Can somebody explain RetroArch? Is it just launching other emulators?

RetroArch General
#1

I’m a little confused on RetroArch (and libretro)…

At first I thought RetroArch was a frontend that launched other emulators. For example, if you selected an SNES game it would launch SNES 9X (or whatever), and the GUI would change to SNES 9X.

However, after reading it sounds like libretro calls other emulators using API calls so each emulator acts as a compiler/interpreter and sends the results back to libretro to be rendered, etc.

Which is correct?

The idea of having rendering different rendering cores but one standard GUI is fantastic…

#2

Libretro is an API that allows you to implement a game, an emulator, media player, whatever - anything that involves a combination of audio, video and/or input… Through libretro it is possible to write platform-agnostic cores that can be made to run on any ‘frontend’ for libretro.

To this end, me, maister, (and others )have developed a libretro frontend called RetroArch. There is a version out for 360, PS3, Wii, Xbox 1, Xbox 360, Gamecube, PC (Win/Mac/Linux/BSD), Android, iOS, Blackberry and (soon to be) Windows RT.

Other libretro frontends have also been made, such as:

  • XBMC (has a libretro implementation called RetroPlayer that will probably be merged in a future mainline release)
  • Arcan (highly advanced frontend by one of our regulars that is like RetroArch meets black hat magic security stuff).

Anyway, a libretro port is quite a bit more unique than “just another port”.

You can read more about it here -

http://www.libretro.com/pages/menubar/api.html

Thanks for showing interest in how it all works under the hood - we rarely get that from endusers.

#3

Thanks for the explanation and the link. (not sure how I missed it when I checked out the libretro page)

I really like the idea of abstracting out the common-layers of emulation (GUI, video, input, etc) and then using specific “cores” for each of the emulation platforms. I’m suprised I didn’t hear about this sooner!

Also, I just bought an nVIDIA Shield so I’ll be checking this out later…

Thanks again for the information!