What has Retroarch ever done for us?

[FAST6191]

So I have been around to see the earliest attempts at making frontends for emulators (never seen the appeal myself but to each their own on that one), was around to see some of the console emulators push the boat out beyond what the PC was doing at the time, was around to see new and upcoming emulators do things the old guard never thought to do (only to have the same thing happen to them a year or two down the line, possibly from their own fork). Retroarch them seemed just a new take on the frontend thing and not much more so I mostly ignored it, did try it a few times but I think it was up there with old school MAME in the tedium to make things work where everything else was "get ROM, config controls maybe, possibly get BIOS files, open and go".

Short and sweet then is retroarch more than just a frontend for emulators and source of oh so much drama*? Has it provided new features, served as a nicer way in for some things (if I don't have to configure epsxe plugins again then that works for me), got things going again that stalled, saw us have ports that would not have otherwise happened (or happened as well), did some kind of cross platform niceties that would otherwise have to be replicated individually (I see people mention plugins a lot) or otherwise provided more than a frontend some people like?

*the comparison to old school MAME was probably more apt than I first intended as its licenses are probably comparable here. Though far from the only source of drama.

 

[zfreeman]

RetroArch 1.7.2 — Achieving better latency than original hardware through new runahead method

 

[linuxares]

Is there new drama or what?

 

[Deleted member 435036]

what

 

[Psionic Roshambo]

As far as RetroArch "doing anything for us" I feel like it's a mixed bag, I like the concepts and I feel like it has allowed to other better front ends to even exist. So from that perspective RA is important.

That being said I hate RA's own UI and from my perspective it's clunky and unintuitive. <--- purely my opinion and I am sure to most of the human population it's absolutely fine. So I can't even say it's bad since UI's are a personal opinion kind of thing.

 

[FAST6191]

Is there new drama or what?

No, or if there is I was not aware of any when I posted this, it was an offhand remark on another thread that made me decide to ask if I had been missing out by ignoring it beyond my earlier assessments. Some seemed to talk about it as though it was the best thing to happen to emulation since we got more than the gravis control pad to control things with (or maybe dynamic recompilation) where I mostly saw it as a frontend. That said as emulation is more or less a sorted problem (or sorted enough that most need not mind) and had been for some time there could have been benefits on the backend by reasonably bundling the code into one place, though providing some kind of common API for plugins that don't need console specific things could also count, some kind of unified GUI so everything has all the relevant features (say everything has a full complement of 8 easy to reach/technical infinite savestates where the base emulators might be more limited) or otherwise advancing the state of things in some notable manner.

The just in time/branching path stuff to drop latency is an interesting one I am not actually sure I had seen an equivalent for in emulation (general games sort of but not emulation that I can think of) prior to that example.

what

Does something similar happen if I ask the same question for Retroarch? Or if you prefer can I safely continue to ignore it and dismiss it as an emulator frontend and little else?

 

[linuxares]

Okey. Well it's a well built frontend that's for sure. But I don't want us to start a flamewar on gbatemp.

 

[CORE]

Convenience great to have all in one Emulator.

Video Playback you can have a custom playlist of Console Promo Videos SEGA-Jaguar-Playstation etc.

On almost everything aswell as great strides in Emulation FlyCast-Parallell and FBNeo now think it called not sure if Code exclusive to RetroArch but the Emulator Cores appear to be just hoping and waiting for (JAGUAR AND JAGUARCD) EMULATOR WITH FULL COMPATIBILITY PLEASE...

Then I consider Emulation almost complete for me anyways.
IRON SOLDIER 1-2
BATTLEMORPH - CYBERMORPH
The best the Console has to offer and cant play them.

 

[Deleted User]

Helped make full speed/close to psx emulation on the N3DS possible.

 

[ChiefReginod]

I was a holdout until fairly recently. I hated the GUI and didn't understand how playlists worked, but once I wrote some scripts to create my own and found the many required system and BIOS files it was smooth sailing. The GUI is slowly getting to a point where most users could feel comfortable using it, with the more advanced features still being there for power users.

I've been using standalone emulators since the days of Genecyst and Nesticle but I only really use RetroArch now. It's still a pain to set up, but once it's done it's golden.

 

[Flame]

i have retroarch homebrew versions on everything which is possible which i can. from wii, wii u, 3ds, vita, android.

even PSP, PS2 and PS3 but i dont mess with them alot.

i mean those have homebrew emu's too for is it going to be support for a long time. no. is retroarch supported for a long time? more likely.

in the case of the 3DS for example which has maybe better emu's by bubble2k16 but he has stopped working on them. where as retroarch is still supported and only likely to get better.

on the wii u we dont have a choice anyway. on the vita its has some good individual emu's but retroarch is pretty good and getting better.

 

[Marc_LFD]

The fact that this launcher (if you can call it that) can install multiple emulators it just makes retro gaming a lot easier and convenient as so we don't have to install an emulator for this and that.

That still stays true when I use XP (a laptop which doesn't have its monitor anymore, but still great for that XP experience).

 

[Hanafuda]

Shit, you beat me. I came in here just to post, "The aqueduct."

 

[tech3475]

Shit, you beat me. I came in here just to post, "The aqueduct."

They beat you by over 3 years.

 

[Hanafuda]

They beat you by over 3 years.

Haha yeah I see that now. In that case, I invoke the statute of limitations on "beaten."