Color Depth (Restart): This allows the user to select between RGB565 and XRGB8888 pixel formats. At present, the core forces XRGB8888, which is very slow on some platforms. Selecting 16-bit colour can significantly improve performance.
Interframe Blending: This enables the (crude) simulation of CRT phosphor ghosting effects. Simple performs a 50:50 mix of the current and previous frames. The Ghosting options accumulate pixels over successive frames, with persistence from 65% to 95%.
The main purpose of Interframe Blending is to alleviate the flickering that is common in many Atari 2600 games, caused when developers used the workaround of toggling sprites on alternate frames to show more simultaneous on-screen objects than the hardware strictly allowed. For example:
Setting Interframe Blending to Simple will remove the flashing in Asteroids
Setting Interframe Blending to Ghosting (95%) will almost completely remove the flashing in Pac Man
Ghosting can also produce nice effects in games that don’t flash – e.g. Beamrider looks rather special with Ghosting (85%).
Care has been taken to implement these options in a performant manner. With 16-bit colour depth, all Interframe Blending methods run full speed even on an RG350M (OpenDingux) with 2x video filters.
heyjoeway has made a custom fork of Genesis Plus GX with experimental widescreen (16:9) options, called ‘Genesis Plus GX Wide’. We now offer this version on our buildbot, and you can download/install it right now on RetroArch for most platforms!
Available for:
Android (on Play Store it’s available on Plus only)
macOS
iOS
Linux
Windows
3DS
Switch (libnx)
GameCube
Wii
WiiU
PlayStation Vita
How to get it
First, make sure you update the Core info files. To do this, go to Online Updater, and select ‘Update Core Info Files’.
There are two ways to install and/or update the Genesis Plus GX Wide core:
a – If you have already installed the core before, you can go to Online Updater and select ‘Update Installed Cores’.
b – If you haven’t installed the core yet, go to Online Updater, ‘Core Updater’, and select ‘Sega – MS/GG/MD/CD (Genesis Plus GX)’ from the list. It will then download and install this core.
Notes
This is an experimental feature right now. Some games might already output nicely with widescreen, while others will likely require patches to display properly.
It works only on Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games, and not Sega CD/Mega CD games.
How it works/how to use it
To use the new widescreen feature, go to Quick Menu -> Options.
Extra columns to draw in H40 for widescreen
This determines how many extra columns to draw for a widescreen aspect ratio. ‘0’ means no extra columns will be drawn.
In the previous version, this was always set to 10. Now, you are able to tweak this setting. Some games will require a value lower or higher than 10 to display properly, and some games allow you to set it as high as possible.
Let us run down the list of some games and what the best possible configuration for them is:
Ecco The Dolphin 1/2: Set this to 22 (or lower depending on your preference). See screenshot here. (See default 4:3 image here).
Thunder Force IV: Set this to 22 (or lower depending on your preference).
Streets of Rage 1/Bare Knuckle 1: Set this to 18, minimal pop-in (see screenshot here). Set the value lower to eliminate it altogether at the expense of a reduced field of view (See default 4:3 image here).
World of Illusion: Set this to 18 (for minimal pop-in). Set the value lower to eliminate it altogether at the expense of a reduced field of view.
Thunder Force IV: Set this to 20.
Virtua Fighter 2: Set this to 18. See screenshot here. See default 4:3 image here.
Special instructions for Sonic The Hedgehog 1/Sonic CD widescreen
Sonic The Hedgehog 1 runs well in widescreen but requires you to patch the ROM first. Thankfully, heyjoeway made this rather easy for the user to accomplish. Go to this site here and select your ROM file. It will then spit out a modified ROM with proper widescreen modifications.
With the patched version, you can set extra columns to as high as 12. Any more and you will run into the limits of the game’s plane sizes and see pop-in on the right side of the screen.
So ProjectFuture finally materialises! From the beginning, we have been unsatisfied with the general state of the retrogaming scene when it comes to being able to dump and play your own legally bought game cartridges. Solutions exist like the Retrode. There are some big issues with them though that limits their viability as something an average consumer can just buy readily off the shelf:
1. Super expensive.
2. No longer in production/out of stock
3. Rights to the product changing hands between sellers/store owners
4. Because of 3, usually one or two stores can only sell them.
5. The specs are closed so only a select few can assemble and sell them, limiting the ability of DIY homebrewers to make their own device.
While as a general rule of thumb, developers will always tell people to dump their own game cartridges, in reality there is nobody stepping up to the plate to make this either affordable, to integrate it well with existing software, or to make it possible for your homebrew hardware maker to easily build his own.
RetroArch Open Hardware is our attempt to shake up this sector of the retro games market, and our effort to revitalize the DIY market and shift it away from proprietary solutions. Our first Proof of Concept hardware device is an N64 cartridge adapter that you connect to any device with a USB Type-C cable. It will be relatively cheap to assemble and much faster than any existing competing device out there that does the same task.
RetroArch Integration
We have some high-level goals we aim to achieve with this project. We want seamless integration with RetroArch. When you attach this to RetroArch, it should be hopefully as simple to play the game as it is on a real game console when you plugged in the cartridge. That’s the level of integration we are aiming to achieve with this project, and none of the existing solutions out there really fit the bill.
When we mentioned before that we want RetroArch to be its own game console, we pretty much meant it. And being able to take your own game copies with you and run them with RetroArch seems like an obvious next step to take.
We have come up with a completely custom and lean design so that the person aiming to build this for themselves in DIY fashion will be able to build these relatively cheaply. We are convinced the transfer speeds are far in excess of any other similar product out on the market right now, which is just as well considering the biggest N64 game out there is 64MB in size.
The current transfer speed that we are achieving is ~4MB per second on a prototype device. Our target is a transfer speed of approximately ~ 4.5MB per second give or take.
In addition, Switch dock support will be there from Day One, working out of the box.
How does it work?
Attach it to any device and it will mount itself as a Mass Volume Storage device, mapping the cartridge as a bunch of files on the filesystem.
You insert the N64 cartridge into the cartridge reader and you connect it to a PC (or some other device) with a USB Type C-cable. The device will then map the contents of the cartridge itself as a Mass Storage device volume. EEPROM, Flash, ROM, and SRAM are mapped as separate files on this volume. (*)
Playing the game should be as easy as just loading the ROM from this device. So already even without the aforementioned RetroArch integration, it already works. But our hope is that with the RetroArch integration, we finally get the promise of a true cross-platform game console where you can take your games library with you, whether it’s digital or physical, and just use it across the devices that you already have RetroArch on. This is the dream and promise we have been slowly building towards – the power lies in the user’s hands, not that of any corporation or organization.
* – This might be subject to change. We are still considering whether to change this to a dedicated protocol to allow using cartridge hardware in an emulator core without just reading all of the cart as one big contiguous ROM file.
Prototype
This project has been ongoing now for the better part of a year. We have some internal prototypes and so far we can definitely confirm high success rates with our own cartridge collection. SRAM support already works in the firmware, but no EEPROM/FlashROM support yet. Your SRAM should work as long as your SRAM battery is not dead yet anyway. Some of these cartridges are over 20+ years old by now after all so an SRAM battery being dead is not an unlikely prospect at this point.
Some cartridges will need their cartridge connectors cleaned in order to work properly with this device. It’s a common problem among N64 game preservationists that I’m sure should not be news to anyone at this point.
Q&A
I’m sure there will be many questions in response to this article. We will remain tight lipped for now until we feel the time is right to release more details. We hope that RetroArch Open Hardware will be a contagious project that will see many contributors and participants working towards one common goal – being able to interface with the games media they’ve bought for all these decades and just being able to make it work with the software they’re already using without having to buy new closed-spec proprietary devices that lock you out of the software you’re already using. Free software is one thing, but it’s only as good as the hardware you’re running it on. Consider this our valiant effort of trying to get both sides in order.
For now, here is a gallery of screenshots to a few of our prototypes, brought to you by Sasa and m4xw.
We recently released a LibRetro core of LowRes NX. Most of you probably never heard about it before, so what is LowRes NX? You may know the fantasy consoles PICO-8 or TIC-80. These are retro style platforms to develop and play little games, but without actual hardware. Something like emulators for invented consoles. LowRes NX is based on the same idea, but has some significant differences.
Imagine LowRes NX as a handheld game console with a d-pad, two action buttons and a little rubber keyboard below a slidable touchscreen. LowRes NX was inspired by real 8- and 16-bit systems and simulates chips for graphics, sound and I/O, which actually work like classic hardware. It supports hardware sprites as well as hardware parallax scrolling, and even offers vertical blank and raster interrupts to create authentic retro effects.
The programming language of LowRes NX is based on second-generation, structured BASIC. It offers all the classic commands, but with labels, loops and subprograms instead of line numbers. Graphics and sound are supported by additional commands and you can even access the virtual hardware directly using PEEK and POKE. You have complete control over the program flow, there is no standard update function to implement.
LowRes NX includes all the tools you need: The Character Designer for editing sprites, tiles and fonts, the Background Designer for tile maps and screen layouts, as well as the Sound Composer for music and sound effects. All of these are just normal BASIC programs. You can change and improve them or even create your own custom editors.
LowRes NX has stand-alone applications for MacOS, Windows, Linux and iOS, which can be used to develop new games (even on iPhone). Although the LibRetro core doesn’t support development, it’s finally a way to play your games on many previously unsupported platforms.
2020 has been a year of accelerated growth for RetroArch, but 2021 looks set to surpass it by far! Here is what we are able to reveal of our current roadmap for now, but best believe us when we say this is only the tip of the iceberg!
Xbox Series
RetroArch raised a lot of heads last year when people figured out how to run it on the new Xbox Series consoles. Every Xbox console supports UWP (Universal Windows Platform), and every Xbox console can become a devkit by paying a one-time Developer fee, so this is not really reliant on any jailbreak/hack in the traditional sense. So all you have to do to make something be able to ‘run’ on an Xbox is to simply port your software to UWP, which is how RetroArch ended up being ojn Xbox. A good thing in our view, and it lets homebrew developers do what they want with the device from within a sandboxed environment. We hope more console manufacturers take a page out of Microsoft’s playbook there since the cat and mouse game that other companies like to play with their proprietary game consoles really has stopped making sense for a long time now.
We have made some significant improvements to the UWP (Universal Windows Platform) port that will definitely benefit Xbox users. Reading and writing to files used to be very slow in previous versions. It should be much faster now thanks to some generous improvements by contributor driver1998. We also intend to fix some of the display issues that might be going with certain hardware rendered cores like PCSX2 later on, there are some unfortunate menu rendering bugs right now when that core is running which shouldn’t be happening.
We are only providing RetroArch UWP as a stock version on our website that will run on both PC (Windows) and Xbox. We are not affiliated with the distribution of it anywhere else.
Apple Silicon – Mac M1
We’re happy to announce that RetroArch will start supporting the latest ARM-based Macs soon as a first-class citizen.
Right now, there are only three Mac devices you can buy that sport an ARM-based Apple M1 processor:
Macbook Air (2020)
Macbook Pro 2013 (2020)
Mac Mini (2020)
Features:
This will be a separate version from the currently existing Intel version. Metal will be the default video driver, since unlike RetroArch for Mac Intel, backwards compatibility is not a concern here.
It will require its own separate cores because of the processor architecture switch (ARM64/AArch64). This has been consuming quite a bit of time on our end building up the core library. So far, we have nearly 70 cores ready on our buildbot and more to come. NOTE: You won’t be able to run cores built for Intel RetroArch Mac on this new separate version.
There is no OpenGL support right now in the current Mac ARM64 version. However, while OpenGL has been deprecated for a while, it still works just fine on these ARM-based Macs, so we’d still like to find a way to include it so you can switch between the Metal and GL video driver.
Some dormant MoltenVK interfacing code has existed for a while in RetroArch but never really used before. We’d like to return to this. Once complete, it would allow us to run Vulkan-based cores on RetroArch Mac.
We’re impressed with the performance of these new Macs. While there is currently a lack of software on the platform in general, everything we have been able to run on them has so far exceeded our expectations in terms of performance. Expect RetroArch to run lovely on these new devices. It’s quite something when a laptop not only matches but exceeds modern Intel Core-based desktops in terms of CPU performance while being relatively noiseless but that seems to be mostly what we’re getting here. Everything runs great on RetroArch and with great frame pacing, and thanks to the Metal driver you’ll be able to use the slang shaders.
DE10-Nano
RetroArch will appear on the DE10-Nano this year. It’s basically an open source FPGA alternative to the likes of proprietary FPGA retro game consoles like the Analogue devices.
This port will rely in large parts on a member that we are collaborating with called Booger.
So far, RetroArch on DE10-Nano will be a plain-Jane port. RGUI works, it uses SDL for video, it works with gamepads, and it can run only software-based libretro cores for now (in other words, anything that is not an OpenGL/Vulkan-based hardware context core).
In terms of image enhancement, you are limited to basic software video filters, as there is no GPU, so the advanced stackable GLSL/Slang shaders in RetroArch remains a pipe dream for FPGA users unfortunately.
At RetroArch, we are building a platform. We do not think of our project as an emulator. Our stated goal is for this platform to be all-pervasive when it comes to being able to run it on as many different devices as possible. Giving people the choice to do with their hardware what they want is always the number one priority.
The DE10-Nano is an Intel SoC FPGA that can be bought off the shelf, and it’s currently intended as hardware subsidized for students. DE10-Nano right now is very much in a hobbyist realm where you need to source all these parts together and cobble them together to make them all work. There is also no affiliation between Intel and the homegrown efforts of these FPGA hardware cores. There’s a limited amount of places to buy this hardware from. The actual non-FPGA part of the hardware (ARM SoC) is rather weak compared to most modern ARM hardware. As mentioned before, there is also no GPU on the DE10-Nano, so OpenGL/Vulkan-based cores are not going to be able to be used on it. It’s important to keep expectations in check with regards to what will be able to be ran on it.
We don’t believe the future of emulation is necessarily going to end up either being software-only or hardware-only. Both are valid approaches and both have clear ups and downs. We think instead it will be complimentary, and that’s the way we want to approach it. We see a lot of possibilities for RetroArch as a platform on this, just like we do on other platforms. And the good thing about RetroArch is that precisely because it’s more than just an emulator, it doesn’t really matter, as a platform we can go whichever way the wind is blowing.
As ever with our project, whatever the DE10 Nano port can be and will be is going to depend in large part on where the community takes it. That’s the power of open source.
Below is a sneak peek of RetroArch running on DE10-Nano via HPS framebuffer on a CRT with TinyOS³.
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