Homebrew Unofficial 3DS RetroArch builds

[lone_wolf323]

Well, Ignore most of that. Main thing is, Which scph file is best to use with this? I use scph1001. Is that what I should go with? Or is there better ones to use?

 

[DSoryu]

Silent Hill Is one of the few games from the psx library that heavily depends on dithering, disabling it makes the game look horrible. With the latest build, it finally runs completely fine even with dithering enabled, this is outstanding, congratulations!

 

[NanashiFinal13]

Silent Hill Is one of the few games from the psx library that heavily depends on dithering, disabling it makes the game look horrible. With the latest build, it finally runs completely fine even with dithering enabled, this is outstanding, congratulations!

Shadow Man also now runs good with dithering on. It doesn't depends on dithering that much, but its notorius, on stages with poor light the difference its clear, and most of the game occurs on dark areas. Also thanks for the data, i just try Sillent Hill with dithering and looks really good!

 

[NanashiFinal13]

Rittai Ninja Katsugeki Tenchu now runs full speed. (without dithering, with it suffer off some frame drops on some areas.) (before this update of pcsx, game ran at 52/54 fps)

 

[kenseiden]

In the process of testing the CIA versions on New 3DS and N2DSXL.

Nestopia has audio but no video when Threaded Video is enabled.

Mega Turrican on Genesis Plus GX is running spectacularly. It is one of the most demanding Genesis/MD games, but I haven’t seen it dip below 59 FPS in my testing so far; before the new threaded updates, it would play at 53 FPS most of the time in this particular core.

Wanted to test 32X performance on Picodrive, but loading 32X games makes the core crash back to the 3DS home menu.

gpSP seems to run a little too fast with with the threaded video and audio enabled in my brief testing. (Tested Aria of Sorrow and Zero Mission.)

Overall, there have definitely been some gains achieved across the board with threading implemented. Thanks for all the work you’ve done, @justinweiss!

 

[DSoryu]

Have been doing some testing and sometimes when loading new contents it gets stuck on "Set audio input rate to: 31960.00Hz."

EDIT: This seems to happen if you try to load a core directly from the Home Menu, to avoid the issue, reload the core using retroarch first.

EDIT2: mGBA still gets stuck even with the core load trick.

 

[justinweiss]

Have been doing some testing and sometimes when loading new contents it gets stuck on "Set audio input rate to: 31960.00Hz."

EDIT: This seems to happen if you try to load a core directly from the Home Menu, to avoid the issue, reload the core using retroarch first.

EDIT2: mGBA still gets stuck even with the core load trick.

Hm. CIA, right? How consistently does it happen for you? Every time, most of the time, just some of the time?

I tried mGBA and Genesis Plus CIAs, both loading right from the home menu and through the RA CIA, automatically installing, manually installing, and haven't run into any freezes yet, so I'm not sure what's going on. Which core did you get the 31960.00Hz from?

I'm definitely not as familiar with how the CIA builds work than the 3dsx ones, so I'm not sure if you need to uninstall and reinstall the cores / RetroArch CIA to get them upgraded, but that might be worth a try if you haven't done it yet.

 

[Kurt91]

Just removed my 1.8.9 installation and installed this. Had some crashes until I reset the configuration file. Launched the PCSX ReARMed core through the RetroArch menu and it loaded Guardian's Crusade just fine. Even got to keep my existing save file. Figured this would be a good game to test the new settings with, since I get nearly full speed to begin with, with occasional slowdown and lag in spots. If the new settings work, then I've got everything going flawlessly.

Thing is, after making a few basic adjustments such as turning off vSync and setting up the start directory, I'm getting freezing when loading my game. The freeze is at "selected sound output driver: libretro". I've tried resetting the config file to default again, but it's still happening. Any ideas? I'll keep trying different things to get it to work.

 

[Larsenic]

Silent Hill Is one of the few games from the psx library that heavily depends on dithering, disabling it makes the game look horrible. With the latest build, it finally runs completely fine even with dithering enabled, this is outstanding, congratulations!

Would you mind sharing your config? I am testing the .cia but with dithering on it drops to 50~40 fps quite often.

What I noticed in the few games I tested is that sound reverb ON and interpolation set to simple no longer affect fps with audio set to threaded.

 

[justinweiss]

Just removed my 1.8.9 installation and installed this. Had some crashes until I reset the configuration file. Launched the PCSX ReARMed core through the RetroArch menu and it loaded Guardian's Crusade just fine. Even got to keep my existing save file. Figured this would be a good game to test the new settings with, since I get nearly full speed to begin with, with occasional slowdown and lag in spots. If the new settings work, then I've got everything going flawlessly.

Thing is, after making a few basic adjustments such as turning off vSync and setting up the start directory, I'm getting freezing when loading my game. The freeze is at "selected sound output driver: libretro". I've tried resetting the config file to default again, but it's still happening. Any ideas? I'll keep trying different things to get it to work.

That sounds kind of like what @Dartz150 was talking about, but I haven't been able to run into it myself. Are you running the dsp_thread sound driver or the regular dsp one? Is this CIA or 3dsx? Does it happen every time? Any other settings (threaded video, etc.) changed from the defaults?

 

[Kurt91]

I tried both dsp and dsp_thread. I'm using CIA. It's happened every time so far, at the same place. I've tried with the default settings as well as turning on the threaded video option. The only thing that I haven't tried just yet to fix the issue myself is deleting all of the config files and having RetroArch rebuild them. I only haven't done that just yet because it's a pain to have to get to the microSD for each adjustment. I've actually broken the back panel from removing and re-attaching it so many times. I'm just lucky that it broke in a way that it still is able to latch onto the system and is still usable, though I'm going to need to replace it at some point. (Honestly, why would they decide to hide the microSD inside the damned system?) I've got some time now, though, and I'll give that a try to see if wiping the config files and rebuilding from scratch will help.

EDIT: Okay, I deleted every single config file, and I'm able to load games again. I think that what happened was I may have accidentally set changed settings as a core override, and so every thing that I tried to fix things and revert to default was being overwritten by that override. I could have sworn that I undid that when it happened, though. Is there an in-menu way to delete overrides without having to connect the microSD to PC and delete them manually?

I'm going to fiddle with settings and see what I can get working. I still want to actually turn on the threaded video option. I'll add to this post if anything breaks as soon as it happens, so I can write down exactly what caused it.

EDIT 2: I've re-done the settings and everything is still working. vSync is off, threaded video is turned on, start directory was re-created, everything saved to config file. Game still works, and I seem to actually have that last little bit of oomph needed to get flawless full-speed for the game I'm playing. Battle transitions work faster and more smoothly. Another issue that I had forgotten to mention when things were broken was that all of the settings I tried to fix disappeared each time I had to restart the 3DS, but that's also fixed now as well.

I'm sorry, but I honestly don't know what I did the first time around to break things. I know that kind of renders all of my input absolutely useless, and I wish I would re-create the broken state so that I could tell you what happened and why. On the bright side, it's all working great on my end now, and I'm going to chalk my issues up as user-error rather than anything wrong with the program itself.

@Dartz150 should probably try deleting all of the config files as well. I had a similar problem on the main RetroArch thread before when I updated to the stable version before trying this one, and so there's a post from somebody who helped me then, that should be on the latest page still, that lists all of the files to delete.

 

[MarioKartFan]

@Kurt91 You should consider downloading 3DShell (a file manager) so you don’t have to open up your 3DS in order to delete a CFG file. It’s a great app.

 

[lone_wolf323]

@Kurt91 You should consider downloading 3DShell (a file manager) so you don’t have to open up your 3DS in order to delete a CFG file. It’s a great app.

I mean. FBI is pretty handy for looking at files. Aswell as GM9

 

[Kurt91]

I mean. FBI is pretty handy for looking at files. Aswell as GM9

Oh my god, that's such an obvious solution. *smacks forehead* I've used FBI pretty much exclusively for just installing CIAs. I know it's a file manager, but it never actually occurred to me to use it as one.

 

[justinweiss]

EDIT 2: I've re-done the settings and everything is still working. vSync is off, threaded video is turned on, start directory was re-created, everything saved to config file. Game still works, and I seem to actually have that last little bit of oomph needed to get flawless full-speed for the game I'm playing. Battle transitions work faster and more smoothly. Another issue that I had forgotten to mention when things were broken was that all of the settings I tried to fix disappeared each time I had to restart the 3DS, but that's also fixed now as well.

Happy it's working for you now, at least! And yeah, it's so annoying taking the 3DS apart every time you want to change something. A file manager (like the ones mentioned up there) can be helpful, and I really like ftpd for accessing the 3DS remotely from a computer. Don't transfer a bunch of small files over ftp unless you have tons of time to waste, but it's very nice for everything else. These days I really only remove the SD for full RetroArch upgrades.

 

[TheBeverage]

Would any of these improvements apply to special chip SNES games on SNES9x 2005+? Getting SA-1 chip games like SMRPG at full speed would be amazing.

 

[MrHuu]

Would any of these improvements apply to special chip SNES games on SNES9x 2005+? Getting SA-1 chip games like SMRPG at full speed would be amazing.

Yes, it affects retroarch overall. I haven't tested the builds myself yet, so i can't tell how specific cores or games run.

@justinweiss
Looking trough your commits on threading i noticed '-DHAVE_SOCKET_LEGACY' also got enabled HERE.
Currently, the network code doesn't use this as i was still having some issues, stalling retroarch.
Libctru 2.0 also provides some fixes for networking compared to v1.1. Which should help with fully implementing networking (mainly netplay, ai would also be nice).
Although i'm quite sure it's guarded out, it's probably best to have it disabled until reworked.

 

[Kurt91]

Would any of these improvements apply to special chip SNES games on SNES9x 2005+? Getting SA-1 chip games like SMRPG at full speed would be amazing.

Stupid question, but is there an advantage to using 2005+ over 2002 for SMRPG? I've been playing SMRPG Revolution on 2002 and other than not doing the background color correctly, I haven't noticed too many issues.

 

[justinweiss]

Although i'm quite sure it's guarded out, it's probably best to have it disabled until reworked.

Good idea, don't remember why I uncommented the whole thing. Will fix it.

Stupid question, but is there an advantage to using 2005+ over 2002 for SMRPG?

I think 2005+ has better sound emulation, plus the other misc. fixes that would happen in 3 years. If 2002 works fine for you, it will probably be faster.

 

[BORTZ]

So I have recently joined the whole RetroArch on 3DS parade. And I have a few things to say.

1. justinweiss, you are completely outta your gourde. And quickly becoming one of my favorite members here.

2. These cores are incredible. I updated specifically to get a hold of the mGBA and the PCSX Rearmed cores. It wasn't necessary at all except for the mGBA core.

3. I think these un-official cores broke the connection to RetroAchievements.
Is that possible? I had RA working before I updated, at least I got a few logged earlier. So they were working. I know that I have been changing a lot over the last few days.