In the run-up to RetroArch 1.1 – what’s ‘new’ pt. 2

We’ve been away for half a year so there is a lot to talk about in this new upcoming release. Rest assured I’m working hard as hell to meet the Christmas sweet spot.  It will take a couple of blog posts to go through it all. So let’s start with the first one. I’m putting these articles out now because I really don’t fancy having to write all this stuff later on in the holidays when I drop this stuff.

In this blog post, let’s talk about some other new cores you can expect.

4DO – 3DO core

We ported over an emulator that emulates the 3DO. The emulator in question is 4DO, itself a fork of 3DOh.

In case you don’t know, 3DO was a short-lived game console released in the early ’90s. It was one of the first ‘next-generation’ 32bit game consoles that were released, and it predated the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation by about a year. Studio 3DO had some lofty ambitions at the time where the 3DO would grow up to become a video game standard like VHS where every licensee would just make a 3DO-compatible player. Unfortunately, the hardware was a bit too weak and after PlayStation/Saturn launched, 3DO died a slow death.

The few standout games for this platform can probably be counted on one hand but there was some notable stuff. A great port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo with nice redbook CD audio, Electronic Arts at the time made some good games like Need For Speed and Road Rash (both probably still better than what these franchises have become in the current-day), and Gex by Crystal Dynamics first made its appearance here. It also has the dubious distinction of playing host to the first Naughty Dog game, a game called Way Of The Warrior. It’s a standard one-on-one beat ’em up, a bit of a Mortal Kombat/Street Fighter II derivative of the day. Guess we all have to start somewhere.

Anyway, regarding the core implementation – things are up and running, you will need a pretty powerful device for this so the faster your CPU is, the more chance you have of actually running this at fullspeed. There is a core option that lets you play games at 640×480 instead of the original framebuffer resolution. Do keep in mind that this will raise performance requirements even more. Save states are implemented but they can cause issues with certain games right now. It’s something we still have to fix.

What’s done?

– Core works, save states work but still have bugs, etc.

What’s to be done in the future?

– Backport more stuff over from 3Doh-related forks.

– Make it big-endian compatible so that it can run on big-endian consoles and old PowerPC Macs.

– Look into the multithreading speedhacks done in an Xbox 360 port of 3Doh assuming this doesn’t come too much at the cost of accuracy and can remain a toggleable option.