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.

Goodbye FBAlpha, Welcome FBNeo

BarbuDreadMon

Due to a “controversy”, all devs bar one from FinalBurn Alpha moved to a new fork called FinalBurn Neo. If you were using the FBAlpha core we recommend you move to the new FBNeo core by updating your core list and info files.

FBAlpha/FBNeo is a very active project with exciting features added regularly so it might be a good opportunity to talk about recent additions !

Support for Midway/Williams/Atari classics

A lot of people have been asking about them over the last few years, a lot of them are now playable !

Support for vector games

Tempest, Black Widow and other classic vector games are now playable too, some of them with resolution upscaling !

 

Support for Neo-Geo CD

Neo-Geo CD is now fully playable as a subsystem, including its exclusive title : Samurai Shodown RPG !

NB : this game was only available in Japan, but fan translations exist.

Other noteworthy improvements

  • Many of you might not know, but this core also supports a few consoles as subsystems, and it does it pretty well, recently we even added “Super Game Module” support for CBS ColecoVision.
  • Many control schemes were added to the core recently, you can now play with mouse, trackball or lightgun, there is also keyboard support for ZX Spectrum.
  • There was a major improvement to QSound emulation a week ago, now CPS1/CPS2 sound is clear as day. Actually there was also sound improvements for a lot of other games, leading to faster emulation and clearer sound.
  • There is now RetroAchievements support for popular arcade games, this implementation even added support for cheats as a side effect.

F.A.Q

Check our F.A.Q if you need help ! If your question isn’t already covered, ask on libretro’s forum.

You want to contribute ?

You are a coder ? You want to help the project ? Join us on our forum ! We are always happy to see new contributors. A few things we might be especially interested in :

  • Adding support for CHD.
  • Porting our MIPS3 dynarec to other archs, it’s only available for x64 at the moment.
  • Improving our TMS34010 CPU core, it’s still WIP and its developer can’t find the time to finish it.
  • Adding a SH3 CPU core, preferably interpreter+dynarec(s), if someone can do that we promise you support for cv1k (Cave 3rd generation board) in the near future.