Kronos 1.7.0 is now available on the buildbot ! The major change since 1.6.0 is a complete rewrite of the glcore renderer by its author FCare over the last 6 months, it allowed to fix a ton of graphical issues.
As usual, the emulator is a good alternative to beetle-saturn if your CPU isn’t fast enough, or if you want features like resolution upscaling.
The minimal requirement is still a GPU with OpenGL 3.3 support. On a sidenote, there are probably still issues with some Intel gpus, especially on windows, sadly the issue is clearly on Intel drivers’s side so we have no plans to search for a fix any further. However if there is an Intel gpu guru around, help is welcome !
One last exciting thing, writing a Vulkan renderer has been added to the roadmap, don’t ask for an ETA though.
RetroArch 1.7.7 includes many user interface tweaks and improvements. Here is a brief round-up of important changes:
Playlist Enhancements
Playlist display has been tidied up with some general housekeeping:
Content metadata can now be displayed via playlist ‘sublabels’. These have been added to all menu drivers apart from Ozone (which employs a side panel instead), and at the most basic level are used to show current core associations. This greatly improves the appearance of history and favourites playlists – for example:
Sublabels OFF
Sublabels ON
Sublabels can be enabled/disabled via the Show playlist sublabels option under Settings > Playlists. (Note: Users who disable sublabels but still want a ‘clean’ history/favourites can hide core associations via the Show associated cores in playlists option)
Playlist sorting is now consistent, and controlled via a Sort playlists alphabetically toggle under Settings > Playlists. When enabled, all content playlists (excluding histories) are presented in alphabetical order. When disabled, entry display order may be set manually by editing playlist files with an external editor.
All menu drivers now show identical playlist information in all cases.
Playlist titles have been shortened/cleaned up.
Various bug fixes have been implemented, including proper sorting of playlists with blank labels, and the prevention of duplicate history entries.
Content Runtime Logging
RetroArch can now keep track of your playtime. For most menu drivers, this information is presented via playlist sublabels:
…whereas Ozone uses a side panel:
Content runtime logs are enabled/disabled via two new options under Settings > Saving:
Save runtime log (per core): Generates a separate log file for each core+content combination (standard behaviour)
Save runtime log (aggregate): Logs playtime for each item of content independently of the associated core (handy for users who like to run the same content with multiple cores)
A Playlist sublabel runtime option under Settings > Playlists allows either log type to be displayed in the menu.
Runtime files are saved in JSON format, and may be edited by hand should users wish to add existing playtime accumulated before this logging feature was added. By default they are written to the following locations:
Per core logs: [playlist_dir]/logs/[core_name]/[content_name].lrtl
A small but significant improvement: thumbnails can now be displayed on ‘mixed content’ playlists – most notably history and favourites.
This works by correctly utilising the db_name field of playlist entries when searching for thumbnails. This information (when available) is now automatically added to history/favourites whenever new entries are created. (Note that history/favourites generated with the previous 1.7.6 release will need to be deleted/recreated for proper thumbnail support)
A caveat here is that content launched via the file browser (or command line) has no associated db_name – but we’ve added a workaround for this. Provided that the content directory and thumbnail directory have the same name, thumbnails will be identified and shown. This requires some external organisation (e.g. SNES ROMs must be placed in a Nintendo - Super Nintendo Entertainment System folder), but it means that – for the first time – users who rely exclusively on the file browser can still view thumbnails on their content history playlists.
Menu ‘Ticker Text’ Improvements
Another small yet important addition…
RetroArch veterans will be familiar with menu ‘ticker text’ – i.e. the slow ‘back and forth’ scrolling method used to display text strings that are too long to fit on screen:
Many users think this is too slow, and reading text backwards is awkward – so now both the scroll speed and method can be adjusted via two new options under Settings > User Interface > Appearance:
Ticker Text Animation: Can be set to either Bounce Left/Right (existing behaviour) or Scroll Left
Ticker Text Speed: 0.1x -> 9.9x
The Scroll Left animation is a standard scrolling marquee, and combining this with a higher speed provides a more comfortable viewing experience:
(The new ticker is available for all menu drivers, and looks best with RGUI due its use of a fixed width font)
RGUI Remastered
The venerable RGUI is often considered the ugly duckling of the RetroArch family, but with this release it can stand head and shoulders with XMB and Ozone. Here’s a highlight reel of the most significant changes:
Menu Sublabel Support
Previously, RGUI had no way of displaying sublabels. These are commonly used in XMB/Ozone/GLUI to show informative ‘help’ text for each menu entry, but they also (for example) provide netplay room information and the content runtime metadata mentioned above. In other words, they are an important aspect of the user experience.
To remedy this shortcoming, we now have a Show menu sublabels option under Settings > User Interface > Views. When enabled, sublabels are printed in the space at the bottom of the screen where the core name would normally be shown:
Shadow Effects
A new Shadow Effects option can be found under Settings > User Interface > Appearance, which may be used to add drop shadows to all menu elements. This really makes RGUI ‘pop’, and greatly increases text legibility when using colour themes or wallpapers with lighter backgrounds:
Widescreen Support
RGUI now has proper support for 16:9 and 16:10 displays:
The new Menu Aspect Ratio option under Settings > User Interface > Appearance allows the selection of both ‘regular’ 16:9/16:10 ratios and ‘centred’ variants – the latter can be used in conjunction with wallpaper themes to enable fancy border effects:
(These and a number of other custom menu presets are available via the online assets updater – they can be found in the rgui folder inside the assets directory)
Closely related to this is the new Lock Menu Aspect Ratio option. By default, RGUI will stretch to fit the aspect ratio of the currently running content, which means the ‘Quick Menu’ is frequently distorted – for example:
By setting Lock Menu Aspect Ratio to either Fit Screen or Integer Scale, RGUI will always be displayed with the correct Menu Aspect Ratio value:
(Note that Integer Scale is recommended on most platforms, since it ensures that menu pixels are always perfectly square and free of scaling artefacts)
Thumbnail Support
RGUI now has full playlist thumbnail support:
This is controlled via the following new options under Settings > User Interface > Appearance:
Show Playlist Thumbnails: When enabled, mini ‘scaled down’ thumbnails are displayed to the right of playlist entries. When disabled, it is still possible to toggle a fullscreen thumbnail by pressing RetroPad Y while a playlist entry is highlighted.
Top Thumbnail: Thumbnail type to be shown at the top of the screen. This is also the type of thumbnail that is presented fullscreen whenever RetroPad Y is pressed.
Bottom Thumbnail: Thumbnail type to be shown at the bottom of the screen.
Swap Thumbnails: Just swaps the draw positions of the top/bottom thumbnails (allows the ‘fullscreen’ thumbnail type to be shown at the bottom of the screen)
Thumbnail Downscaling Method: Selects which algorithm to use when ‘shrinking’ thumbnail images to fit on screen. This allow a choice between performance (Nearest Neighbour) and quality (Bilinear or Sinc/Lanczos3). Generally, the highest quality (Sinc/Lanczos3) option may used without issue.
Of course, loading thumbnail images incurs a performance penalty. This is utterly insignificant on most platforms, but on devices with very slow storage (e.g. old Nintendo consoles, such as the 3DS) the overheads of handling thumbnails can produce lag when scrolling rapidly through playlists.
But this is RGUI: the inclusive menu driver. All kinds of hardware are accounted for. To this end, an additional Thumbnail Delay (ms) option is provided, which prevents thumbnails from loading until the selection pointer has been idle for the specified amount of time. Setting this to ~256 ms (or higher) essentially removes all overheads during menu navigation, while still providing responsive thumbnail display. This enables lag free, thumbnail-enriched playlists on even the weakest of hardware.
On-Screen Keyboard
Prior to this release, the only way to enter usernames/passwords or perform searches in RGUI was to make use of a physical keyboard. Not any more. RGUI now has a proper gamepad-controllable on-screen keyboard, just like all the other menu drivers:
Battery Notifications
RGUI has also gained an optional battery indicator, complete with ‘icons’ showing charging status/battery level:
Extended ASCII Support
Traditionally, RGUI has only supported English as a display language, since it was limited to the 128 characters of the standard ASCII set. With the 1.7.7 release, a new Extended ASCII Support option has been added under Settings > User Interface > Appearance, which (at the cost of a miniscule performance hit) allows another 128 ‘special’ characters to be shown. When this is enabled, RGUI gains full support for the following additional languages:
French
Spanish
German
Italian
Dutch
Portuguese
Performance Optimisations
Despite these enhancements and additions, the performance overheads of the RGUI ‘render’ function have been reduced by almost an order of magnitude. This means RGUI is lighter and leaner than ever before, and users of (virtually) all platforms can enjoy the extra ‘bling’ at no added cost.
(Even 3DS – one of the weakest devices we support – runs full speed with every RGUI feature enabled, including the particle effect animations described here)
There’s probably a good number of people still using RetroArch’s snes9x2002 core for SNES emulation on low-performance devices (primarily Raspberry Pi 1 and Zero). There’s probably also going to be a resurgence now that the Retroflag GPI Case is coming. Because of this, I had a look at snes9x2002, testing both the performance (frame rate) and input lag. Turns out snes9x2002 had two issues with input lag:
In the LibRetro layer: The emulator would first run to generate a frame, then the input would be sampled, instead of the other way around. This means that the input fed to the emulator was always that which was sampled after rendering the previous frame. This added between 0 and 1 frame of input lag, depending on frame rendering time.
In the emulator itself: Each time the emulator was kicked off to render the next frame, it would start at the first scanline and run to the last. Due to how most SNES games work (polling input at the beginning of VBLANK, running game logic during VBLANK and scanning out the resulting lines from scanline 0 to 226/240), the optimal thing to do is to start the emulator at VBLANK, just before polling input, and then run it for a complete frame until the start of the next VBLANK. That means you capture input polling, game logic and resulting image within one and the same emulator loop. This issue added exactly 1 frame of input lag.
I fixed these issues (with Tatsuya79 on GitHub helping out with committing the LibRetro layer fix) and the result is a reduction of input lag by 1-2 frames (16.7 to 33.3 ms), without any increased computational demands. The updated core is available now, by updating from source or using the Online Updater in RetroArch.
It’s important to mention that these fixes bring snes9x2002 up to par with the other RetroArch snes9x cores in terms of input lag. Unless you have a really low-performance device, you’re still better off using snes9x2005 and upwards for the superior emulation.
UPDATE May 11, 2019: RetroArch 1.7.7 has been updated again. This latest hotfix release should fix several crashing issues that could happen at startup on the 3DS and WiiU. It should also be a generally more stable release than the previous version. If you already downloaded RetroArch before May 11, be sure to download it again and upgrade your existing version!
RetroArch 1.7.7 has just been released! Grab it here.
If you’d like to show your support, consider donating to us. Check here in order to learn more.
Buildbot/release woes – and a new Patreon goal
On a special note, this release took several days due to our buildbot no longer being up to the task of being able to process all of these builds within a timely manner. We have set out a new Patreon goal that would allow us to significantly upgrade our rented servers so that release cycles don’t have to take 10+ hours anymore. Please consider pledging to our Patreon.
New tiers and perks
We have created new tiers, there is now a $1 tier that gives you a special Discord badge and access to a Patron-only Discord channel. The $5 tier gives you all the perks of the $1 tier including a special subflair on our RetroArch subreddit page. There is now also a $10+ tier, if you become a member of this, you can choose to have your name/nickname inserted into RetroArch’s Credits screen in future versions of the program.
So, we reiterate, the release could have happened this past weekend, but unfortunately, we were met with the stark reality of a buildbot that has long since outgrown its shoes, and we now need to throw better hardware at it in order to make it perform much faster. So we ask for your help in that endeavor.
Highlights
Experimental alpha version of UWP/Xbox One version!
NOTE: This is a pre-alpha version of RetroArch for UWP/Xbox One! Please be aware that the current product is far from polished, and that whatever you see here might not be reflective of the finished product later on. Our sole purpose for releasing this is that Dominater01 had already made a release and we felt it would be remiss not to share this with our users, regardless of its current level of polish.
Ever since its inception, RetroArch users on the desktop have been clamoring for a Desktop UI that would allow them to manipulate all of the settings available in RetroArch. The most often heard complaint was that it was cumbersome to change these settings with a gamepad. Of course, our intention is to have a unified UI that mostly works the same across desktop, game consoles and mobile phones, but a reasonable argument could be made that it was counterintuitive to force a desktop user to go through a gamepad-centric UI.
So, to address these criticisms, a few versions back we debuted a companion Desktop UI that can be invoked by pressing F5. This was step 1. We have made this process a bit easier now too for Windows users. You can now go to the menubar, go to ‘Window’ and then select ‘Toggle Desktop Menu’ in order to go to the Desktop UI.
Step 2 was adding an actual settings screen. This has now been done as of version 1.7.7. Thanks to the great efforts of CozmoP and also due to some refactoring on our end, starting as of version 1.7.7, RetroArch will finally allow you to change settings inside the nice and easy Desktop UI (that can be triggered at any time by pressing F5 on your keyboard).
NOTE: The Desktop UI is only available for Mac, Windows and Linux. The desktop UI is powered by Qt 5.
Menu widgets
In this video, you will see some of the widgets in action when:
* Taking a screenshot
* Downloading a core
But there are many more widget elements available, such as:
* Fastforwarding
* Rewinding
* Showing the framerate onscreen
* Achievement notifications
Etc.
This is all courtesy of natinusala. More widgets will be added in the future.
New OpenGL Core driver supports Slang universal shader spec!
A new OpenGL driver has been made that targets OpenGL 3.2 and up. And unlike the older GL driver, this one supports only slang shaders. This means that this OpenGL driver can now finally use the same shaders as Vulkan, Direct3D 10/11/12, and Metal. This marks an important milestone for us since we are well on our way to having a true universal shader spec now that can cross around graphics API barriers.
Legacy OpenGL 1.1 driver for GPUs with no vendor-supplied drivers!
Up until now, RetroArch required at least OpenGL 2.x support on the desktop. If your GPU did not have a driver supporting at least OpenGL 2.x, RetroArch would simply not run with the OpenGL driver.
There are plenty of integrated Intel video cards that have no real OpenGL support on Windows 10, so they have to rely on a fallback driver provided by Microsoft called ‘GDI Generic’. This limits these cards to OpenGL 1.1.
Now, those inconvenienced users can still use the OpenGL 1.1 fallback driver. Do note that it will be impossible for shaders to ever work with this video driver – OpenGL 1.1 dates back to 1997. It would take until 2003/2004 before pixel and vertex shaders would become a standard feature of any video card worth its salt.
RGUI – Particle effect animation system and numerous improvements
RGUI is a low-fi CRT-friendly raster-based menu UI that in the past has been kept purposefully minimalist.
jdgleaver has really taken the bull by the horns and significantly improved upon RGUI, to the point where it now has:
Thumbnail support (with scaling support)
Theme support
Fancy particle animation effects
Drop shadow icons for text
Extended ASCII character support (for accented characters)
Much-needed performance improvements
To learn more about this, read these articles here and here.
Menu framerate is now framerate independent
Previously, the menu would be capped at 60fps. Users acclimatized to higher refresh rates would find the 60fps update to be lacking when they are inside one of the fancy raster menus inside RetroArch (XMB/MaterialUI/Ozone).
The menu framerate in RetroArch is now framerate independent. So, for instance, if you’re using a 120Hz resolution, XMB will animate at 120fps, and you will see smooth animation with menu shader effects like the ribbon effect, snow, or bokeh.
When you’re running a game that is capped at 60fps, it will cap the menu along with it. But once the game with the lower refresh rate cap is loaded out of memory again, the menu should return again to that native framerate.
Menu Font text issues fixed on Android and macOS
Severe font text issues have been fixed on both Android and macOS. Languages like Japanese should now display properly on Android without any of the graphical bugs that appeared on earlier versions.
We are also now using STB_font unicode as our font driver for macOS and iOS, so for the first time languages like Japanese and other non-Western languages should finally be rendered properly.
Press Quit Twice To Exit
RetroArch traditionally exits the program immediately when you press the ‘Escape’ key on your keyboard. This has been one of the most commonly heard complaints usability-wise, so while this is an acquired taste, it’s understandable that some wouldn’t want the program to function like this.
So now there is a new option for those who dislike it – ‘Press Quit Twice To Quit’. Go to Settings – Input, and enable it. You will notice that when you hit the Escape key now to exit, it will remind you through a popup message first that you need to hit the key another time for it to truly exit.
Android phones: Vibrate on touch
You can enable this by going to Settings -> Input, and turning on ‘Vibrate on key touch’.
Your Android phone will vibrate every time you touch an UI element inside the menu or overlay. This could be useful in order to get a sense of tactile feedback from your button interactions while playing a game.
Automatically set the user language based on your system language
This is a new feature at first-time startup. Right now, it should work on Android, Linux and Windows.
When starting up RetroArch for the first time, it will check what your system language is set to, and then make RetroArch use that same language. This way, you don’t have to manually change your language after starting up RetroArch for the first time.
If you find that for whatever reason you want to use either another language or revert to English, you can go to Settings -> User and set Language back to English.
Changes for macOS
The macOS version ‘Apple macOS High Sierra (and later) with Metal2’ now requires Metal, the new graphics API. If your system does not have Metal support, it will not run. There is no backwards compatibility support for OpenGL, as Apple is fast-tracking the deprecation of this API and it might not be there for much longer. This version requires macOS High Sierra and/or later (10.13).
Please be aware that cores which rely on Libretro GL will not work with this version of RetroArch.
Conversely, there is also a separate build where OpenGL support is still a thing, but there is no Metal driver. This version requires macOS/OSX Tiger or higher (10.7).
And so much more…
We could write an entire book about all the new features we added to RetroArch 1.7.7. The list is so exhaustive, in fact, that we had to split this release blog post up into several mini articles in order to properly do justice to all of the major features and platform releases that have happened as a result of this release. We might go into some more of the standout features later on in a future blog post, but for now, below is the massive CHANGELOG of this release.
General changelog
– 3DS: Add unique IDs to prevent cores overwriting each other.
– 3DS: Fix screen tearing when running 50Hz content.
– ANDROID: We now target API level 26 (minimum is still API level 9).
– ANDROID: Add option to vibrate on touch (works in menu or overlay).
– ANDROID: Add device vibration option for cores that support rumble.
– ANDROID: Add gamepad vibration support for cores that support rumble.
– ANDROID: Allow stylus/pen to move mouse without pressing down.
– AUDIO: Avoid deadlocks in certain audio drivers when toggling menu sounds on.
– BLISS-BOX: Support PSX Jogcon (requires firmware 3.0).
– CHEEVOS: Fix crash when reading memory that is out of range.
– CHEEVOS: New Cheevos implementation enabled by default.
– CHEEVOS: Pop-up badges when an achievement is triggered.
– CRT: Dynamic super resolution support.
– DISCORD: Fix potential crash when username is empty and discord is disabled.
– DISCORD: Ask to join support for Linux.
– INPUT/ANDROID: Add “Input Block Timeout” option.
– COMMON: For platforms without HAVE_THREADS, don’t automatically resume content when saving/loading states
– COMMON: Make playlist sorting optional and consistent.
– COMMON: Fix sorting of playlists with blank labels.
– COMMON: Fix content scanner creating false positive playlist entries that also have wrong label and crc32.
– COMMON: Add some MMX-optimized pixel conversion routines.
– COMMON: Fix typo preventing some SSE2-optimized pixel conversions from being used.
– COMMON: Add option to track how long content has been running over time.
– COMMON: Fix buffer overflows in system information.
– COMMON: Add option to change screen orientation via the windowing system (Android, Windows, X11).
– COMMON: Show CPU model name in log.
– COMMON: Add “Help -> Send Debug Info” option (and F10 hotkey) to send diagnostic info to the RetroArch team for help with problems.
– COMMON: Show GPU device name/version in log.
– COMMON: Add menu option to write log info to a file.
– COMMON: Add subsystem support for playlists. Subsystem info is automatically saved to the history playlist for easy relaunching.
– GL: Add new “gl1” OpenGL 1.1 compliant video driver for legacy GPUs and software renderers
– GL: Add a new “glcore” driver with slang support (requires GL 3.2+ or GLES3).
– GL: Draw OSD on top of overlay.
– GONG: Add savestate support.
– GONG: Add video refresh rate core options.
– GONG: Two player support via core option.
– GUI: Fix text alignment when using stb_unicode.
– GUI: Fix text display issues when using Japanese (and other unicode-dependent language) text with stb_unicode.
– GUI: Set language on first startup to the user’s preferred OS language (Windows, *nix and Android).
– INPUT: Add (scaled radial) analog deadzone and sensitivity options.
– LIBRETRO: Add Turkish language support.
– LIBRETRO: Allow non-accelerated video to rotate the display.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Chinese (Simplified) translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Chinese (Traditional) translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Dutch translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update French translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update German translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Japanese translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Polish translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Russian translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Spanish translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Add new Turkish translation.
– MIDI: Fix startup crash in midi driver.
– MENU: Bugfix – you can no longer get stuck in Online Updater -> Update Core screen when toggling between ingame and menu.
– MENU: Selectively hide ‘Take Screenshot’ for video drivers that don’t support taking screenshots.
– MENU: Framerate independent menu rendering. MaterialUI/Ozone/XMB/RGUI can now run at higher framerates.
– MENU: Thumbnails work in history list.
– MENU: Menu widgets.
– MENU: Add memory statistics support to more context drivers.
– MENU: Enable ozone driver for UWP builds.
– MENU: Add optional “looping” menu text ticker with configurable speed.
– MENU: Fix core video rendering when using ozone with GL cores that implement the scissor test.
– MENU: Add optional playlist sublabels (associated core + play time, where available).
– MENU: Dropdown list settings now apply immediately.
– MENU: Add setting to require pressing the “Exit RetroArch” hotkey twice to confirm.
– MENU: Now able to run at higher refresh rates than 60Hz.
– MENU: Enable “Add to Favorites” without loading a core.
– MENU: Allow core name to be hidden on history/favorites playlists.
– MENU: Populate crc32 and db_name fields when adding history/favourites playlist entries.
– MENU: Fix TTF files not showing in OSD/menu font selection screen.
– MENU: Fix audio/video filters not showing in file browser.
– MENU/MaterialUI: Add subsystem support.
– MENU/MaterialUI: Add currently selected entry in dropdown menus.
– MENU/OZONE: Add mouse support on entries (no sidebar yet).
– MENU/OZONE: Allow collapsing the sidebar.
– MENU/OZONE: Add thumbnail support.
– MENU/OZONE: Battery notifications.
– MENU/OZONE: Add wifi icon for network entries.
– MENU/QT/WIMP: Add git version and build date to Help->About window.
– MENU/QT/WIMP: Fix content loading via the file browser.
– MENU/QT/WIMP: Add new settings window to control all RetroArch settings.
– MENU/RGUI: Improve playlist titles.
– MENU/RGUI: Add option to hide associated cores in playlists.
– MENU/RGUI: Add internal upscaling option.
– MENU/RGUI: Add subsystem support.
– MENU/RGUI: Add menu sublabel support.
– MENU/RGUI: Re-enable “Load Core” option when content is loaded.
– MENU/RGUI: Add optional “Collections” entry to main menu.
– MENU/RGUI: Add “Lock Menu Aspect Ratio” option.
– MENU/RGUI: Add “full width” layout option.
– MENU/RGUI: Ensure menu color theme is applied immediately.
– MENU/RGUI: Fix “Lock Menu Aspect Ratio” option when using custom viewports.
– MENU/RGUI: Add widescreen support.
– MENU/RGUI: Allow text to be centred when selecting widescreen layouts.
– MENU/RGUI: Add inline playlist thumbnail support.
– MENU/RGUI: Add optional shadow effects.
– MENU/RGUI: Performance optimizations.
– MENU/RGUI: Add optional extended ASCII support.
– MENU/RGUI: Add optional delay when loading thumbnails.
– MENU/RGUI: Add on-screen keyboard.
– MENU/RGUI: Battery notifications.
– MENU/XMB: Prevent crashes when resizing to a tiny window.
– MENU/XMB: XMB honors the ‘show menu sublabels’ setting now – was previously RGUI only
– NETPLAY: Fix stall-out causing total disconnection with >2 players.
– NETPLAY: Different (more intuitive?) default netplay share policy.
– NETPLAY: Add hotkey option to toggle hosting on/off.
– NETWORKING: Encode URLs to allow for spaces in directory names.
– OSX: Prevent crash on exit.
– OSX: Metal is now the default video driver for the RetroArch Metal build.
– OSX: Enable CoreAudio v3 driver for Metal.
– OSX/MACOS/IOS: Now uses the STB Unicode font driver.
– PS2: CDFS support.
– PS2: Implemented analog support for ps2 controllers.
– PS2: Fix audio freeze after restarting core.
– PS2: Fix issues with load state and the font driver.
– PS2: File I/O now works for USB and network host.
– PS2: Support cores with extra padding in their frame buffers.
– SCANNER: New option ‘Scan without core match’. When this is enabled,
supported extensions by all installed cores are not checked, and instead
it will add all content it finds to a playlist. This way, you can install the core you need later on after scanning. Not enabled by default.
– SHADERS: Don’t alphabetize shader presets.
– SWITCH: Add rumble support.
– SWITCH: Add USB keyboard support.
– VITA: Add bluetooth mouse and keyboard support.
– VULKAN: Fix color issues with RGBA8888 swapchains in readback (screenshots).
– WII: Don’t init overlay when RAM is beyond 72MB.
– WII: Skip CRC calculation on content load, can improve load times of larger games by several seconds.
– WINDOWS: Fall back to gl1 driver if accelerated GPU driver is unavailable.
– WINDOWS: Allow winraw and xinput to work without dinput (needed for WinRT).
– WINDOWS: Add MSVC2017 ARM desktop support.
– UWP: Fix rewind by opting for slower codepath.
– UWP: Fix relative path name issues when loading shaders.
– UWP: Optimizations for VFS system.
NOTE: This is a pre-alpha version of RetroArch for UWP/Xbox One! Please be aware that the current product is far from polished, and that whatever you see here might not be reflective of the finished product later on. Our sole purpose for releasing this is that Dominater01 had already made a release and we felt it would be remiss not to share this with our users, regardless of its current level of polish.
PLEASE BE AWARE, THIS IS A ROUGH DRAFT OF RETROARCH AS A WINDOWS 10/XBOX APP. THE FINAL PRODUCT WILL BE MUCH BETTER AND IN NO WAY IS THIS REFLECTIVE OF THE QUALITY OF THE FINAL PRODUCT.
We ask for your patience while testing this; you might find file system performance lacking and some manual steps might need to be performed that are obviously not user friendly. Do note that we are very conscious of these current limitations and we hope to have them resolved in future versions.
For Windows 10 PCs, go to the Windows 10 logo and download both the certificate and the .appx file.
For Xbox One users, just go to the Xbox One logo and download the pre-alpha.
NOTE: This won’t replace the regular Windows version on PC. For regular PC users, the UWP port is nothing but a downgraded/gimped version of our main Windows version. You can use this version for academic purposes, but I would not recommend using it primarily on Windows.
Running this on PC
1. Download and extract this version of RetroArch on your PC.
2. Make sure you download the certificate too, you will need it immediately afterwards – Download certificate here.
3. First, make sure that you can actually install Windows/UWP apps from outside the Windows Store. Go to Settings -> Applications. At ‘Installing Apps’, select ‘Allow apps from anywhere’. In case you’d prefer it to be limited to Store-only apps, you can change this back later after you have finished these instructions and installed RetroArch already on your PC.
Created with GIMP
4. Now we need to install the certificate that we downloaded in step 2. Double click on it.
5. Click on ‘Install Certificate”.
When you are at this screen and it asks for any dependencies, you might have to add this file :
6. A Certificate Wizard will now appear. Of the two questions, select “Local Machine”.
7. Check ‘Place all certificates in the following store’, click on ‘Browse…’, and select ‘Trusted Root Certification Authorities’.
8. After we have verified that the certificate is successfully installed, we start up RetroArch.appx. If an app identical to this was already installed, you would not be able to install this program right now. As it is, click on ‘Install’.
Running this on Xbox One
1. Download and extract this version of RetroArch on your PC.
2. Go to your Xbox. Make sure you have changed your Xbox to ‘Developer Mode’ (see here for more information on how to do that).
3. On the Developer home screen, go to “Remote Access Settings” and enable Xbox Device Portal. You might have to setup a username and password as well. You can do this by selecting Remote Control settings.
When you connect to the IP on PC and you see this page, make sure to click ‘Show Advanced’ and click ‘Proceed’.
4. Go to the Device Portal on your PC. This is the IP of your xbox one (it will show up on the Developer home screen) (if its being picky do this https://ip:port)
5. Goto “Add” on device portal and choose the .appxbundle (see step 1) then hit next
6. Goto “Choose File” if there are any dependency files needed (you will have to install all files one at a time) then hit next.
7. It will install. After this is finished, you can go to the Xbox One and run RetroArch.
8. You should now be able to run RetroArch UWP on Xbox One.
As has hopefully been stressed before, this is a very early version of RetroArch for UWP devices. As such, the first time you start it up, you need to do some first-time configuration before everything looks properly and is ready to go.
In this video, you can see the first-time setup procedure – it is the same for both Xbox One and Windows 10 –
Set type of RetroArch App on Xbox One to ‘Game’ in order to get faster USB disk access
By default, any app you install gets assigned with type ‘App’. In order for RetroArch to become much quicker at accessing USB storage, we will need to change it to ‘Game’.
Be aware that after making this change, you will need to reboot your Xbox One for the changes to take effect. Otherwise you might run into issues.
NOTE: You will only be able to use USB 3.0 HDDs/storage on Xbox One.
Gain access to files beyond the sandbox
By default, your level of access to the filesystem with an UWP app is limited to the basic sandbox directory your app lives in. This is of course far too limiting for most RetroArch users, so to enable full filesystem access, go to Load Content, and then select ‘Enable external file access’.
You will be presented with a screen looking like this:
Go to ‘Choose Which Apps Can Access your file system’ and make sure that RetroArch is enabled there. This dialog screen might then close, and you might have to restart the program again.
What works
Fully working Direct3D 11 driver
Menu drivers like XMB/MaterialUI/Ozone/RGUI work as you would expect.
Already known issues
Very slow filesystem performance.
[Core issues] Closing content when running a PSP game with PPSSPP crashes RetroArch.
[Core issues] Loading savestates on the PCSX ReARMed core crashes.
[Core issues] Dolphin Core doesn’t work.
GL Cores aren’t compatible/loadable (this is because only Direct3D 11 is being used right now, and we arent’ using ANGLE right now).
RetroArch on Xbox One won’t highlight the text on the onscreen keyboard unless set to a white background.
Having the rewind feature on slows the PCSX core
Setting directories to USB by default isn’t saving correctly.
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