Here is a quick update on some new patches we have pushed to the Parallel N64 core –
1 – You can now get anywhere from a 6fps (conservative) to a 10fps or more performance boost with multithreaded Angrylion core by enabling a new option called ‘Send Audio Lists To RSP HLE’. Instead of sending audio lists to the low-level RSP plugin (cxd4), it will instead send these to the HLE (High-Level Emulated) RSP plugin instead. Note: If a game does not use the RSP for audio processing, you will not notice a speedup by enabling this. Nevertheless – many games benefit from this already.
NOTE: Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine might have bad audio with this option enabled, my guess is that the MusyX HLE audio code is still not perfect or we need to have something backported still to make it so. Will look into that tomorrow.
2 – We followed the advice of ata8 (the original Angrylion RDP Plus plugin) and refactored some of the RDRAM code. As a result we are getting a very minor performance boost now on Linux. It’s still not anywhere near it should be compared to the Windows version but it is an improvement nonetheless –
Mario 64 – VI overlay on – 77fps (after) instead of 72fps (before)
Mario 64 – VI overlay off – 87fps (after) instead of 84fps (before)
Hope you enjoy these low-hanging fruit performance gains. Back to getting RetroArch 1.6.8 ready!
We originally intended to release this together with the new RetroArch version right before the end of this month. However, we want to take a few more days to ensure that the release of RetroArch 1.6.8 is solid and that we don’t rush it out of the gates in a premature state. We ask for your patience, it won’t take too long, a couple of days at most. In the meantime, we have the Parallel N64 core with multithreaded Angrylion ready to go!
This is a heavily modified version of ata4‘s Angrylion RDP Plus plugin. It has the following distinctive characteristics so far:
1 – Made a bunch of changes so that performance in Linux/Mingw is not as bad as it was previously (still worse than Windows though).
2 – Does not require OpenGL context 3.2, or OpenGL at all. It is purely a software renderer that can use any output video driver you want in your libretro frontend. So you can use this in conjunction with OpenGL, Direct3D, Vulkan, etc.
Credit goes to mudlord, Brad Parker and AIO for being able to get this done in such short notice. I helped out along the way too.
Available for
Linux
Windows
Android
Where to get it
1. Start RetroArch.
2. Go to Online Updater -> Update Cores.
3. Download ‘Nintendo 64 (Parallel N64)’ from the list.
How to use it
1. Start up the Parallel N64 core with any game.
2. Go to Quick Menu -> Options. Make sure that you set ‘GFX Plugin’ to ‘angrylion’ and ‘RSP Plugin’ to çxd4′. Restart RetroArch.
3. It should now use multithreaded Angrylion as the graphics plugin.
Performance
This scene serves as our benchmark test. Fullspeed framerate has been enabled.
For the purpose of this performance test, I am running the game Super Mario 64.
The system on which the tests are being performed is a Core i7 7700k processor with 16GB of RAM running Windows 10 and Linux respectively.
Windows
CPU Core
Angrylion version
OS
Performance (with VI Overlay on)
Performance (with VI Overlay off)
Cached interpreter
Windows 10
Old Angrylion
52fps
63fps
Dynarec
Windows 10
Old Angrylion
52fps
64fps
Dynarec
Windows 10
New Angrylion Multithreaded
114fps
123fps
Cached interpreter
Windows 10
New Angrylion Multithreaded
106fps
118fps
Linux
CPU Core
Angrylion version
OS
Performance (with VI Overlay on)
Performance (with VI Overlay off)
Cached interpreter
Linux
Old Angrylion
53fps
63fps
Dynarec
Linux
Old Angrylion
55fps
65fps
Dynarec
Linux
New Angrylion Multithreaded
72fps
84fps
Cached interpreter
Linux
New Angrylion Multithreaded
69fps
82fps
macOS
Too slow to be worth bothering with, singlethreaded Angrylion actually turned out faster here. That is why the Mac version will still be using the old Angrylion version.
Some core options have the potential to dramatically improve performance.
Quick Menu -> Options -> Framerate – You can set this to either ‘Original’ or ‘Fullspeed’. Original will attempt to run the game at its original framerate, while Fullspeed bumps it up to 60 V/Is. Note – if you find a game is running below fullspeed on your system, consider setting this to ‘Original’. I know that in Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Pilotwings 64, there is a big performance impact if you set it to ‘Fullspeed’.
Quick Menu -> Options -> VI Overlay – Disabling this can give you a 10 to 20fps speedup at the expense of the VI overlay’s filtering being lost, leading to a more pixelated but less blurry image. Also note that some games may not work properly with VI Overlay off right now, such as Resident Evil 2.
How to improve the graphics
In case you find the N64’s native resolution and blurry VI filter to be unpalatable, we want to bring your attention to various things you can do to improve your graphics.
In this video we will be showing you how to apply a so-called ‘Super VI Mode’ filter in order to improve the N64’s graphics.
Note – how these shaders will perform depends entirely on the power of your GPU. The configuration you see later in the video (nnedi-4x) requires a lot more GPU power than the former one (2x). Be mindful of this.
This video will teach you:
* How to load shader presets
* How to stack additional shader chains on top of existing shader presets
* How to configure shader parameters to adjust the screen.
We hope this video will tickle your curiosity so that you will try to hit upon even more fancy shader configurations! The sky is the limit with RetroArch and our common shaders library.
NOTE: This is a bugfixed and spit-and-polish update. The initial release notes below are still from the 1.6.6 release.
RetroArch 1.6.7 has just been released! Grab it here.
This latest version has also been uploaded to the Google Play Store.
General changelog
– SCANNER: Fix directory scanning.
– SCANNER: Fix file scanning.
– COMMON: Fix ‘Disk Image Append’ option.
– FREEBSD: Compatibility fixes for Video4Linux2 camera driver.
– GUI: (MaterialUI) Add disk image append icons.
– GUI: (MaterialUI) Improve word wrapping when menu icons are enabled.
– GUI: (MaterialUI) Add User Interface -> Appearance -> Menu Icons Enable. You can turn on/off the icons on the lefthand side of the menu entries.
– GUI: Performance optimizations for XMB menu driver – only calculates visible items.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Italian translation.
Core updates since previous version (1.6.6)
Picodrive should hopefully work now again on Android after notaz‘ updates.
Beetle PSX’s OpenGL renderer should now work on various AMD GPUs thanks to rz5‘s efforts. There were previously some black screen issues on certain non-Polaris AMD GPUs.
Beetle PSX – Fixed bugs (geometry updates had max width and height unset, other ones) (by albertofustinoni).
Prosystem – NTSC Color Palette updates and DB updates (by underball).
RetroArch 1.6.6 has just been released! Grab it here.
This latest version has also been uploaded to the Google Play Store.
General changelog
– 3DS: Fixes serious performance regression that affected every core; rewind was always implicitly enabled.
– AUDIO: MOD/S3M/XM sound should now be properly mixed in with the core’s sound.
– GUI: Visual makeover of MaterialUI.
– GUI: Added ‘Music’, ‘Images’ and ‘Video’ collection options to RGUI/MaterialUI.
– GUI: Allow the user to add ‘Favorites’.
– GUI: Allow the user to rename entries.
– GUI: Performance optimizations for XMB menu driver.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Italian translation
– INPUT: Overlay controller response – when we press buttons on the gamepad or keyboard, the corresponding buttons on the overlay will be highlighted as well.
– NETBSD: Silence some compilation warnings.
– COMMON: Fixed bug ‘Deleting an entry from a playlist would not update the list view inside XMB’.
– COMMON: Fix inet_ntop_compat on *nix
If you want to read about the latest bounty and core updates, read this post instead here.
Complete overhaul of the mobile User Interface! (MaterialUI)
On mobile devices, RetroArch uses the mobile UI, MaterialUI, by default. This interface is designed around touchscreen and pointer devices like a mouse/trackball.
We have given this menu interface a significant overhaul now for version 1.6.6! We are aware that there is a significant percentage of people that to date have been completely unsatisfied with the current state of the menu system on mobile devices like Android and iOS. Our menu UI improvements in version 1.6.6 is our first step to try to remedy this. In later releases, we might follow it up with more elaborate animations, more advanced widgets, etc.
The menu should look less monotonous now due to the usage of context-specific icons. We have also made some other UX improvements:
– The opacity of the game’s image clashed quite badly with the ingame menu before. This has been rectified.
– We have added ‘Music’, ‘Image’ and ‘Video’ playlists to the ‘Favorites’ tab.
Music, Video and Images which have previously been loaded in RetroArch can be easily accessed from the Playlists tab now.
– The file browser is easier to read now because files show up with specific icons to indicate what they are. For instance, music files have a music icon, a directory has a folder icon, selectable content files show up as a plain file, etc.
The file browser is easier to read now because files show up with specific icons to indicate what they are. For instance, music files have a music icon, a directory has a folder icon, selectable content files show up as a plain file, etc.
Usability tips
You can customize the color theme of the menu in MaterialUI at any time.
1 – Go to User Interface.
2 – Go to Views.
3 – Go to ‘Menu Color Theme’ and set it to the color theme you want.
General menu improvements
Favorites
You can now add a game to a ‘Favorites’ list for easy access! This has been an often-requested feature for years, and in the past we always felt that ‘Load Recent’ was good enough. However, if you load a lot of content, that can easily get cluttered over time.
To add a game to the Favorites list, do the following:
1 – Once a game is running, go to ‘Quick Menu’.
2 – Select ‘Add To Favorites’.
3 – Once added, you can now start the game at any time from the Favorites list.
On RGUI – go to Load Content -> Favorites.
On MaterialUI – go to the Playlists tab -> Favorites.
On XMB – go to the Favorites tab.
To add a game to the ‘favorites’ list, inside Quick Menu, select ‘Add To Favorites’. It should now be added to the Favorites list. You can access the ‘Favorites’ list inside MaterialUI by going to the Playlists tab. On RGUI, you go to Load Content -> Favorites. On XMB, you go to the Favorites tab instead.
Renaming entries inside playlists
You can now rename an entry from any playlist!
To do this, do the following:
1 – Go to a playlist of any type (it can be the history list, a system playlist, favorites, music/video/images playlists, etc).
2 – There should be an option called “Rename”. Select it. If you are using MaterialUI and/or XMB, an onscreen keyboard will now pop up. Input the new title for the entry and then hit either the Enter key on your keyboard ,the Start button on your gamepad or press the ‘Enter’ key on the onscreen overlay in order to confirm the changes.
You can now rename any entry! Say for instance you loaded a Quake data file. Instead of the playlist showing ‘PAK0.PAK’, you can rename it to Quake 1 instead.
Overlays show button presses
Previously, overlays would only show button presses if they were actually being clicked on by either the touchscreen or the mouse.
A user submitted a bounty to make onscreen reactions possible through the gamepad and/or keyboard. A bounty hunter has now successfully completed this bounty and has been paid out. We have enabled this feature by default. If you want to turn it off, you can do so by doing the following:
1 – Go to Onscreen Display -> Onscreen Overlay.
2 – Go to ‘Show Inputs on Overlay’. Set this to off if you don’t want the overlay to react to keyboard/gamepad input, turn it on if you want this to happen (turned on by default).
Nintendo 3DS regression fix – all cores were running slower
A serious issue has been fixed in the Nintendo 3DS RetroArch port which compelled us to push this release sooner rather than later.
It appears that by mistake, rewind was always forcibly enabled in the 3DS port, which led to a halving of performance. This should now be fixed.
What’s next?
The new cores
We are still determined to get the promised cores like PPSSPP into your hands before the end of the month. We just felt it very important to get this release out of the door so that people can see that we are determined to improve the menu on mobile, and also so that the 3DS RetroArch port is repaired again.
Wii input fix
Finally, after years of struggling with this very pesky issue, it seems we are on the verge of a breaktrhough here that could lead to this random input issue finally being fixed –
it seems there was a regression in libogc at some point which lead to this input regression. Superssonic reports that going back to an older version of Wiiuse fixes the issue. What we are probably going to do is make a custom baked-in libogc version for the Wii port for the next release.
RetroArch 1.6.6 has just been released! Grab it here.
This latest version has also been uploaded to the Google Play Store.
General changelog
– 3DS: Fixes serious performance regression that affected every core; rewind was always implicitly enabled.
– AUDIO: MOD/S3M/XM sound should now be properly mixed in with the core’s sound.
– GUI: Visual makeover of MaterialUI.
– GUI: Added ‘Music’, ‘Images’ and ‘Video’ collection options to RGUI/MaterialUI.
– GUI: Allow the user to add ‘Favorites’.
– GUI: Allow the user to rename entries.
– GUI: Performance optimizations for XMB menu driver.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Italian translation
– INPUT: Overlay controller response – when we press buttons on the gamepad or keyboard, the corresponding buttons on the overlay will be highlighted as well.
– NETBSD: Silence some compilation warnings.
– COMMON: Fixed bug ‘Deleting an entry from a playlist would not update the list view inside XMB’.
– COMMON: Fix inet_ntop_compat on *nix
If you want to read about the latest bounty and core updates, read this post instead here.
Complete overhaul of the mobile User Interface! (MaterialUI)
On mobile devices, RetroArch uses the mobile UI, MaterialUI, by default. This interface is designed around touchscreen and pointer devices like a mouse/trackball.
We have given this menu interface a significant overhaul now for version 1.6.6! We are aware that there is a significant percentage of people that to date have been completely unsatisfied with the current state of the menu system on mobile devices like Android and iOS. Our menu UI improvements in version 1.6.6 is our first step to try to remedy this. In later releases, we might follow it up with more elaborate animations, more advanced widgets, etc.
The menu should look less monotonous now due to the usage of context-specific icons. We have also made some other UX improvements:
– The opacity of the game’s image clashed quite badly with the ingame menu before. This has been rectified.
– We have added ‘Music’, ‘Image’ and ‘Video’ playlists to the ‘Favorites’ tab.
Music, Video and Images which have previously been loaded in RetroArch can be easily accessed from the Playlists tab now.
– The file browser is easier to read now because files show up with specific icons to indicate what they are. For instance, music files have a music icon, a directory has a folder icon, selectable content files show up as a plain file, etc.
The file browser is easier to read now because files show up with specific icons to indicate what they are. For instance, music files have a music icon, a directory has a folder icon, selectable content files show up as a plain file, etc.
Usability tips
You can customize the color theme of the menu in MaterialUI at any time.
1 – Go to User Interface.
2 – Go to Views.
3 – Go to ‘Menu Color Theme’ and set it to the color theme you want.
General menu improvements
Favorites
You can now add a game to a ‘Favorites’ list for easy access! This has been an often-requested feature for years, and in the past we always felt that ‘Load Recent’ was good enough. However, if you load a lot of content, that can easily get cluttered over time.
To add a game to the Favorites list, do the following:
1 – Once a game is running, go to ‘Quick Menu’.
2 – Select ‘Add To Favorites’.
3 – Once added, you can now start the game at any time from the Favorites list.
On RGUI – go to Load Content -> Favorites.
On MaterialUI – go to the Playlists tab -> Favorites.
On XMB – go to the Favorites tab.
To add a game to the ‘favorites’ list, inside Quick Menu, select ‘Add To Favorites’. It should now be added to the Favorites list. You can access the ‘Favorites’ list inside MaterialUI by going to the Playlists tab. On RGUI, you go to Load Content -> Favorites. On XMB, you go to the Favorites tab instead.
Renaming entries inside playlists
You can now rename an entry from any playlist!
To do this, do the following:
1 – Go to a playlist of any type (it can be the history list, a system playlist, favorites, music/video/images playlists, etc).
2 – There should be an option called “Rename”. Select it. If you are using MaterialUI and/or XMB, an onscreen keyboard will now pop up. Input the new title for the entry and then hit either the Enter key on your keyboard ,the Start button on your gamepad or press the ‘Enter’ key on the onscreen overlay in order to confirm the changes.
You can now rename any entry! Say for instance you loaded a Quake data file. Instead of the playlist showing ‘PAK0.PAK’, you can rename it to Quake 1 instead.
Overlays show button presses
Previously, overlays would only show button presses if they were actually being clicked on by either the touchscreen or the mouse.
A user submitted a bounty to make onscreen reactions possible through the gamepad and/or keyboard. A bounty hunter has now successfully completed this bounty and has been paid out. We have enabled this feature by default. If you want to turn it off, you can do so by doing the following:
1 – Go to Onscreen Display -> Onscreen Overlay.
2 – Go to ‘Show Inputs on Overlay’. Set this to off if you don’t want the overlay to react to keyboard/gamepad input, turn it on if you want this to happen (turned on by default).
Nintendo 3DS regression fix – all cores were running slower
A serious issue has been fixed in the Nintendo 3DS RetroArch port which compelled us to push this release sooner rather than later.
It appears that by mistake, rewind was always forcibly enabled in the 3DS port, which led to a halving of performance. This should now be fixed.
What’s next?
The new cores
We are still determined to get the promised cores like PPSSPP into your hands before the end of the month. We just felt it very important to get this release out of the door so that people can see that we are determined to improve the menu on mobile, and also so that the 3DS RetroArch port is repaired again.
Wii input fix
Finally, after years of struggling with this very pesky issue, it seems we are on the verge of a breaktrhough here that could lead to this random input issue finally being fixed –
it seems there was a regression in libogc at some point which lead to this input regression. Superssonic reports that going back to an older version of Wiiuse fixes the issue. What we are probably going to do is make a custom baked-in libogc version for the Wii port for the next release.
Despite the short release cycle, there has been a fair bit of core work since the 1.6.4 release, including some significant contributions driven by the recently implemented bounty system. In no particular order:
Core updates
Snes9x 2005
JamSilva has been pushing various updates/fixes/improvements:
* Loading savestates seems to no longer cause segfaults
* Improved sound in the non-plus version – especially noticeable in Secret of Evermore.
* Working SPC7110 emulation (quickly tested with Tengai Makyou Zero and Momotarou Dentetsu Happy).
* CPU emulation fixes – E.V.O – Search for Eden
* CPU emulation fixes – Wizardry V
* The SA1 fixes correct the VLDC9 “WORST” level transition problem I mentioned in #36.
* Backport Brunnis lag fixes. I did not actually measure the input lag after applying the patch, only that there was no (obvious) game breakage on a few games.
Genesis Plus GX
Ekeeke pushed the following changes to upstream and the libretro core –
* [Core/CD] fixed CD hardware buffer initialization when using dynamic memory allocation – should fix crash at startup on WiiU
Parallel N64
* Add delay SI entries for Mischief Makers
P-UAE
r-type has ported this core to WiiU.
Beetle PSX
Various fixes have been committed:
* Fix PSX EXE loading.
* Fix some OpenGL regressions that crept in. Should fix in specific backgrounds in Crash Bandicoot games.
Beetle PC Engine Fast
rtissera has committed the following:
* MAME CHD image support
Beetle PC-FX
rtissera has committed the following:
* MAME CHD image support
Beetle SuperGrafx
rtissera has committed the following:
* MAME CHD image support
Final Burn Alpha
Various fixes and backports have been committed by barbureadmon and others:
* Fix for sound issues in Strikers 1945 Pro (s1945p)
* Hotfixes in upstream
* Fix some weird CPS2 layout
* Fix EEPROM saving
* PGM – single pcb boards, missing bios issue
ProSystem
underball has committed the following improvements:
* Added new DB entry for Double Dragon (RC7b) hack, also corrected MD5 value for Double Dragon (RC7). Added value=1 for “Flags” to One on One, and Basketbrawl. Also added missing values for Ninja Golf.
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