Hi, why libretro can’t load c64 games?
You can load them through the MESS core, but it’s a bit of a pain.
There’s no C64-specific core because no one has felt like porting one to libretro (yet). It’s a volunteer project, so people port the cores they’re interested in playing.
I managed to finally make sense of MESS. If you’re trying to load it via the command line on Linux, the syntax would be…
retroarch -f -L /usr/lib/libretro/mess_libretro.so "c64 -rompath \"/path/to/retroarch/system/mess\" -cass \"/path/to/your/rom/file.c64""
The key is that you basically have an escaped set of arguments within the ROM argument for RetroArch.
The downside is you still have to tell the C64 to boot the game (via - LOAD"*",8) once you’re in.
Any volunteers for starting work on a C64 core? Given the popularity of the machine back in the days, I’m surprised that it hasn’t received much focus so far.
I would happy to work on debugging, cleaning up code and finetuning for Retroarch, if one of you more experienced contributors could hack up a rough port to work with. I’ve studied the sources of a couple of C64 emulators and I have to admit that I’m not skilled enough to establish the ground work for a core.
A C64 core could probably be based on either VICE or Frodo: http://frodo.cebix.net http://vice-emu.sourceforge.net
Yeah VICE would be best, odd that we have a Spectrum core but not a C64 one…or Amstrad CPC come to think of it!. Any any of these in the works at all?
I think Twinaphex and the other main contributors have ported about as many emulation cores as they’re going to at this point. The maintenance load is already quite high. Anything else will require someone else to port it, preferably an upstream author.
Thats a shame, we have numerous different emulators for the same system (3 for Megadrive, 4+ for GBA, 3+ for NES, 5+ for SNES etc). I would much rather streamline these duplicate system emulators and add cores for system we dont have. I mean its not hard to select the best emulator for each system…
Megadrive/SMS/Mega CD= GenPlusGX 32x= PicoDrive SNES= BSNES NES= FCEUmm GBA= MGBA or VBA_NEXT
and just stop updating or change the frequency for these duplicate emulators. That would surely cut out the work load for the maintenance
[QUOTE=BlockABoots;23139]Thats a shame, we have numerous different emulators for the same system (3 for Megadrive, 4+ for GBA, 3+ for NES, 5+ for SNES etc). I would much rather streamline these duplicate system emulators and add cores for system we dont have. I mean its not hard to select the best emulator for each system…
Megadrive/SMS/Mega CD= GenPlusGX 32x= PicoDrive SNES= BSNES NES= FCEUmm GBA= MGBA or VBA_NEXT
and just stop updating or change the frequency for these duplicate emulators. That would surely cut out the work load for the maintenance[/QUOTE]
bsnes is limited to modern computers so if there could be only one supported emulator in RA it would probably be either Snes9x or one of its forks.
Also, FCEUmm is very far away from being one of the NES emulators out there. It’s good for playing Chinese bootlegs though. 
twinaphex was working on a VICE port a few years ago, but I seriously doubt it’s still in working state.
What is the best nes core then, nestopia or quicknes?
Depends on your criteria, but probably nestopia.
Each of the ports exists and is maintained for a reason, be it performance or compatibility or whatever. That in mind, it’s a pretty good bet that any single emulator for a popular platform like SNES likely gets more use than any port of a more obscure platform would.
Yeah what hunterk said.
Nestopia has higher compatibility with licensed games, is more accurate than the other three NES cores and still manages to run on a Wii. FCEUmm is useful for bootlegs and is fast enough for the PSP. QuickNES isn’t really needed for anything atm, but it could be useful if RetroArch ever gets ported to stone age hardware. bnes, however, is complete garbage. It’s slow, not really that accurate and lacks support for alot of mappers.
Yeah, bnes is unmaintained and based on a very early incarnation of the emulator. byuu’s put a fair bit more work into it since then, and hex_usr has done quite a bit more, but even so, it doesn’t really bring anything to the table other than zomg cycle accuracy and would require a full rebase to bring it up to date.
And Nestopia sound rocks. Batman music was so bad on other emulators last time I tested.
Scrap bnes and replace it with vice then 
If bnes is relatively unmaintained, scrapping it wouldn’t add much time/focus back to the project. They may as well do it at this point, though.
The “stone age” remark with QuickNES brought up a thought I’ve been having, though: Isn’t the effort to support RetroArch and the libretro cores across this seemingly unprecedented amount of different devices taking up a lot of manpower?
Yes, but Twinaphex is a fucking machine. He barely sleeps and cranks out dozens, sometimes hundreds of commits every day, 7 days a week. RetroArch and libretro are designed to make it as easy as possible, with code written to be ultra-portable and the vast majority of which is shared across all platforms, but it’s still an unprecedented achievement.
Is the Amiga core even working now, ive never manged to get a game to work with it?
Yes, on Raspberry Pi 2 it is working quite well. It also supports WHDLOAD when using hardfiles.
Is that the P-UAE emulator?, did you have to use any of the kickstart roms? As i load the P-UAE core up and select a game to load and then it just loads the following screen…
If i click on ‘OK’ i just get a black screen
Yes, I use the PUAE core, and you will need a kickstart rom in order to do anything with it.
Using UAE is not as simple as console emulators. You will need to understand how to use kickstart roms, disk files and hardfiles. You will need to know how to set the correct cpu type, chipset, and memory settings. I recommend that you study some of the documentation for FS-UAE to get to know the basics: http://fs-uae.net/getting-started
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