New Vulkan graphics enhancements features in Beetle PSX HW!

Libretro Team

MDEC YUV filtering

PlayStation used a special unit called the MDEC to decode full motion videos instead of relying on software rendering (like the Saturn). These videos were encoded in YUV macroblocks and had to be converted from YCbCr to RGB so that the PSX can output the final image to the screen. A common issue with PlayStation emulators is that the chroma channel generally should be smoothed, but the PlayStation tend to leave it unfiltered.

There’s now a feature called ‘MDEC YUV smoothing’ which does filter the chroma channel. You can see the before/after screenshot above (video in question is the Resident Evil 1 intro) to see the kind of visual enhancement this brings to the picture.

SSAA (Super Sampled Anti Aliasing)


Some people prefer to play PlayStation1 games at native resolution and just applying a CRT shader at the end instead of running them at very high resolutions. However, there are some issues with that approach. 3D polygon graphics can tend to look very aliased and jagged and lacking in definition.

Alternatively, others like to crank the resolution up as high as possible. Both approaches have their pros and cons, but a definite disadvantage is that early 3D was very primitive so you might not want to see razor sharp angular polygons rendered at obscene resolutions, especially when a game relies a lot on pre-rendered backgrounds and other 2D elements. The Final Fantasy and Resident Evil games come to mind for one.

The option ‘Adaptive smoothing’ already exists and it attempts to distinguish 2D elements from 3D elements. It will smooth out the 2D elements but leave the 3D elements alone, resulting in a high resolution picture with the 2D elements not looking pixelated and ugly.

This new Vulkan-only option, SSAA, is a completely new approach. The image is rendered at the internal resolution you set it at (2x/4x/8x/16x, you name it). It then downsamples it at the final output stage back to a resolution somewhere in the ballpark of 240p. What you get is a low-resolution image with very clean anti-aliased 3D, kinda similar to the N64 actually which had native 8x multi sampled anti aliasing of some sort.

Certain CRT shaders expect a 240p-ish image to look their absolute best, so this option lends itself very well to that. It also can tend to look bit more coherent with mixed 2D and 3D in cases where adaptive smoothing fails.

Tip: We recommend you turn dithering off when using SSAA (Super Sampled Anti-Aliasing).

Example – Final Fantasy IX

Below you see SSAA in action with Final Fantasy IX on RetroArch. The first image is SSAA at 1x internal resolution. The second image is SSAA at 8x internal resolution. You can see how the downscaling does its magic in the second picture – it results in an image that almost looks like as if the polygon characters are part of the background itself.

Finally, a CRT shader is used – crt-royale-ntsc-320px.

Final Fantasy IX – SSAA at 1x internal resolution with CRT Royale
Final Fantasy IX – SSAA at 8x internal resolution with CRT Royale

Dithering for Vulkan

PlayStation and N64 output the final image at 16 bits per pixel. Since that isn’t a particularly wide colorspace, both systems used dithering in order to fake the illusion of a larger palette of colors. This combats color banding and wouldn’t be very noticeable at native resolutions on a CRT TV. On more powerful hardware and when emulated, the limitations of this approach become clear, and some would prefer either internally rendering the dithering at the internal resolution, or disabling it altogether.

Dithering was previously ignored by the Vulkan renderer and was always turned off, no matter what you configured. Now it will actually let you enable it. If dithering is enabled, the scanout image will be 16 bits per pixel. If it is disabled, the scanout image will be 32bits. We recommend that you turn dithering off if you are going to be using ‘SSAA’ (Super Sampled Anti Aliasing)

Libretro Status Updates

Libretro Team

So, what have we been up to?

Dolphin and Ishiiruka cores

The Dolphin libretro bounty has led to this rebasing of the Dolphin libretro core. It is now up-to-date with the latest sourcecode, and it now supports OpenGL, Direct3D11 and Vulkan! It is even available for RetroArch on Android right now, provided you use the AArch64 version (since Dolphin itself requires a 64bit CPU on Android anyway).

In addition to this, I have also taken a look at porting Ishiiruka (a Dolphin fork) to Libretro. This one is not as far along yet as the mainline Dolphin core, but we are already making steady progress with the OpenGL renderer!

RetroArch 1.7.4 – WIMP updates

There will continue to be improvements to the WIMP UI in RetroArch 1.7.4. One of the big new features will be a fancy grid view. Previously, the WIMP UI only had a list view.

Beetle PSX HW

Some important bugs have been fixed. Finally, mask bit emulation has been (hackishly) implemented by flyinghead for the OpenGL renderer, so Silent Hill’s fog finally displays properly. iCatButler has made PGXP much more robust over the past few weeks, which has led to many rendering bugs being fixed when PGXP is enabled.

Reicast

You can read about all of our improvements to the Reicast core in this separate blog post here.

Beam racing bounty – up to $1132!

The beam racing bounty has fetched $1132 so far!

RetroArch is already at the tip of the spear when it comes to latency mitigation strategies with features like runahead, configurable max swapchains, frame delay, custom video context drivers, etc. Beam racing is a new lagless VSYNC technique has been developed that is already implemented in some emulators like WinUAE. The aim of this bounty is to finally implement it in RetroArch as well, and the users/devs that want it have put their money where their mouth is for this particular feature!

RetroArch 1.6.9 -Released!

Libretro Team

RetroArch 1.6.9 has just been released! Grab it here.

This latest version has also been uploaded to the Google Play Store.

General changelog

– Audio: Fix the Audio DSP picker
– CHEEVOS: Add support for Atari Lynx cheevos.
– CHEEVOS: Add support for RetroAchievements Leaderboards.
– GUI: (MaterialUI) Fix crash that happened on context reset with Vulkan.
– GUI: (MaterialUI) Skip querying and drawing items that are not visible; Cache content height and bbox calculation.
– GUI: (MaterialUI) Fix entry box highlight calculation.
– GUI: (XMB) Skip drawing the fading list when it is already transparent. Optimization.
– GUI: (XMB) Comment out visible item calculation in xmb_draw_items().
– GUI: (RGUI) Prevent crashes when using a non-English language reliant on UTF8.
– GUI: Add menu option for OSD background color.
– GUI: Add menu option for OSD text color.
– GUI: Add menu option to remove frame count from OSD.
– GUI: Allow wraparound of int/float settings when pressing the left key
– INPUT/LIBRETRO: Add support for more mouse buttons (buttons 4/5)
– INPUT/LIBRETRO: Add support for analog buttons
– INPUT: Always show the controls menu even if descriptors are not set
– INPUT: Fix input descriptors not being set on cores that don’t implement the controllers interface
– INPUT: Apply descriptors only for the amount of cores the core supports
– INPUT: Implement keyboard to gamepad input remapping (limited to one gamepad device for now)
– INPUT: Fix absolute mouse move handling on the winraw driver
– INPUT: Ignore keyboard input if window is not active on udev driver
– INPUT: Sanitize the filenames of autoconfig profiles before saving
– LOBBIES: Fix crash on navigating left / right from the lobby menu
– LOCALIZATION: Update Dutch translation
– LOCALIZATION: Update Italian translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Japanese translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Portuguese-Brazilian translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Russian translation.
– LINUX/ARMHF: Set buildbot updater URL to armhf location instead of blank string
– LINUX/PI: Broadcom VC4: Add Videocore config option
– LINUX/UDEV: Fix – RetroArch reads keyboard input when not focused with the udev input driver.
– NETPLAY: Fix disconnection not fully deinitializing Netplay.
– NETPLAY: Fix lan rooms when there is more than one room
– NETPLAY: Fix lan rooms on systems where all addresses are treated as IPv6
– COMMON: Fix clear/free loop conditionals in playlists.
– WINDOWS/GDI: Fix flickering of text.
– WINDOWS/GDI: Fix graphics corruption on Windows 98
– WINDOWS/GDI: Allow compiling without DirectInput8 for NT support
– WINDOWS/WGL: Try to use wglSwapLayerBuffers instead of SwapBuffers if possible (for more optimal performance).
– WINDOWS: Fix menubar text corruption on Japanese locale systems
– WINDOWS: Support Unicode file I/O (can now display CJK characters in file browser for example).
– WINDOWS: Support Windows 95, NT3.51, NT4
– WINDOWS: add Makefile.griffin targets for msvc6,2003,2005,2010,2012,2013
– WII: Use custom, embedded libogc SDK.
– WIIU: Initial touchscreen support for WiiU gamepad.
– WIIU: Add Cheevos support.
– SCANNER: Fix archive scanning.
– SCANNER: Support CHD files.
– SCANNER: Support Gamecube ISO scanning.
– SCANNER: Use primary data track of disc images for CRC lookups rather than cue files. This is slower but finds matches more reliably, and is necessary for CHD files to work at all. Update your databases!
– SCANNER: Fall back on looking inside archives when matching MAME/FBA content (most recent cores only). If you had difficulty with content being detected before, you may have better luck now. Update your databases and core info!

Highlights

Scanner system supports more formats

CHD and Gamecube ISO files can now be scanned. A lot of libretro cores have gained the ability to use CHD image files, some of them being all the Mednafen-derived cores (also known as Beetle cores). There is also a new fallback used for scanning MAME/FBA content which looks inside an archive for matching files. If you had trouble having the scanner detect your content before, you might be more usccessful now.

Retro Achievements – Leaderboard support

Unicode support for Windows users

Unicode is now supported for file I/O (Input/Output). What this means, is that game content that uses CJK characters and/or other non-ASCII characters can now be read by RetroArch. These files will also show up from within the filebrowser. Useful for our Japanese users.

NOTE: MaterialUI (the default UI on Android) might still exhibit issues displaying Japanese on Android. This is due to a font renderer that will need to be improved in a future version in order to display these extra characters properly.

Kiosk Mode and more


You can now tailor RetroArch’s UI even more to your own personal preferences. You can choose which submenus to hide, and which to show.

There’s also a special mode called ‘Kiosk Mode’. When enabled, you won’t be able to access any settings, and/or install/upgrade any cores. The guy who implemented this feature likely intended it as a parental control feature to make sure that kids don’t get to mess with any of the internal settings by accident that could end up breaking something. There’s also a password lock you can enable so that any access to settings can still be curtailed.

See the PDF article here for a more detailed breakdown of Kiosk Mode –

https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/files/1320429/RetroArch.Kiosk.Mode.v4.pdf

Input enhancements


The libretro API has been enhanced by David Walters in the following ways:

  • Button input was previously all-digital, now button input can be analog as well. As a proof of concept, this has already been implemented for the Beetle Saturn core. Analog triggers now work as expected. This feature will be necessary for future systems like PlayStation2, where each face button on the gamepad was an analogue button.
  • Mouse buttons 4 and 5 were added. A proof of concept has already been implemented for Beetle Saturn. The mouse on the Sega Saturn had at least 5 buttons instead of the PlayStation mouse’s 2.


Mouse support and lightgun support has also been added to Beetle PSX, a much-requested feature. There are also some proposals on how to improve lightgun support in libretro so that it is more conducive to non-mouse based lightgun solutions. As ever, additions to the libretro API have to be backwards compatible and they should not break ABI, so that existing frontends will not be adversely affected but at the same time new frontends can reap the benefits of these new features all the same.

What’s coming next for RetroArch

We will have a separate blog post on this soon.

In the meantime, check out the addendum to this post –

https://www.libretro.com/index.php/core-updates-since-last-release/

This details all of the changes to the cores that have happened since the last release.

RetroArch 1.6.7 -Released!

Libretro Team

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)

  1. Picodrive should hopefully work now again on Android after notaz‘ updates.
  2. 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.
  3. Beetle PSX – Fixed bugs (geometry updates had max width and height unset, other ones) (by albertofustinoni).
  4. Beetle Saturn – Unloading game leaves core unusable fix (by albertofustinoni).
  5. Beetle Supergrafx – add turbo on/off for 2-button controller mode (by retrowertz).
  6. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 –

https://github.com/SuperrSonic/RA-SS/commit/29d6467d28a835136b8ab87e209feb34421983ff

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 1.6.4 – Released!

Libretro Team

RetroArch 1.6.4 has just been released! Grab it here.

This latest version has also been uploaded to the Google Play Store. You might see it appear on the Amazon App Store soon too!

General changelog

ANDROID: Fire Stick & Fire TV remote overrides gamepad port 0 on button press and viceversa like SHIELD devices
ANDROID: Provide default save / system / state / screenshot locations
AUDIO: Audio mixer supports MOD/S3M/XM file types now!
INPUT: input swap override flag (for remotes) is cleared correctly
INPUT: allow specifying libretro device in remap files
INPUT: allow specifying analog dpad mode in remap files
INPUT: allow saving libretro device to remap files
INPUT: allow saving analog dpad mode to remap files
INPUT: allow removing core and game remap files from the menu
COMMON: Cores can now request to set a ‘shared context’. You no longer need to explicitly enable ‘Shared Hardware Context’ for Citra/OpenLara/Dolphin.
COMMON: Add ‘Delete Core’ option to Core Information menu.
COMMON: Allow Max Timing Skew to be set to 0.
COMMON: Change the “content dir” behavior so it works on either a flag or an empty directory setting, now platform drivers can provide defaults for save / system / state / screenshot dirs and still allow the content dir functionality, these settings are under settings / saving and flagged as advanced
GUI: You can turn on/off ‘Horizontal Animation’ now for the XMB menu. Turning animations off can result in a performance boost.
GUI: Fix sublabel word-wrapping in XMB where multi-byte languages were cut off too soon
LOCALIZATION: Update Dutch translation
LOCALIZATION: Update Traditional Chinese translation
LOCALIZATION: Update Italian translation
LOCALIZATION: Update Russian translation
WINDOWS: Provide default save / system / state / screenshot locations
LOBBIES: Show what country the host is in
MENU: Enable OSD text rendering for gdi and libcaca drivers
WINDOWS 98/ME/2K: Set default directory for MSVC 2005 RetroArch version.
WII: Better V-Sync handling, backported from SuperrSonic.
WIIU: Exception handler rewritten.

Bounty system gathering steam!

Several bounties have either been completed over the past few days or are nearing completion. Let’s cover a few of them.

In case you’re interested, here is a list of bounties we are currently funding which still have yet to be completed and where you could come in. Check out this list here.

Play MOD / S3M / XM files music files now in-game!


Remember that audio mixer we added a few releases back? This allows you to have external music files playing while any core/game is running. So far, you could only play Wave (WAV) and Ogg Vorbis files with this feature, but now you can playback Mod files too!

Developer Romain Tisserand did the leg work on this bounty, and the nice thing about it being added to libretro-common is that the improvements and additions made to the audio mixer can be used now by either the libretro cores and/or the frontend, RetroArch in this case!

How to use this feature – simply go to ‘Load Content’, and select any MOD/S3M/XM/WAV/OGG file on your file system. Select ‘Add To Audio Mixer’. If you are using the XMB menu driver, it will now be added to the horizontal menu’s ‘Music’ tab.

Start up any core/game now. At any point in time while playing, go back to the music, go to the main menu, go to the Music tab, select any of the music files and choose ‘Add to audio mixer’. Toggle the menu again to go back to the game and you can hear the music being mixed in with the game’s sound.

TIP: You can mix several music files at the same time! You can run up to 8 music files together at the same time. As ever, RetroArch allows you power features beyond what is commonly offered.

MAME CHD support for Beetle Saturn / PC Engine Fast!

This bounty came about when several users saw the value in more emulators being able to read MAME CHD images and chipped in the funds for a bounty.

Developers Romain Tisserand and inolen (Redream) have written a new C-based library called libchdr. This should interface with CHD images. After the library was written, Romain decided to put the work in to backport CHD support to the Mednafen-based cores, Beetle Saturn and PC Engine Fast.

This means that both the Mednafen Saturn and PC Engine Fast cores can now read MAME CHD images! MAME CHD is a compressed image file which can save a ton of storage for disc/CD-ROM based images. The implementation also supports FLAC support for redbook audio.

New bounties have been created for more cores to have this compatibility, such as Genesis Plus GX (and Eke seems interested in having this in his upstream repository as well). This is just one of the ways in which we think bounties can trickle down beneficially to downstream projects as well.

The upshot in all this is that pretty soon it could be possible to use the same MAME CHD image sets for both MAME and these various cores. More interoperability between cores is definitely a good thing to see.

MAME 2003 – DCS sound issues fixed! Proper sound now in Mortal Kombat/NBA Jam/WWF Wrestlemania!


For a long time, the MAME 2003 core has suffered from an issue where the sound could deteroriate after a couple of minutes for about 30 seconds before restoring itself. This would happen in Midway DCS-based games such as Mortal Kombat 1/2/3/Ultimate, NBA Jam, etc.

A bounty had been submitted by dankcushions some time ago and finally this bounty is on the verge of being completed! It should finally be possible to play these games at fullspeed on something as low-fi as a Raspberry Pi without being put out of the game by sound bugs and being reminded you are running an inaccurate emulated version of the game.

New big bounty for Beetle PSX upcoming in next few days – dynarec!

For quite some months now, a bounty has existed for Beetle PSX which has steadily increased in value. Up to $250 now, the pledgers are asking a developer to create a dynamic recompiler for the Wii U system in hopes of being able to run PlayStation games at fullspeed.

Unfortunately, we think that in order for this bounty to first get traction, some groundwork needs to be laid out first. Right now, Beetle PSX has no dynarec system in place at all, only a CPU interpreter. Therefore, it would be very hard for a developer to start right out of the gates with a PowerPC-based dynarec since no framework is in place yet that would allow him/her to slot in a dynarec backend like this.

So, what we are going to do is we want to sweeten the pot a bit and create a new bounty dedicated solely to building a dynarec. We believe that once the groundwork is laid out, this WiiU dynarec bounty has more chance of being successfully completed.

The conditions will be:
* A dynarec system for Beetle PSX, preferably written in C or else C++98.
* A working backend for x86 32bit and x64 (64-bit).
* Should be engineered in such a way that new backend implementations for other architectures (like ARM and PowerPC) can be easily implemented.
* Should be signifcantly faster than the interpreter CPU core, and should lower Mednafen/Beetle PSX’s CPU system requirements considerably.

We will start out this new bounty at $100. Other users can feel free to chip in on this endeavor. You will see this bounty being announced over the next few days.

Release highlights

Windows 98 SE/2000/Millennium Edition version – now with 29 cores!


So we announced a Visual Studio 2005 version of RetroArch this past week which runs on Windows 98 SE / Millennium / 2000. Upon release however, there were no cores.

We now have 29 cores available on our buildbot! You can get them by starting your copy of RetroArch 1.6.4 and going to Online Updater -> Update Cores. Note that because it’s Visual Studio 2005/MSVC2005 we are relying on as our compiler, certain cores might never become available for this. For instance, cores that rely on C11 (like SameBoy) or C++11/C++14 (like Dinothawr/Dolphin/Citra) will not make the cut. Fortunately, most of our cores can happily compile as either C89 and/or C++98, so backporting is not as big an issue for it as it would be for other projects which are not as careful when it comes to code maintenance.

Here are some general hints and advice in case you want to run RetroArch on your retro battle station:
* Keep in mind that Windows 98 SE GPU drivers in most cases won’t support OpenGL 2.0. There is one exception apparently, which is the nVidia Geforce 6 series. This GPU series should support OpenGL 2.0 and there should still be drivers somewhere available for Windows 98. In case you have such a GPU, you could opt to use the OpenGL driver which should be more full-featured than our GDI and/or Direct3D9 drivers.
* In most cases, your GPU driver will probably support Direct3D 9. If you want to use Direct 3D 9, you should only use the menu driver RGUI with it. Neither MaterialUI and/or XMB will render properly as of yet with Direct3D.
* For lower-end GPU hardware where neither Direct3D 9 or OpenGL is desirable or possible (because you don’t have hardware accelerated 3D video drivers), a GDI video driver is also available. For this release, we added OSD font rendering to it. There are still issues remaining with this GDI driver though on certain OS configurations. Bparker might be able to use some help with getting some of those niggles sorted out. Reminder that if you want to use a menu driver with GDI, it’s best to use the RGUI menu driver.

Citra/OpenLara/Dolphin cores can now be easily used!

You no longer need to enable ‘Shared Hardware Context’ anymore in order to use these cores. RetroArch’s underlying API, the libretro API, has gained a new environment callback. The Citra/OpenLara/Dolphin cores make use of this to signify to the frontend that they need a shared hardware context.

A frontend can feel free to implement this or not, however, it goes without saying that cores which make use of this feature might simply not work correctly if left unimplemented.

Deleting cores

Installed a core, but you feel like you no longer need it? It’s now possible to delete it from within RetroArch.

How to do this –
1. Load the core.
2. Go to the main menu, and go to Information.
3. Select ‘Core Information’.
4. Select ‘Delete Core’ at the bottom of the list.

Configuration changes

Saving Stuff on Content Dir

The new behavior is to always provide a sane default directory for Saves, Savestates, System Files, and Screenshots. Windows and Android have been historically problematic in this regard since the content directory may not be writable at all times.
The old behavior relied on the setting strings being empty, now we provide a default value for these dirs on both Android and Windows which means the string will never be empty. Other platforms should follow this convention shortly.

So if you want to use content dir after 1.6.3 do the following:

  1. Navigate to Settings / User Interface
  2. Enable Show Advanced Settings
  3. Navigate to Settings / Saving
  4. Enabled the respective settings among the last four settings for the stuff you want to reside with your content

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause to existing users but we need to make some changes to make progress.

Core Input Remapping Improvements

You can now delete core and game remaps from the Quick Menu.

Core Input Remapping has also been improved. The following will now be saved:
* The libretro device
* Analog Dpad mode

You can also save these in overrides but remaps is a far more convenient place for these.

Updates on cores

Read here what updates have been pushed to the cores since the last release –

As always, you can always install the latest version of every core from RetroArch’s builtin ‘Core Updater’ (accessible from the menu by going to ‘Online Updater’ -> ‘Update Cores’.

Retroarch on Amazon App Store coming soon!

We have often been begged by Amazon for years now to please publish RetroArch on the App Store. So far, we always felt the time was not right.

With this release, though, we have finally fixed a fundamental issue where using the Remote would make it no longer possible to use a gamepad as Player 1. This has now been rectified.

We will inform you when the Amazon App Store build has been published. For now, users can sideload it by just downloading the APK from our website.

What’s up next?

Priority number one absolutely right now is PPPSSPP and Supermodel. We are going to get that into your hands ASAP as promised.

After that,

* An AppImage version of RetroArch for Linux will be available soon.
* Lots of core work like we always do each week.
* More yet unannounced stuff? Stay tuned!

View this page if you’d like to explore donating to us. By popular demand, there is now the ability to send one-off donations through Bitcoin, and we have put up links so that you can directly send funds to the Bountysource bucket. You can also pledge to our Patreon.

NOTE: the OSX PowerPC version will be uploaded tomorrow. Thanks for your patience.