RetroArch Disc Project – Run real games off CD-ROM with RetroArch, starting with Sega CD, Sega Saturn, PlayStation1 and 3DO! Coming VERY soon!

Libretro Team

So, we just announced the RetroArch Disc Project yesterday. We believe everybody that uses RetroArch and has a CD drive at their disposal should be able to run their own original discs on RetroArch.

We had initial plans of launching with just Sega CD, but a lot can happen in a day. So, without further ado, we’re going to show you our latest work in progress video of actual PlayStation1 games running off the original CD in RetroArch!

July 2: And then the day after, we added Sega Saturn and 3DO to the mix!

So what can you expect?

  • Expect a release of this VERY soon.
  • It will be Windows/Linux only for now. We have no plans right now for bringing it to other systems/platforms, but I’m sure the list of platforms that will have CDROM support will grow as we go on.
  • Expect this initial release to target PlayStation, Sega CD, Sega Saturn and 3DO games for now. If more systems get added to the mix, we will let you know in advance.
  • We are going to get Lakka involved in this from Day One.
  • Will things be perfect on Day One? No. But it will be pretty good for an initial release, and as ever with all things RetroArch, we move fast, and we will make speedy progress!

PS. In case you were wondering what happened to ProjectFuture, you’re looking at it!

Retrogaming should be affordable to all and available to all instead of locked behind overexpensive wasteful hardware. It is all built off the backs of opensource anyway, why should this be locked down again by any single company? It shouldn’t! Preservation and emulation should go hand in hand, and that means being able to run the original discs on open source emulators, on ANY device!

To the Raspberry Pi community and other SBC communities – go nuts with this when it hits!

RetroArch – In Development – World-first text to speech in emulators – Update!

Libretro Team

Earlier this month we showed you RetroArch’s world first text to speech implementation for emulators. You can read that previous article here.

Since then, this feature has been immeasurably improved. Onscreen character recognition and live text to speech translation is now done at the press of a button. You bind the AI Service key to a button or key of your choice, and as soon as you press it, a scan of the image will be taken in real-time. Any characters that were recognized as text will then be translated from text to speech.

In this video, we are running a local instance of vgtranslate on the same computer. This cuts down a lot on the latency you could perceive in the previous video. The other big difference is that the core no longer has to be paused manually and then unpaused to do the OCR scan – you now press a hotkey and the game continues running without any interruption. This provides for a much more smooth and seamless experience.

Shown in this video is a test run of several cores and games: Quake 1 with the Tyrquake core, Mega Man 4 with a NES emulator core, Trials of Mana/Seiken Densetsu 3 with a SNES emulator core, and finally Castlevania 3 with a NES emulator core. The OCR/text to speech system works with ANY libretro core that does not use hardware acceleration right now. So any core that doesn’t rely on OpenGL/Vulkan/Direct3D in order to function should be good to go.

Play! (PlayStation2 emulator) getting a libretro core

Libretro Team

The PlayStation2 emulator Play! will be seeing a libretro port in the near future. We’ve reached an amicable agreement with two devs to make this happen. We’ll also be supporting their Patreon monthly from now on, just like we’ve supported other Patreon emulator creators for little over a month now as of this writing.

Note that this is separate from the PCSX2 core bounty, which is still ongoing and is still its own thing. We still need to find a bounty hunter for that one, though.

RetroArch – In Development – Touchscreen Lightgun for mobile devices!

Libretro Team

With the upcoming new RetroArch version, it will be possible to use your fingers as a lightgun on mobile devices!

The first core you can see here with working support is Beetle Saturn, running at fullspeed in this video on an iPhone XS Max!

We will let you know which cores will support this feature as we get closer to the release of the next RetroArch version. Stay tuned!

RetroArch – In Development – World-first text to speech in emulators! OCR Bounty Progress!

Libretro Team

The OCR bounty’s next milestone has been reached! Previously, it was finally possible to recognize patterns of text by the OCR/translation APIs. Now, text to speech has been achieved!

NOTE: This is a work in progress/development, and is not reflective yet of the actual finished product.

In this video, you see us running RetroArch with an old school SNES RPG, Soul Blazer. Right now, this is a very experimental implementation that is far from finished and not really ready for general gameplay, but this will be further developed from this point on.

Anyway, in this video you see us doing the following:

* Whenever we pause RetroArch, the OCR process starts. It will first attempt to recognize text onscreen.

* Once it has recognized text, you will see outlines onscreen surrounding the recognized text.

* Then it passes this off to the Translate Text To Speech engine. Once done, it generates a log message about it (you can see this in the video).

* From this point on, you can unpause RetroArch and you can actually hear the voice over.

NOTE: Just to emphasize, this is NOT how it will work like in the actual finished product. This is a purely ‘WIP developer’ video we’re showing.