUCH better than the previous version.

My 2c.

DISCLAIMER: I did not test the other cores, psikyo, cps1,2, neo go etc.

 

[Tetsuo Shima]

This link is not down -

https://anonfiles.com/file/c2326c85710058c44e39356fe0db3e78

Don't know what you guys are talking about.

Now I can access the link again, but this morning it gave me an error page

 

[LibretroRetroArc]

Tested the latest version some more, here are my results, i only use the cores for the systems i use RA for:


Gambatte palettes are a hit and miss for me, especially for games like Super Mario Land 2, while they work great in games like Kid Dracula. I haven't found how to disable them when i don't like the result, so I reverted to the old core. Again this is my personal experience.

Yes i think the palettes - although nice - are sometimes undesired. It was a feature built-in by Maister and eadmaster. Perhaps we need some button combo in the libretro core to disable it or cycle through the different palettes - that could work.

 

[nintygaming]

Forgive me if this has already been asked, but how does RetroArch Wii compare to the suite of emulators from Tantric? Namely Snes9x GX. Are there any benefits or negatives other than having the emulators in one package?

Tantric's SNES9x GX is notorious for having speed issues, using frameskipping, and sound popping issues. Retroarch's SNES9x has NONE of these issues. Wanna play Yoshi's Island in fullspeed? You can now.

Tantric does have a nice emulator, but some games perform well, some don't. Its not like that with Retroarch. Also, SNES9x GX has gotten slow and more audio popping overtime. Why? I don't know. But I do wonder that if the GUI is causing problems as it may or may not take up too much memory. Then again, the Genesis Plus GX GUI doesn't seem to cause any speed issues, so maybe Tantric could look into that one, but I don't think he will. He seems to have abandoned his projects. Don't know why, its not like people are throwing out their Wii's. I'm sure he has better things to do.

 

[nintygaming]

There is no way to 'say' whether CRT filters are done properly or not - just like there's no way to say whether an emulator of a system is done 'properly' - there are various shades of grey - with each being their own approximation of the thing they are attempting to emulate.

That being said, I think I can speak for many that once you try shaders, you will NOT be wanting to go back again. 5xBR alone with the right shader combo wipes the floor with any 'authentic look' as far as I'm concerned - give me eye candy vs. authentic anyday.

Here are 2 images of Mega Man 2 on RetroArch 360 using the oldtvshader-variant4.cg (see them in fullscreen). Note - I like setting my games at 16;9 so if you don't like how it makes the picture look - don't blame the shader because it has nothing to do with it -

http://imgur.com/msqeyCi,lGrJqTP

Other shots I took from the PS3 builds (with various shaders) -

http://imgur.com/a/6u8Zb#0

http://i.imgur.com/el9iM.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/F9CxF.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/pLxCv.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/6l7lo.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/eN5Bt.jpg

While not 'accurate' or 'authentic', I'm sure you can agree with me that having games look like this is very aesthetically appeasing.

I guess it all depends on which one you prefer the most. Authentic vs. Eye Candy. Some of those shaders look like toothepaste and crayon smearing and would drive me up the wall. The first one with Mega Man 2 look dencent, but the 16:9 would kill it for me, but not for you. To each his own though!

By the way, did you ever find out why TG16 CD games would not load? I've tried many things, but nothing seems to work.

 

[Hielkenator]

Just noticing a lot of konami games do not properly start with the provided fba full core.
Most of them hang in the dipswitch mode and are unable to start.
some of them have major graphical problems.

same count for the toaplan games.

Previous version worked fine with these games.
Is it possible to get the previous full FBA core available?
this would be great so I can play Twinbee ans tmnt2 again....

also noticing sometimes the ccpro controls tend to "stick".

 

[nakata6790]

That is indeed the case with the newest fba core.
Anyway, previous fba core? Right away, i am uploading it
Here: http://dfiles.eu/files/ngacs5zx2

Btw, after studying the readme, i am surprised psxrearmed is less demanding than vb or snes cores

--EDIT--
2 more wads are working with the prboom core:
TNT.wad and Simpsons Doom II.wad

 

[LibretroRetroArc]

Just noticing a lot of konami games do not properly start with the provided fba full core.
Most of them hang in the dipswitch mode and are unable to start.
some of them have major graphical problems.

same count for the toaplan games.

Previous version worked fine with these games.

I told you about this already in the Cores manual PDF. It is linked in the OP for a reason. We know and we intend to fix it once we can solve it.

Is it possible to get the previous FBA core available?

Just copy over the DOL from the previous version or just name it differently. Should do the trick.

also noticing sometimes the ccpro controls tend to "stick".

That is what I tried to 'fix' with the custom Wiiuse version to begin with - it worked but then CCPro apparently no longer worked so we had to revert (I can't test CCPro since I don't own one).

Really - marcan42 tells you there is 'no problem' with wiiuse so why don't you just believe the guy? I mean, it isn't as if he was laughed out of the PS3 scene by the likes of CrashSerious and kakataroks or anything, oh no (and really, if you're laughed out a scene by CrashSerious of allpeople because your 'theories' regarding PS3 hacking are wrong, then oh well - this is a guy -Crash -still struggling with converting int16 sound to float....). But of course he knows perfectly well that 'libogc has many problems, but wiiuse is not one of them'. (yeah, like hell) And no, the 'overflow bug' was not the problem and never was.

 

[LibretroRetroArc]

Btw, after studying the readme, i am surprised psxrearmed is less demanding than vb or snes cores

PCSX ReARMed has a MIPS-to-ARM dynarec (it's a hacked version of the Ari64 N64 dynarec - PS1 had a subset of the N64's CPU so it was possible for notaz to port it from an N64 dynarec to a PSX one). Also, PCSX ReARMed has Exophase's fast and extremely accurate NEON GPU plugin - so put those two together and you have a great emu that is not only fast like hell but also far more accurate graphics-wise than anybody should have any reason to expect at these kind of speeds.

It seems prior to RetroArch it wasn't released on Android yet - it was originally released on the Pandora.

The tagteam is at it again with Drastic now on Pandora which will be a DS emu for ARM with fast speeds - unfortunately we'll have to wait a few years before sourcecode will be released.

 

[Hielkenator]

Yes i think the palettes - although nice - are sometimes undesired. It was a feature built-in by Maister and eadmaster. Perhaps we need some button combo in the libretro core to disable it or cycle through the different palettes - that could work.

Yes , those pallettes look horrible for some games. It would be great to cycle through or optionally disable them.

I do not have the old fba core anymore, where is it available?

 

[LibretroRetroArc]

By the way, did you ever find out why TG16 CD games would not load? I've tried many things, but nothing seems to work.

I'll look into it - I'm pretty sure it's something simple feature-wise that just needs to be catered to.

 

[nakata6790]

Interesting info about psxrearmed, thanks Libretroarch.
Man, if only a N64 ppc emu was as efficient as this, sigh...

Yes , those pallettes look horrible for some games. It would be great to cycle through or optionally disable them.

I do not have the old fba core anymore, where is it available?

post 1408

 

[mightymuffy]

Ohhh... fabulous release for both my Wii & Galaxy S2! Not really tried the Android version that much (probably tonight)
Wii version though, had a good bash and major props once again to the authors!
Slight problem with Super Mario World on this version though, it slows down quite a lot for me! Most noticeable on the wire cage on the first castle, or on the level before with the water underneath whilst invincible.... I do know you can achieve slowdown on the game whilst invincible/water level for instance anyway, but not as pronounced as it is here... tried both the rom on its own and the game as part of the Mario All Stars/World rom, same problem. Clearly wasn't like this in previous versions, and Yoshi's Island/FFIII/Super Mario Kart all run extremely well.... tried a few other games and can't see a problem, just Mario World for some reason! (PAL user, US roms, 480p, component cable)
Not unplayable by any means, just quite noticeable (and weird too, it being lowly Mario World rather than a chip enhanced game for example)

 

[the_randomizer]

Quality control has clearly failed for this release - I'm sorry about this and will do a thorough check the next time personally myself to make sure issues like this don't happen ever again. We had to do a lot of internal changes for the Android port where we had to support both 32bit RGBX8888 video and 16bit RGB565 video and it appears our video rendering code for the GX port right now has some bugs right now coping with that.

Rest assured this will be fixed and preferably this week - it has been a lot and a lot of work putting all this together and I believe we might just have 'rushed' the release out of the door to the console ports' detriment. Might have been better waiting another week but the pressure was on to get Android out of the door after all this time and I did a lot of internal changes for the console ports to make sure there was something 'release worthy' in there and to make sure it was far more maintainable in the future.

Who was pressuring who? What exactly happened that slipped through the cracks that requite a quick bug fix release? From my tests yesterday and today, I must say I'm quite impressed, I also like that Nestopia has a pseudo stereo output, which makes games sound perfect compared to a real NES. Keep it up! Oh, and to answer your question about Final Fantasy VI, I didn't notice any speed regressions at all.

Forgive me if this has already been asked, but how does RetroArch Wii compare to the suite of emulators from Tantric? Namely Snes9x GX. Are there any benefits or negatives other than having the emulators in one package?

Games like Yoshi's Island and Final Fantasy VI run full speed, even in large areas, due to the emulator not relying on frameskip hacks, so you get an overall smoother experience. A big plus is that the whole "open-up-the-menu-and-get-tinny-sound" issue is also absent in Snes9x Next.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Sweet, an Android port. Gonna try that out later when I feel like it

 

[jmckutchin]

Who was pressuring who? What exactly happened that slipped through the cracks that requite a quick bug fix release? From my tests yesterday and today, I must say I'm quite impressed, I also like that Nestopia has a pseudo stereo output, which makes games sound perfect compared to a real NES. Keep it up! Oh, and to answer your question about Final Fantasy VI, I didn't notice any speed regressions at all.



Games like Yoshi's Island and Final Fantasy VI run full speed, even in large areas, due to the emulator not relying on frameskip hacks, so you get an overall smoother experience. A big plus is that the whole "open-up-the-menu-and-get-tinny-sound" issue is also absent in Snes9x Next.

That sounds like a major benefit to me. My two biggest gripes with snes9x GX were the tinny sound and the issues with audio stuttering and popping I still had even after you guys decided on a correct frequency.

 

[the_randomizer]

That sounds like a major benefit to me. My two biggest gripes with snes9x GX were the tinny sound and the issues with audio stuttering and popping I still had even after you guys decided on a correct frequency.

Well, I remember that, took forever to find that number, not sure why this doesn't have the sound issue, and I've only seen it crash once, but that was my fault.

 

[nintygaming]

I'll look into it - I'm pretty sure it's something simple feature-wise that just needs to be catered to.

Sounds great.

One more things I've been wondering about. Don't those shaders in the PS3 version introduce "Input Lag"? I'm very sensitive to lag, especially on old-school games like Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. In fact, I'd say that Retroarch SNES9x has less lag (if any at all) than SNES9x GX.

 

[Floating Seal]

First of all I'd like to express my deepest thanks to the RetroArch team for all the the hard work you've done for this wonderful emulator. However I have a slight issue with try to play Sega CD games on my Toshiba Thrive tablet. I'm supposed to put the bios in RetroArch's 'system' directory like the readme says, but I can't seem to find RetroArch's main directory anywhere. Can someone give me a clue as to how to find it?