The first Dreamcast emulator ever to get a Vulkan renderer. Completely open-source, written from scratch, and available later today on RetroArch. Update your core later today to get the latest version with the Vulkan renderer! Available for Android, Windows, and Linux.
For more information, read down below…
Wait … a new what?
The renderer is the emulator component that emulates the Dreamcast/Naomi GPU chip, namely the PowerVR Series2. It was one of the first generations of 3D chips, with only a fixed pipeline. The PowerVR2 supported DirectX 6.0, which was the graphics API used by Windows CE games on the Dreamcast. Successors of the PowerVR2 would later be found in the original iPhone and iPod Touch (PowerVR4), iPhone 4 and iPad (PowerVR5) and many many other mobile devices. Now the Dreamcast GPU is more than 20 years old. You might think it should be easy to emulate such an ancient chip on modern hardware, right? Well … yes for the most part. But there’s one thing that the PVR2 does really well, and it’s order-independent transparency. And even today this is still not trivial to implement even on modern hardware. You won’t find this feature in Open GL or DirectX, and you need a pretty recent version of these APIs to be able to emulate it, which means manually sorting individual pixels from back to front and blending them together, and doing this for each visible pixel on the screen!
OK, but what about Vulkan?
For those of you who are not familiar with Vulkan, it is a relatively new 3D graphics API, basically a follow-on to Open GL. Open GL is quite permissive and has little declarative constraints. You just throw stuff at the driver when you need to and the driver’s job is to figure it out. The downside of this is that the Open GL driver often needs to guess what you’ll do next and he might not guess right. And when it doesn’t, performance suffers. Vulkan is radically different in that everything must be declared in advance, in great details, and there’s very little room for improvisation on the part of the driver. Vulkan works much closer to the hardware than Open GL does. So you can expect less overhead, more reliability and better performance in many cases.
The downside of Vulkan is the sheer amount of code you have to write to display just a single triangle on the screen, let alone a full-featured Dreamcast renderer. Last time I checked, the Vulkan renderer had 47 source files and around 7800 lines of code. (The Open GL renderer only has around 6000 lines of code.)
So what do we get?
As with Open GL, there are actually two Vulkan renderers: The first one uses a traditional single render pass with per-triangle or per-mesh sorting done by the CPU. The second one is capable of order-independent transparency with per-pixel sorting performed by the GPU. It uses multiple subpasses to compose the final image: the first subpass draws the opaque geometry depth map and the shadows casted on them. The second subpass renders all opaque geometry to a temporary color framebuffer, and transparent geometry into a huge pixel linked list. The last subpass then renders shadow volumes for translucent geometry. And finally all pixels are sorted and blended together using the opaque framebuffer of the previous subpass as background.
Subpass 1
Subpass 2
Subpass 3
The next Flycast nightly build will have support for Vulkan on all major platforms: Windows, Linux and Android. In terms of features, the new renderer should be on par with the Open GL renderer, with the notable exception of lightgun crosshair and VMU screens display, which will be added soon. However, expect to find bugs and crashes here and there as is expected with any new piece of software. Also it may be slower than Open GL depending on many factors such as GPU, driver version, game being played, etc. We’ll do our best to fix any issue encountered and overcome performance issues. When reporting problems, make sure to indicate what GPU you’re using and the Vulkan driver version. It is highly recommended to upgrade your drivers to the latest version available, especially on mobile.
Here is a showcase of the differences between the basic and OIT renderers. By the way, this also applies to Open GL.
Here the hair of these ladies show glitching triangles in basic mode.
Basic
OIT
In Speed Devils 2, the shadow volumes (called “Modifier Volumes” in Dreamcast literature) are used in a special way to project headlights. This is only possible by using deferred rendering.
Basic
OIT
In this example, look at Ryo’s cast shadow on his left. There is a fog effect applied to this scene, but the basic single pass renderer cannot apply a fog effect to the cast shadow. In the OIT renderer, the shadow is perfectly fogged.
Basic
OIT
In Jet Set Radio, the character is composed of translucent polygons, and these polygons can be shadowed as well. Only the OIT renderer can properly render shadows cast on translucent polygons.
Basic
OIT
To finish, here is another seldom used GPU features: secondary accumulation buffer. It can be used to do tri-linear filtering and other effects. This is Evil Dead – Hail to the King and it is clear that the basic renderer is having a hard time here.
Basic
OIT
Final thoughts
Yes, the per-pixel alpha transparency option which to this date was only available on Windows and Linux now also works on Android with the Vulkan renderer. However, keep in mind that per-pixel alpha sorting is heavily memory bandwidth-limited. It has been tested on a Mali G76 (Samsung Galaxy S10+) – and it runs acceptably at 640×480 or 800×600 resolution. Your mileage may vary depending on the GPU power inside your Android phone. We recommend you to find that sweet spot which works best for you, and if results are too bad with per-pixel alpha enabled, turn back to per-triangle.
Some clear advantages of the Vulkan renderer is that frame pacing is much better than the OpenGL renderer, and performance is far higher when it comes to texture uploads and/or framebuffer manipulation. For example – when you KO an opponent in Dead Or Alive 2 against an explosive wall – the framerate would often tumble a bit on GL, but no such issues with Vulkan. Similar improvements can be noticed in Virtua Tennis 2 – when certain framebuffer effects happen after a replay, performance is much more steady with Vulkan thanks to the high degree of parallelism.
With Vulkan, we have heard reports that virtually all sound crackles and stutters are gone. That’s because with vulkan you choose the sync points where you wait. In GL the driver has to guess and sometimes it fails. These effects are using render to texture, and with OpenGL this creates sync issues.
GLSL shaders now preferred over Cg when possible
Update to latest RetroArch for compatibility with updated GLSL shaders
Cg shaders demoted, GLSL promoted to first-class
Portability and compatibility are major goals for RetroArch and libretro, so we invested heavily in Nvidia’s Cg shader language, which worked natively anywhere their Cg Toolkit framework was available (that is, Windows, Linux and Mac OS X), as well as on PS3 and Vita, and could be machine-compiled to messy-but-usable GLSL (lacking a few features, such as runtime parameters) for platforms that lacked the framework (primarily ARM / mobile platforms). Cg was also so close to Microsoft’s HLSL shader language that many Cg shaders will compile successfully with HLSL compilers, such as those available with Windows’ D3D driver and on Xbox 360.
This was great for us because we could write shaders once and have them work pretty much everywhere.
Sadly, Nvidia deprecated the Cg language in 2012, which left us in a bad spot. Since then, we’ve been limping along with the same strategy as before, but with the uneasy understanding that Nvidia could stop supplying their Cg Toolkit framework at any time. Rather than sit idly by, waiting for that other shoe to drop, we took it upon ourselves to hand-convert the vast majority of our Cg shaders to native GLSL with all of the bells and whistles. TroggleMonkey’s monstrous masterpiece, CRT-Royale, still has a couple of bugs but is mostly working, along with its popular BVM-styled variant from user Kurozumi. Additionally, before this conversion, many of our Cg shaders were flaky or completely unusable on libretro-gl cores, such as Beetle-PSX-HW’s OpenGL renderer, but these native GLSL conversions should work reliably and consistently with any core/context except for those that require Vulkan (namely, ParaLLEl-N64’s and Beetle-PSX-HW’s Vulkan renderers).
With the GLSL shaders brought up to speed, we can finally join Nvidia in deprecating Cg, though it will still remain as an option–that is, we’re not *removing* support for Cg shaders or contexts at this point–and we will continue to use it where there is no other choice; namely, Windows’ D3D driver and the Xbox 360, PS3 and Vita ports. Moving forward, our focus for shaders will be on native GLSL and our slang/Vulkan formats, though we will likely still port some to Cg from time to time.
RetroArch now correctly handles #version directives in GLSL shaders; GLSL shader repo updated to match
There have been a number of updates to the GLSL shader language/spec over its long life, and shader authors can use #version directives (that is, a line at the top of the shader that says #version 130 or whatever) to tell compilers which flavor/version of GLSL is required for that shader. However, RetroArch has long had a strange behavior whereby it injected a couple of lines at the beginning of all GLSL shader files at compile time, and this broke any shader that attempted to use a #version directive, since those directives must be on the first line of the shader. This meant that our shaders couldn’t use #version directives at all, and all of our shaders lacked #version directives until very recently for this reason. These #version-less GLSL shaders are still perfectly compliant GLSL because GLSL v1.10 didn’t support directives, either, but the necessity of leaving off the #version started to cause some problems as we whipped our GLSL shader library into shape.
The error caused by adding a #version directive under the old behavior.
On AMD and Nvidia GPUs, the compilers would just toss up a warning about the missing directive and still expose whatever GLSL features were available to the GPU, which worked out great. On Intel IGPs, however, the compiler tosses the error and then reverts to only exposing the features available in ancient GLSL v1.10 (released way back in 2004). As a stopgap, we gave many shaders fallback codepaths that would still work in these circumstances, but a number of other shaders were either impossible to make compatible or even the compatible result was imperfect. So, as of this commit (courtesy of aliaspider), RetroArch will no longer reject shaders with explicit #version directives, and we have added those directives to any shaders that require them at the lowest version that still compiles/functions properly. That is, if the shader doesn’t use any features that require greater than #version 110, they will still have no #version specified, and any shader that requires #version 120 but not #version 130 will not have its requirements increased to the higher version for no reason. This should keep our GLSL shaders as compatible as possible with older hardware, and including the #versions explicitly when needed will also make it easier for other programs/developers to utilize our shaders without any unnecessary guesswork due to behind-the-scenes magic.
This change does require a clean break, insofar as older versions of RetroArch will choke on the new #version directives (that is, they’ll fail to compile with the “#version must occur before any other program statement” error pictured above), so users with Nvidia or AMD GPUs must update their RetroArch installation if they want to use the updated shaders. Users with Intel IGPs will be no worse off if they don’t update, since those shaders were already broken for them, but they’ll probably *want* to update to gain access to the many fancy shaders that now work properly on their machines.
Mobile GPUs using GLES had many of the same issues that Intel IGPs had, with many shaders refusing to work without #version directives, but GLES compatibility added in a further complication: GLES requires its own separate #version directives, either #version 100 es or #version 300 es, which are different from and incompatible with desktop GL’s #versions. To get around this, we added a trick in RetroArch to change any #version of 120 or below to #version 100, which is roughly comparable in features to 120, and any #version 130 or above to #version 300 es whenever a GLES context is used. This should get everything working as effectively and consistently as possible on mobile GPUs, but if anything slipped through the cracks, be sure to file an issue report at the GLSL shader repo.
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.
Vigilante 8 running in ParaLLEl.Here is a pre-alpha release of the hotly anticipated N64 Vulkan renderer, paraLLel. To coincide with this, a new RetroArch version has also been released that includes support for the async compute interface that this new renderer requires.
RetroArch keeps moving forward, being the reference frontend for libretro and all. Here comes version 1.3.6, and once again we have a lot to talk about.
Where to get it
Windows/Mac/iOS (build only)/Nintendo/PlayStation – Get it here.
Android: You can either get it from F-Droid or from Google Play Store.
Linux: Since RetroArch is included now on most mainline Linux distributions’ package management repository systems, we expect their versions to be updated to 1.3.6 shortly.
I will release versions for MacOSX PowerPC (10.5 Leopard) and 32-bit Intel MacOS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) later on, maybe today or tomorrow.
Usability improvements
Windows Drag and Drop support
Courtesy of mudlord, with the Windows version, you can now drag and drop a ROM (or any other content) onto RetroArch’s window, and it will attempt to load the correct core for it. If there is more than one core available for the type of content you dragged and dropped, it will present you with a slidedown list of cores to select from.
Vastly improved content downloading features
Starting with v1.3.6, RetroArch users can download compatible freeware content, such as the shareware release of Doom, right from the app. This video goes through the steps, which include fetching the core from the online updater, fetching the content from the repository and then launching the core and content we just downloaded.
Menu customization and aesthetics – XMB and MaterialUI
RetroArch v1.3.6 adds support for a number of themes in the default mobile menu, including both bright and dark themes.
There’s also the ability now to set a custom wallpaper in XMB and be able to colorize it with a color gradient. To do this, you go to Settings -> Menu, you set a wallpaper, and from there you have to set ‘Menu Shader Pipeline’ to OFF. You can then choose from one of the color palettes in ‘Color Theme’ in order to shade the background wallpaper, or just select ‘Plain’ in case you don’t want to colorize it.
Undo Load/Save State
Have you ever gotten through a tough part of a game and wanted to make a savestate only to hit the “load state” button instead and have to do it all over again? Or maybe you were practicing a particularly difficult maneuver–for a speedrun, perhaps–and accidentally saved a bad run over your practice point because you hit “save state” instead of “load state”? While savestates are considered one of the great advantages to emulating retro games, they can also lead to these frustrating situations where they wipe out progress instead of saving it, all because of one slip of the finger. RetroArch now has the ability to undo a save- or load-state action through some automatic state-shuffling that happens behind the scenes, so you never have to worry about these situations again.
Undo Load State – Before the ‘current’ state is altered by e.g. a ‘Load Savestate’ operation, ‘current’ is saved in memory and ‘Undo Load State’ restores it; you can also undo this option by using it again, which will make you flip-flop between 2 states.
Undo Save State – If there was a savestate file that was overwritten, this option restores it.
New Features
The main event of RetroArch 1.3.6 is obviously the fact that it makes it possible to run the N64 Vulkan core, paraLLEl. Previous versions of RetroArch will not be able to run this because of the new extensions to libretro Vulkan which we had to push to make this renderer possible.
Vulkan
Async compute core support – ready for ParaLLEl
It was already possible to run Vulkan-enabled libretro cores, but with this release, a few crucial features have been added. Support for queue transfers was added and a context negotiation interface was added.
With this we can now use multiple queues to overlap compute and shading in the frontend level, i.e. asynchronous compute. ParaLLEl would certainly not have been as fast or as effective were it not for this.
ParaLLEl now joins triple-A games like Rise of the Tomb Raider and Doom in heavily relying on Vulkan’s async compute capabilities for maximum efficiency. A test core was also written as a proof of concept for this interface.
If you want to read more about ParaLLEl, we have a compendium blog post for you to digest here.
Supports Windows, Linux, Android equally well now
The previous version already had Vulkan support to varying degrees, but now we feel we are finally at the point where Vulkan driver support in RetroArch is very much mature across most of the supported platforms.
Vulkan should work now on Android, on Windows, and on Linux, provided your GPU has a working Vulkan driver.
On Linux we now support even more video driver context features, such as VK_KHR_display support. This is a platform-agnostic KMS-like backend for Vulkan, which should allow you to run RetroArch with Vulkan without the need of an X11 or Wayland server running.
On Windows and Android, we include Vulkan support now. Vulkan has been tested on Android with NVIDIA Shield Tablet/Console, and both work. Be aware that there are some minuscule things which might not work correctly yet with Vulkan on Android. For instance, orientation changing still doesn’t work. This will be investigated.
Max swapchain images – driving latency even lower with Vulkan and friends
RetroArch already has built up quite a reputation for itself for being able to drive latency down to very low levels. But with new technologies, there is always room for improvement.
Max amount of swapchain images has now been implemented for both the DRM/KMS context driver for OpenGL (usable on Linux) and Vulkan now. What this entails, is that you can programmatically tell your video card to provide you with either triple buffering (3), double buffering (2) or single buffering (1). The previous default with DRM/KMS was 3 (triple buffering), so setting it to 2 could potentially shave off latency by at least 1 frame (as was verified by others). Setting to 1 won’t often get you single buffering with most monitors and drivers due to tearing and they will fall-back to (2) double buffering.
With Vulkan, RetroArch can programmatically infer to the video card what kind of buffering method it likes to be able to use, a vast improvement over the nonexistent options that existed before with OpenGL (from a platform-agnostic perspective).
What Vulkan brings to the table on Android
Vulkan has been tested to run on Android devices that support Vulkan, like Shield Tablet/Console. Latency has always been very bad on Android in the past. With Vulkan, frame times are significantly lower than with OpenGL, and we no longer have to leave Threaded Video enabled by default. Instead, we can turn off Threaded Video and letting RetroArch monitor the refresh rate dynamically, which is the more desirable solution since it allows for less jittery screen updates.
Audio latency can also be driven down significantly now with Vulkan. The current default is 128ms, with Vulkan we can drive it down to 64 or even 32ms.
Couple this with the aforementioned swapchain images support and there are multiple ways to drive latency down on Android now.
OpenGL music visualizer (for FFmpeg-enabled builds)
Versions of RetroArch like the Linux and Windows port happen to feature built-in integrated FFmpeg support, which allows you to watch movies and listen to music from within the confines of RetroArch.
We have added a music visualizer now. The scene is drawn as a cylindrical mesh with FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) heightmap lookups. Different colors are shaded using mid/side channels as well as left/right information for height.
Note that this requires at least GLES3 support (which is available as well through an extension which most GPUs should support by now).
Improvements to cores
TyrQuake
User leileilol contributed a very cool feature to TyrQuake, Quake 64-style RGB colored lighting, except done in software.
To be able to use this feature, you need to create a subdir in your Quake data directory called ‘maps’, and you need to move ‘.lit’ files to this directory. These are the lighting map files that the Tyrquake core will use in order to determine how light should be positioned.
From there on out, you load up the Tyrquake core, you go to Quick Menu -> Options, you enable Colored Lighting. Restart the core and if your files are placed correctly, you should now see the difference.
Be aware that in order to do this, the game renderer shifts to 24bit color RGB rendering, and this in turn makes things significantly slower, although it should still be fairly playable even at higher resolutions.
To download this, go to ‘Add Content’ -> ‘Download Content’. Go to ‘Tyrquake’, and download ‘quake-colored-lighting-pack.zip’. This should extract this zip to your Downloads dir, and inside the Quake directory. From there, you can just load Quake and the colored lighting maps should be found providing the ‘Colored Lighting’ option has been enabled.
SNES9x emulator input lag reduction
A user on our forum, Brunnis, began some investigations into input latency and found that there were significant gains to be made in Super Nintendo emulators by rescheduling when input polling and video blitting are being performed. Based upon these findings and after some pull requests made to SNES9x, SNES9x Next, and FCEUmm, at least 1 to 2 frames of input lag should be shaved off now.
Do read this highly interesting forum thread that led to these improvements here.
News for iOS 10 beta users
There is now a separate version for iOS 10 users. Apple once again changed a lot of things which makes it even more difficult for us to distribute RetroArch the regular way.
Dynamic libraries cores cannot be opened from the Documents directory of the app anymore in iOS 10. They can be opened from the app bundle, as long as they are code-signed. This reverts back to the previous behavior of RetroArch, where the cores need to be in the modules directory of the app bundle.
2. Move the contents of this directory over to the ‘modules’ directory inside the RetroArch iOS 10 Xcode solution. It should presumably handle signing by itself.
Bugfixes/other miscellanous things
Stability/memory leak fixes – We subjected RetroArch to numerous Valgrind/Coverity/Xcode Memory leak checks in order to fix a plethora of memory leaks that had reared their ugly heads inbetween releases. We pretty much eliminated all of them. Not a sexy feature to brag about, but it involved lots of sweat, tears and effort, and the ramifications it has on the overall stability of the program is considerable.
There were some problems with Cg and GLSL shader selections which should now be taken care of.
ScummVM games can now be scanned in various ways (courtesy of RobLoach)
Downloading multiple updates at once could crash RetroArch – now fixed.
Several cores have gotten Retro Achievements support now. The official list of systems that support achievements now is: Mega Drive, Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color, NES, PC Engine, Sega CD, Sega 32X, and Sega Master System.
You can now turn the supported extensions filter on or off from the file browser.
Effort to addressing user experience feedback
I think a couple of things should be addressed first and foremost. First, there is every intent to indeed make things like a WIMP (Windows Icons Mouse Pointers) interface around RetroArch. To this end, we are starting to make crossplatform UI widget toolkit code that will make it easy for us to target Qt/GTK/Win32 UI/Cocoa in one fell swoop.
We have also spent a lot of time plugging some of the rough edges around RetroArch and making the user interface more pleasurable to work with.
Youtube libretro channel
Hunterk/hizzlekizzle is going to be running the libretro Youtube channel from now on, and we’ll start putting up quick and direct Youtube videos there on how to be able to use RetroArch. It is our intent that this will do a couple of things:
1. Show people that RetroArch is easy to use and has numerous great features beneath the surface too.
2. It allows users to give constructive criticism and feedback on the UI operations they see and how they think they should be improved.
3. We hope to engage some seasoned C/C++ coders to help us get some of these UI elements done sooner rather than later. Most of RetroArch development mostly relies on a handful of guys – 5 at the most. It is a LOT of hard work for what amounts to a hobbyist project, and if we had a lot more developers seasoned in C/C++, stuff could be done quicker.
4. There is no intention at all to make RetroArch ‘obtuse’ for the sake of it, there is every intention to make it more accessible for people. Additional help would go a very long way towards that.
Regarding the current UIs and their direction, it is obviously meant to be a console-like UI experience. This might not be what desktop users are used to on their PCs but it is what we designed menu drivers like XMB to be. It is true that keyboard and mouse are mostly seen as afterthoughts in this UI but really, we wrote the UI with game consoles and something where a gamepad is the primary input device at all times, particularly since a keyboard to us is a poor way of playing these console-based games anyway.
Anyway, menu drivers like XMB and MaterialUI will never have any WIMP UI elements. HOWEVER, in upcoming versions, we will be able to flesh out the menubar and to allow for more basic WIMP UI elements.
RetroArch is meant to be a cutting-edge program that is ultra-powerful in terms of features. With that comes a bit of added complexity. However, we have every intent of making things easier, and with every release we put a lot of time and effort into improving things. But again, more developers would help out a substantial lot in speeding up certain parts that we are working on.
Our vision for the project involves an enormous workload and we’re considering differnt ways of generating additional support. If a Patreon might allow us to get more developers and get more stuff done faster, we might consider it. But we want such things to be carefully deliberated by both our internal development staff and the users at large. I hope you’ll be able to appreciate the relative rough edges around the program and appreciate the scope and the craft we have poured into the program. Please appreciate that we are pouring a lot of blood, sweat and tears into the program and that mostly we try to maintain an upper stiff chin when faced with all the criticism, but we do care and we do intend to do better. Volunteer coders are very welcome though, by people who have some time to spare and who want to make a difference. We ask for your understanding here, and we hope that by finally speaking out on this, users can gain a better understanding of our intent and be able to appreciate the program better in light of that.
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