Homebrew RetroArch - A new multi-system emulator

[Toad King]

Not on Wii due to memory restraints. IIRC only Mednafen supports rewind feature, for Master System, Game Gear, NES, GameBoy and TurbograFX games.

Anyway, happy New Year everyone and may 2013 be the best year for everyone.

Reading the last pages, i'm happy to see the drama about the release date is thankfully behind us, which is as it should, ie it will be ready ready when it's ready.

If it's not too much hussle, i would like to ask ToadKing and Libretroarch about the changelog for the forthcoming 0.9.8 version, just to know what to expect.
1. If i understood correctly, MAME 0.78 (or is it 0.72 for Wii?) will be postponed for later on Wii (0.9.9 or beyond)?
2. Will arguments be supported (saved custom button assignments for each setup)?
3. Will there be an automatic detection of input method (say NC+Wiimote vs Wiimote by itself) on startup?
4. zip support for small roms? (although that is a non issue at this point, just asking )
5.Support for larger neo geo roms?
6. Speedup and performance improvements for sme fba games like Toki, Shinobi etc?
7. Any significant core specific changes?

That's all, thanks again for all the work so far and please take your time.
For what it's worth we can already play 500 arcade games along with thousands of retro console games with FBA, it's already great.

Actually with RetroArch any core that supports savestates can do rewinding, not just the mednafen cores. I think there are some issues with some FBA cores though, plus it's too intensive to work on the Wii for pretty much most cores.

To answer your questions:
1. MAME will probably miss 0.9.8, and I'm unsure on if it would be small enough to fit on the Wii. MAME's binaries are huge and when I developed MAME Wii I had to manually trim it down and remove a lot of cores.
2. Controller setups are still going to be one for everything.
3. Input detection is finicky at best or choose the wrong device at worst, so you'll have to just set it up manually once.
4. We already have zip support, and let's not bring this up again.
5. Not this release.
6. Not unless there were speed improvements for them in FBA 0.2.97.28.
7. Most of the core updates were in Snes9x (for speed improvements, pretty much most games should be fullspeed save for maybe some SA-1 or SFX games) and FBA updates.

New Wii features off the top of my head are:

* Native resolutions (double-strike)
* Debug text
* Alternative SRAM/Savestate locations
* Lots of video backend changes, shouldn't notice these as an end-user
* Fixed that bug where the menu input combo was really finickyhttp://neosource.1emu.net/forums/index.php?topic=1731.0

 

[LibretroRetroArc]

Will VBA Next ever get fixes for the framerate issues in Iridion 2, Mother 3, etc?

There might be some more speed we can wring out of it - I saw bgK doing some meaningful video rendering optimizations for VBA - if that pans out for VBA Next, we could be looking at quite significant speed gains.

Anyway, I'm not saying that this will happen and this will NOT happen in time for the 0.9.8 release. Remember that the Wii is still limited by the CPU in terms of how fast GBA emulation can be. That not even Nintendo released GBA games on Virtual Console probably speaks to that.

Mother 3 runs at fullspeed at least on Xbox 360/PS3 - Iridion 2 I can't be sure about although I can give it a test.

 

[LibretroRetroArc]

Not on Wii due to memory restraints. IIRC only Mednafen supports rewind feature, for Master System, Game Gear, NES, GameBoy and TurbograFX games.

Actually, there's no reason I couldn't throw in rewind support for the RetroArch Wii port. Just remember that this will be a feature that will demand much more CPU power - so if your core was just running 'barely' on Wii before, there's no way it will run fullspeed on the Wii since rewinding done with delta frames is quite expensive. Rewind for RetroArch Wii should probably be fullspeed for anything other than SNES9x, VBA Next and some high-demanding games in FBA.

This will be a feature that you will have to turn on/off explicitly before you start playing games on a core due to it making things twice as slow.

 

[LibretroRetroArc]

Do any of the RetroArch staff have access to a Ouya.

They'll have to offer one to me for free because I surely won't buy one, that's for sure. 800 dollars for that 'devkit' is a joke - if the 'SDK' you will have to target will just amount to a gamepad API then sure, we can put support in - I just wouldn't be able to test it.

While we're on Ouya - I have to call it as I see it and say that people are probably settting theselves up for disappointment by expecting too much from it. I don't put much stock in Android at this point and I surely don't put much stock in what they're offering people right now with OUYA. Android for a gaming console seems doomed to failure right from the beginning. Hell, even going with Blackberry 10 (QNX), iOS or just plain ARM Linux as the OS would have done the job for a games console - but hell no to some Java piece of garbage framework on top of a hacked Linux kernel (aka Android). This OS simply does not meet the requirements for a modern-day gaming console. Having a garbage collector run through your game with 10ms/20ms stalls willy-nilly will make it the laughing stock of the console world. I can see the post-launch reception already, and it will probably be an uncomfortable hangover that will remind people in the worst way possible why consoles are 'consoles' to begin with and why putting a smartphone OS on them is a terrible idea.

If that 'Valve' games console with ARM Linux comes out and if Valve is at least is somewhat more down-to-earth and receptive to opensource stuff than the current console players out there, that could totally eat OUYA's lunch - no contest at this point - ARM Linux will beat Android any day of the week for performance.

 

[the_randomizer]

There might be some more speed we can wring out of it - I saw bgK doing some meaningful video rendering optimizations for VBA - if that pans out for VBA Next, we could be looking at quite admirable speed gains.

Anyway, I'm not saying that this will happen and this will NOT happen in time for the 0.9.8 release. Remember that the Wii is still limited by the CPU in terms of how fast GBA emulation can be. That not even Nintendo released GBA games on Virtual Console probably speaks to that.

Mother 3 runs at fullspeed at least on Xbox 360/PS3 - Iridion 2 I can't be sure about although I can give it a test.

Iridion 2 slows down in the menu, and the levels will run fine until enemies show up. While I can't expect miracles, I can safely say it's the fastest I've seen GBA emulated on the Wii, but if/when we get those speed fixes, it will be all the better/

 

[4K_future]

They'll have to offer one to me for free because I surely won't buy one, that's for sure. 800 dollars for that 'devkit' is a joke - if the 'SDK' you will have to target will just amount to a gamepad API then sure, we can put support in - I just wouldn't be able to test it.

800 bucks is the developer early edition. The 99$ regular unit released in March 2013 should* be the same SDK but if it needs unlocking I do not know. Six months from now should show what the future for this device is.


Might be an idea to keep tabs on this user as he has been asked to test some emulators on the hardware.

He is only showing a OnLIve test below.



Kinda offtopic considering this is the wii thread I know.............

 

[Gamecuber]

Will GameCube port miss 0.9.8?

 

[nakata6790]

Thank you ToadKing for taking the time to answer my questions, much appreciated.
I forgot to ask one thing: will it be possible to eventually use the code from SDLmame for IR aiming on FBA too? It would be useful for games like operation wolf, operation tiger, zombieraid etc. that already run fine but are missing IR aiming. Thanks again and keep up the good work.

PS. LibretroRetroArc this multi machine emu really is an ambitious and super impressive project, hope you see it through.

 

[LibretroRetroArc]

Will GameCube port miss 0.9.8?

It's not really worth it as an independent release - you could compile and build it yourself if you really wanted to. My only way of booting it is with SD Gecko and that's really painful to set up every time with Phantasy Star Online exploit so it's not exactly my favorite port.

It's just a downgraded Wii port basically - nothing special about it really and a lot of ROMs won't fit into the Gamecube's small amount of RAM.

If you want to I can put out a release for it this time - it will just come with zero guarantees and an absolute minimum of quality control on my end.

 

[eadmaster]

Actually, there's no reason I couldn't throw in rewind support for the RetroArch Wii port. Just remember that this will be a feature that will demand much more CPU power - so if your core was just running 'barely' on Wii before, there's no way it will run fullspeed on the Wii since rewinding done with delta frames is quite expensive. Rewind for RetroArch Wii should probably be fullspeed for anything other than SNES9x, VBA Next and some high-demanding games in FBA.

This will be a feature that you will have to turn on/off explicitly before you start playing games on a core due to it making things twice as slow.

Then I suggest to add the "rewind_granularity" option.
Increasing the default value should reduce the CPU usage.

 

[the_randomizer]

It's not really worth it as an independent release - you could compile and build it yourself if you really wanted to. My only way of booting it is with SD Gecko and that's really painful to set up every time with Phantasy Star Online exploit so it's not exactly my favorite port.

It's just a downgraded Wii port basically - nothing special about it really and a lot of ROMs won't fit into the Gamecube's small amount of RAM.

If you want to I can put out a release for it this time - it will just come with zero guarantees and an absolute minimum of quality control on my end.

Speaking of the next version, will FCEU Next finally have the save states not saving/loading issue fixed? Because the issue still persists. I can't create save states with NES ROMs.

 

[terpsfan101]

Can DIP switch support be added to FBA and the CPS cores? It is a necessary feature since not all games support changing settings through the service menu.

 

[Gamecuber]

It's not really worth it as an independent release - you could compile and build it yourself if you really wanted to. My only way of booting it is with SD Gecko and that's really painful to set up every time with Phantasy Star Online exploit so it's not exactly my favorite port.

It's just a downgraded Wii port basically - nothing special about it really and a lot of ROMs won't fit into the Gamecube's small amount of RAM.

If you want to I can put out a release for it this time - it will just come with zero guarantees and an absolute minimum of quality control on my end.

Please do it, thank you very much.

 

[LibretroRetroArc]

Speaking of the next version, will FCEU Next finally have the save states not saving/loading issue fixed? Because the issue still persists. I can't create save states with NES ROMs.

It's a problem to do with certain NES mappers and FCEUmm - it has endian issues so some games can't be save stated on big-endian consoles.

Not sure if the author finally got around to fixing those.

 

[4K_future]

Please do it, thank you very much.

Another vote for GameCube version.

SD Media Launcher is a huge help enabling homebrew on the Cube.

 

[the_randomizer]

It's a problem to do with certain NES mappers and FCEUmm - it has endian issues so some games can't be save stated on big-endian consoles.

Not sure if the author finally got around to fixing those.

Ah, bugger, figures. Oh, well. I can't expect the author to fix it, he probably has bigger fish to fry. In the most recent version, it's a huge issue with many games, like Akumajo Densetsu or Castlevania 3 (NTSC-J).

 

[Hielkenator]

Ah, bugger, figures. Oh, well. I can't expect the author to fix it, he probably has bigger fish to fry. In the most recent version, it's a huge issue with many games, like Akumajo Densetsu or Castlevania 3 (NTSC-J).

aaah, be hardcore!
Play the game like in the old days!

 

[miihackwii]

Awesome, Thank you very much

 

[the_randomizer]

aaah, be hardcore!
Play the game like in the old days!

Well, I guess I could.

 

[yafaiz]

changing to vba core kills the program on wii u, can't even load back into it since the .ini is set to vba boot.
possible fix?