One of our goals with getting on Patreon was to experiment with using a bounty system to encourage contributions from outside of the normal libretro/RetroArch/Lakka team, and we’re finally ready to take a stab at it. This is uncharted territory for us, so some of this framework is bound to change as we move forward, but here’s our initial plan:
The libretro team makes all final decisions on bounty allocations and disbursements. While we intend to listen closely to community input, ultimately we have to be able to make the final decisions.
All contributions must follow coding guidelines and meet approval of the libretro team before disbursements will be awarded. We can’t pay out if the code isn’t usable and/or maintainable by us.
Pursuant to #2, potential contributors should contact the libretro team prior to beginning work to make sure the final product will be acceptable. This is intended to avoid misunderstandings and other conflicts. We don’t want someone to work hard on a fix or feature only to find that it’s not going to be acceptable for whatever reason.
We will try to do as much as we can through Bountysource, where we can link specific issues from our Github repos to bounty values. This is especially applicable to smaller tasks. However, it may not be appropriate for all tasks, and we’ll decide how to deal with those that don’t exactly fit on a task-by-task basis.
Pursuant to #4, potential contributors should contact the libretro team and determine an actual disbursement value based on the magnitude and difficulty of the task. We may need to negotiate up or down to find a fair value, based on the contributors’ skillset, or the amount of tutoring needed to get contributors up to speed with the codebases/APIs involved, etc.
Disbursements can be made in the form of cash payments, the purchase of hardware for development and/or testing, etc. We want to be able to help developers with whatever they need. Sometimes that will be in direct payments, other times it may be in specialized hardware for porting/maintaining or reverse-engineering or whatever.
Again, this framework is a work-in-progress, so if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us, either on Github or in #retroarch on Freenode IRC.
On Android, you can expect version 1.5.0 to be downloadable on the Google Play Store later today. If you want to install the APK manually, you can do so by downloading it from the URL linked to above.
Changes since last version (1.4.1)
MOBILE: Single-tap for menu entry selection
MOBILE: Long-tap a setting to reset to default
ANDROID: Autoconf fallback
ANDROID: Mouse support / Emulated mouse support
AUTOCONF: Fix partial matches for pad name
CHEEVOS: Fix crashes in the cheevos description menu
CHEEVOS: WIP leaderboards support
COMMON: Threading fixes
COMMON: 9-slice texture drawing support
CORETEXT/APPLE: Ability to load menu display font drivers and loading of custom font.
DOS: Add keyboard driver
DOS: Improve color accuracy and scaling
GUI: Various settings are now only visible when advanced settings is enabled
GUI: Allow changing icon theme on the fly
GUI: Add a symbol page in the OSK (Onscreen Keyboard)
GUI: Better dialogs for XMB
LOCALIZATION: Add/update Korean translation
LOCALIZATION: Rewrite German translation
LOCALIZATION: Update several English sublabels
LOCALIZATION: Update several Japanese labels
NET: Allow manual netplay content loading
NET: Announcing network games to the public lobby is optional now
NET: Bake in miniupnpc
NET: Fix netplay join for contentless cores
NET: LAN games show next to lobbies with (LAN) and connect via the private IP address
NET: Use new lobby system with MITM (Man In The Middle) support
NET: Fix netplay rooms being pushed on the wrong tab
NUKLEAR: Update to current version
SCANNER: Always add 7z & zip to supported extensions
VULKAN: Find supported composite alpha in swapchain
VULKAN: Add snow/bokeh shader pipeline effects – at parity with GL now
WIIU: Keyboard support
WINDOWS: Logging to file no longer spawns an empty window
WINDOWS: Fix loading of core/content via file menu
We’ll go into some of the important features in more detail below.
UPNP support out of the box! (Windows/MacOS/Linux/Android/iOS)
Previously, in order for netplay to work, you as the hoster would need to manually port forward on your router. Starting with version 1.5.0, RetroArch now supports UPNP out of the box! If you have a home network router that supports UPNP, you should now be able to host netplay games without having to manually open ports on your router!
NOTE: The platforms that come with UPNP support out of the box as of this point includes: Android, MacOS, Linux, iOS, and Windows. If you have a version of RetroArch for any other platform, it’s likely it does not have UPNP support, and therefore you would still need to fallback on manual port forwarding if you want to host a game.
Menu improvements
An often-heard complaint was that touch navigation on mobile devices was not intuitive enough. You had to double tap in order to select an entry instead of being able to single tap which is the norm for most mobile programs out there.
We have changed this so that you now only have to single tap. Also, you can now ‘long-tap’ a setting in order to ‘reset’ it to default. This is useful in case you are tinkering with some setting using touch and you want to set it back to its default setting.
Other new features – changing the icon theme now works on-the-fly, so you no longer need to restart RetroArch for these changes to take effect.
Android controller detection improvements
If RetroArch cannot find a preconfigured entry for your gamepad on Android, it will now try to use the Android standard default controls for the gamepad instead. This should help with a bunch of gamepads that are lacking a current autoconfiguration file, and should prevent the user from having to manually setup the controls.
Vulkan improvements
Previously, the menu effects ‘Snow’ and ‘Bokeh’ were not available if you were running RetroArch with the Vulkan video driver enabled. Now you can use them with Vulkan as well!
In case you don’t know how to access these, go to Settings -> User Interface -> Menu -> Menu Shader Pipeline.
Half a year after RetroArch 1.3.6 was released, now comes the next big stable! Version 1.4.1 is by any yardstick a big massive advance on the previous version. There are about 5000 commits or more to sift through, so let’s focus on a few big main standout features that we want to emphasize for this release.
We are calling this release an ‘Open Beta’ because we want people to put the massively improved Netplay features through its paces! All of your feedback and issues will be taken onboard so that 1.5.0 (which we intend to ship somewhere beginning of March) will deliver on all the promises we have made for netplay.
Netplay
Netplay has seen a big massive improvement since version 1.3.6.
To set up a netplay game, you have two options: Manual or automatic connection.
Naturally, the automatic way is easier:
To host, just load a core and launch some content as usual and, once the game is running, go back into the ‘quick menu’ (the default keyboard shortcut is F1) and scroll down to the ‘netplay’ submenu. From there, choose ‘Start netplay host’ and it will announce your game to the lobby server for other users to join. You can go ahead and start playing and new players can jump in at any time. That is, RetroArch no longer stalls out until clients join.
Joining an existing session is just as easy. From the main menu, navigate over to the netplay tab (the icon looks like a wifi symbol), scroll down to ‘Refresh Room List’ and hit the ‘accept’ key/button (the default keyboard shortcut is the ‘X’ key). RetroArch will fetch the current list of available hosts and display them right there in the netplay tab. From there, just pick the host you wish to join and RetroArch will cycle through your playlists searching for a content match. If it finds a match, you’ll jump right into the host’s game already in progress.
To use manual connection, the host does the exact same steps. The client must load the same core and game first, then choose the “connect to netplay host” option from the netplay menu. You will be prompted for the IP address of the host. Enter it to connect.
To keep your games private, the host may set a password, required to connect, in the network settings menu.
We want your feedback and input on netplay, and the aim is that we take your feedback into consideration for 1.5.0 (which we will launch early March) to put the final finishing touches on netplay in general. Things like chat, friend lists and so on will all need to be implemented still.
Multi-language support/Japanese language support
We have added UTF-8 support and we have added translations for several languages now. Of these, Japanese is probably second to English in terms of being the most complete translation.
In addition to this, the new onscreen keyboard also has multilingual support, and supports Japanese fully (Hiragana, Katakana).
Free homebrew Bomberman clone game – Mr.Boom
Mr.Boom is a Bomberman clone. It supports up to 8 players and features like pushing bombs, remote controls and kangaroo riding.
This was an old MS-DOS/Windows 9x homebrew game that https://github.com/frranck converted over to C with a self-made tool he calls asm2c.
Right now, this core works for Mac/Windows/Linux/ We are still working on Android support!
Mr. Boom currently requires at least a minimum of 2 players. There is no singleplayer mode (yet). It can not yet be used with netplay but that is our ultimate aim! Free 8-player easy Bomberman-like gameplay for everybody! We will make an announcement later when netplay support is fully working for this core!
New menu graphical effects
In addition to the ribbon effects, we have added some new menu effects : Bokeh, and Snow.
Check the accompanying video to see them in action. You can access these menu effects by going to
Settings -> User Interface -> Menu and setting “Menu Shader Pipeline” to any effect of your choosing.
NOTE: These two new menu effects are not yet available for Vulkan and Cg. Ports would have to be made first of these menu effects, since they are completely shader-based.
Quality-of-Life improvements to the menu
We have taken all the criticisms of the menu UI to heart and we really pushed ourselves to make the menu much more pleasant to deal with.
We have gone to the painstaking effort of making sure that nearly every menu entry now has a small description below it.
Loading content has been massively streamlined. There is no longer a separate ‘Load Content’ and ‘Load Content (Detect Core)’ option. You simply select a starting point directory, you then select your game and you decide which core to use.
There is a new onscreen keyboard made for the menu which is compatible with touch and the mouse. It not only supports traditional western characters but thanks to improved multilingual support it will also support Japanese (Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana and Romaji).
In fullscreen mode, the mouse cursor inside the menu will only show for about 5 seconds. If there is no mouse activity it will disappear from the screen until you move the mouse again.
Improved error handling
Cores should now report an error message back to RetroArch in most instances where a ROM/content fails to load. We went over most cores and we are reasonably comfortable in that we took care of most of the trouble spots.
Vulkan N64 and PSX now works on Android!
To read more about these projects, read our past articles here –
ParaLLel (Nintendo 64 core with Vulkan renderer) and Mednafen PSX HW should now work on Android devices that support Vulkan!
Unfortunately, GPU is currently not the bottleneck here. In the case of both of these emulators, more work is required before they will start to run at fullspeed on Android devices. We need to get the LLVM dynarec working on ARM devices.
In the case of Mednafen PSX HW, the interpreter CPU core is the main bottleneck which prevents the emulator from reaching playable speeds right now. An experimental dynarec was written a year ago but it still needs a lot of work before it could be considered ‘usable’.
Lots of other miscellaneous stuff
Improved performance
(Linux) DRM/KMS context driver should be more compatible now
(Linux) The GLX context driver now uses GLX_OML_sync_control when available, leading to much improved swap control. Potential video tearing and frame time deviation will be way lower in general.
(Linux) Attaching a PS4 gamepad will allow you to use the audio headphone jack to route sound to your headphones if you use the ALSA audio driver. It will now query the available audio output sampling rates that an audio device supports, and if the recommended output sampling rate that we use in RetroArch doesn’t match, we will use a sampling rate that the audio device DOES support instead. The PS4 pad only works with 32Khz audio, hence why we need to switch to it on the fly in order to get sound working with it.
(Android) Should fix a longstanding touch input bug that might have prevented touch from working altogether on certain devices.
(Android) GLES3/3.1 support, the fancy ribbon effect and Snow/Bokeh should also be available on Android now.
(Linux/Wayland) Full input support, keyboard and mouse.
Too much stuff to mention
Also read our companion article for more information here –
RetroArch has now been ported to Windows 98SE/2000 as well as DOS. These are very early work-in-progress ports but in their current state do allow you to start up RetroArch and load a core/game.
Windows
For Windows, the current releases and nightly builds do not support XP or below due to changes in the msys2/mingw toolchain. While older Windows versions are indeed supported by the RetroArch codebase, they need to be manually compiled with Visual Studio (Express or Pro) to run properly. For XP and above, Visual Studio 2010 is supported. The solution/project file is located in the pkg/msvc folder of the source along with older msvc solutions. For Windows 98/2000, we support Visual Studio 2005. A DirectX 9.0c SDK is also required, and in order to target 98, a version no newer than December 2006 must be used.
The Windows 98/2000 port may work with our existing OpenGL driver if your graphics card supports a high enough version of OpenGL, but this has not yet been tested. So far 98/2000 has only been tested against a new experimental GDI video driver which does not require hardware acceleration like OpenGL or DirectX (the GDI driver works on newer Windows versions as well). With the GDI driver, the RGUI menu is fully supported and there is also preliminary support for XMB with minimal (text-only) rendering.
For input/joypad and audio support on 98/2000, the DirectX 9.0c runtime should continue to work as it does with newer Windows versions. Windows 98SE requires a DirectX runtime no newer than December 2006, and Windows 2000 can go up to February 2010.
Cores for 98/2000 will also currently need to be compiled manually due to the mingw toolchain used by the buildbot. It’s possible that we may setup a new buildbot target for the older Windows ports at a later date.
DOS
The DOS port requires DJGPP to compile (we cross-compile from Linux), and also requires the CWSDPMI server included with that toolchain to access 32-bit protected mode. An experimental “Mode 13h” VGA driver is implemented to provide 320×200 video with 256 colors. Keyboard input support is currently very minimal, only the A/B/X/Y, Start/Select and arrow keys work. There is also no audio support yet.
Cores for DOS will need to be compiled manually, as well as statically linked with RetroArch itself, similar to how our console ports work. This means that a compiled RetroArch EXE file will correspond to just one specific built-in core. FCEUmm and Snes9x2010 are known to work, but due to the default timer tick in DOS being 18hz, gameplay is currently very slow. Work is ongoing to reprogram the interrupt timer which should allow full speed gameplay.
Release
No release yet! You have to compile from source, and things are still very much a Work-In-Progress!
Compilation instructions
Compilation instructions will be added at a certain point on our Documentation site.
We at Libretro wish you all a happy New Year! 2016 has been quite the year for Libretro as a project, so let’s briefly recap where we stand at the end of this year and what we managed to do in 2016 –
First with Vulkan
We were one of the first programs to ride the Vulkan wave, and we managed to add Vulkan support to RetroArch since Day One of the new graphics API’s release.
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