RetroArch 1.6.0 – Released!

Libretro Team

RetroArch 1.6.0 has just been released!

Get it here.

PS3 port

Sony might have just ended production of the PlayStation3 in Japan as of two days ago, but we are still supporting it for RetroArch regardless! The last stable release for RA PS3 was back in 1.3.6 days, so the remaining diehard PS3 jailbroken users will be glad to hear that 1.6.0 is available for PS3 right now!

We are only supplying the DEX version. We will assume PS3 repackers will be able to make a CEX version out of this.

PowerPC OSX port

It’s also been a long time since we released a new build of the PowerPC OSX port. We have bundled the cores that have been ported to PowerPC inside the main app bundle. To use this version, you need at least MacOS X version 10.5 (Leopard) and a PowerPC Mac.

Wii port

The Wii port has received stability fixes amongst other things.

WiiU port

Each and every RetroArch release is always a community effort. FIX94 and aliaspider have made numerous improvements to the WiiU version of RetroArch. For one, it has HID controller support now, which means you can use gamepads other than the default Wii U gamepads on it. There is also support for the XMB and MaterialUI menu drivers. There are some graphical touches missing from it such as shader effects though, so don’t expect to see the fancy ribbon animating on the WiiU yet.

Overall, it is a big improvement on what went before. Netplay should also start to work on WiiU.

PS Vita port

Frangarcj has provided patches which fixes the slow file I/O speeds for the Vita port, an issue which afflicts a lot of homebrew on the Vita actually. Menu performance regressions should also be fixed. For instance, the menu was previously erroneously running at 30fps.

Windows version improvements

Windows users now can use the WASAPI audio driver for the first time, which should allow for lower-latency audio. And if that isn’t enough, there is another successfully completed bounty, a RawInput input driver, which should allow for lower-latency low-level input.

Vulkan renderer

The Vulkan renderer has received some improvements. It should now support Unicode font rendering and render certain accented French characters correctly.

Localization

There have been several localization improvements. The German and Japanese translations have been updated, and Korean text should finally display properly.

Audio mixer

Now here is a real standout feature courtesy of leiradel we are excited to tell you about! RetroArch now has a built-in audio mixer which allows you to mix up to 8 separate audio streams and splice them together with the game’s audio. To put it more simply, this means custom soundtrack support from inside RetroArch!

Currently, there are a couple of limitations here –

1 – The only supported audio files so far are Ogg Vorbis files (.ogg) and regular Wave files (.wav). Over time, there will be more audio codecs supported.

2 – The audio mixer tracks will only play when the game is running. They will not play while inside the menu, unless you turn off ‘Pause when menu activated’ (Settings -> User Interface -> Menu).

3 – You can only mix up to 8 simultaneous audio streams so far. Looping is not yet available, neither is pausing an audio stream or changing a stream’s volume. All of these might be added in later versions of RetroArch though.

Here is a quick demonstration of how you use it:

While the game is running, go to Load Content, and select a supported audio file (either an Ogg Vorbis .ogg file or a .wav file)
While the game is running, go to Load Content, and select a supported audio file (either an Ogg Vorbis .ogg file or a .wav file)
Select ‘Add to MIxer’. If the game is already running, this should start playing the music immediately and also add it to your music collection.
You can easily access this music track at any point in time from this point on by going to your Music tab inside the XMB. You can then start mixing the audio again by selecting it again and choosing ‘Add to mixer’.

Changelog

Here is a changelog of most of the things that changed:

– AUTOSAVE/SRAM – Fix bug #3829 / #4820 (https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/issues/3829)
– ENDIANNESS: Fixed database scanning. Should fix scanning on PS3/WiiU/Wii, etc.
– NET: Fix bug #4703 (https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/issues/4703)
– ANDROID: Runtime permission checking
– ANDROID: Improve autoconf fallback
– ANDROID: Improve shield portable/gamepad device grouping workaround
– ANDROID: Allow remotes to retain OK/Cancel position when menu_swap_ok_cancel is enabled
– LOCALIZATION: Update/finish French translation
– LOCALIZATION: Update German translation
– LOCALIZATION: Update Japanese translation
– LOCALIZATION/GUI: Korean font should display properly now with XMB/MaterialUI’s default font
– MENU: Improved rendering for XMB ribbon; using additive blending (Vulkan/GL)
– OSX/MACOS: Fixes serious memory leak
– WINDOWS: Added WASAPI audio driver for low-latency audio. Both shared and exclusive mode.
– WINDOWS: Added RawInput input driver for low-latency, low-level input.
– WINDOWS: Core mouse input should be relative again in cores
– MISC: Various frontend optimizations.
– VIDEO: Fix threaded video regression; tickering of menu entries would no longer work.
– WII: Fix crashing issues which could occur with the dummy core
– WIIU: HID Controller support
– WIIU: XMB/MaterialUI menu driver support
– WIIU: Initial network/netplay support
– LOBBIES: Fallback to filename based matching if no CRC matches are found (for people making playlists by hand)
– LOBBIES: GUI refinement, show stop hosting when a host has been started, show disconnect when playing as client
– LOBBIES: if the game is already loaded it will try to connect directly instead of re-loading content (non-fullpath cores only)
– LOBBIES: unify both netplay menus
– THUMBNAILS: Thumbnails show up now in Load Content -> Collection, Information -> Database
– VITA: Fix slow I/O
– VITA: Fix 30fps menu (poke into input now instead of reading the entire input buffer which apparently is slow)
– VITA: Fix frame throttle
– VULKAN: Unicode font rendering support. Should fix bad character encoding for French characters, etc.
– VULKAN: Fix some crashes on loading some thumbnails
– AUDIO: Audio mixer support. Mix up to 8 streams with the game’s audio.

New Lakka 2.1 RC release!

A new release candidate of Lakka, our popular set-top box solution powered by RetroArch, was recently released!

Please read more about it here.

Important shader-related changes

Please read hunterk’s extensive article on some organizational changes we are making to our popular shaders collection.

Upcoming events

Stay tuned for our first official unveiling of the Dolphin libretro core in the upcoming days, as well as releases of OpenLara, PX-68K, Neko Project II, Redream and other new cores! There will also be a survey/poll which will let you decide which cores we are going to port next!

Shader Changes

hizzk

Abstract

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.

SDL Libretro Proof of Concept

Libretro Team

The larger design goal behind Libretro is to make programs modular. To us, modularity means that a program should run from within the confines of a dynamic library, and that it should be possible for this program to then run inside any of the libretro-compatible players that exist out there.

In order to make a libretro core as it stands right now, you need to be familiar with how the API works. There is some obligatory documentation available for this purpose but we understand that API familiarity is still not where it should be, and that to some developers out there looking to get started with libretro, it might be intimidating to get started.

To that end, we are searching for ways to ease the difficulty and learning curve that comes with getting to grips with Libretro. We know that SDL for instance is already heavily used out there by game developers and emulator creators alike.

SDL and libretro cannot reasonably be compared. The entire purpose behind Libretro is to make a cohesive, consistent ecosystem of modular programs that, like a plugin, can be inserted into any frontend player that supports our API. Something like SDL is more generic in that it doesn’t really care what your program is going to be; it just acts as convenient middleware for your program so that you don’t have to write against a myriad of programming APIs across all the various platforms. And while libretro allows for something of that nature too, it does so with distinct design goals in mind that are more or less forced on you for the purpose of a better play experience.

SDL Libretro

SDL Libretro is a project that was started out by me half a year ago. Back then it was more or less in an unusable state. To date, I had ported a couple of SDL programs already to libretro (like NXEngine), but previously I always did so by manually baking in parts of SDL and then shoehorning the runloop such that it would fit inside libretro. A libretro core’s runloop consists of a ‘lifebeat’ that lasts for exactly one frame, which can pose a problem for many SDL programs, because how the programmer implements the runloop there is entirely up to the programmer, whereas libretro forces this runloop model on you. It does this for good reasons, so that the frontend can easily do advanced operations like fast forwarding, rewinding, etc. But nevertheless, if you have an existing program, it might take time to whip it into shap such that it fits the confines of a libretro program.

Developer r-type has done an awesome job of making SDL Libretro finally a viable project. Right now it exists as a Proof of Concept that works on both Linux and Windows, and to illustrate that it works, r-type has made available three Proof of Concepts to show off SDL Libretro:

  • An OpenTyrian SDL port
  • A Mandelbrot game port (using SDL)
  • A Tetris game port (using SDL)

Right now, this SDL port is obviously in its infancy, and this might be an area where we could make use of further contributions.

To go over some of these:

  • Because an SDL program can be implemented any number of ways, right now we have to rely on libco in order to implement the main runloop.
  • Right now we are targeting SDL 1.2.15. There are currently no plans for SDL 2 support, although if we do, it’s likely it would be a separate project.
  • Lastly, be cognizant of the fact that when we say ‘Proof of concept’, we really mean it. Things are not perfect yet and it will take some time to iron out all of the bugs.

To use libretro SDL in conjunction with your game program, right now you would first build the SDL libretro part. You run the Makefile and once successful, it will create a statically linked ‘archive’ (such as ‘libSDL_unix.a’ and/or ‘libSDL_win.a’). From there, you would manually link this archive into your libretro core. That way, your libretro program can interface against SDL.

If you want to see some test examples of how this is done in practice, go to the directory ‘tests‘. ‘opentyrian’, ‘sdl-mandelbrot’ and ‘sdl-tetris’ are three current proof of concepts.

What does this mean for endusers?

It means that developers familiar with SDL have an easier time getting themselves acquainted with libretro. It also will mean that we can get SDL ports up and running quicker instead of having to reimplement and rewrite everything from scratch.

Right now, my current plan is to take the quick and dirty OpenTyrian port, and divorce it from most of its SDL idiosynchrasies and turn it into a nice, native, fleshed out libretro core. However, at the same time, I also want to help improve, build and foster further work going into libretro SDL. So if anything, we need to strive for even more well fleshed-out tests at the same time.

Credit to r-type

We want to thank r-type a lot for coming up with this wonderful Proof-of-Concept. Without him, this project would have barely stumbled out of the gates and it would have taken many more months for it to end up running anything. Hopefully we can once return the favor for all the hard work and effort guys like this have provided to our project. It’s the passion and the commitment of most of the followers surrounding this project that keeps us going.

Bounty Updates

hizzk

We have the bounty system up and rolling with Bountysource and have begun adding awards to a series of issues. The libretro organization has seeded $80 to issues so far, and another $100 has been offered by users. Current issues include adding low-latency input and audio drivers for Windows; extending the mouse axis for games like tyrquake that can be controlled by mouse; support for multiple mice simultaneously, which could enable 2-player light-gun games in several cores; and adding a host virtual filesystem layer, which could enable softpatching on all cores among other benefits. The VFS layer has had the most activity so far and currently sits at $70.