Creating a frontend in Java using Slick2D/and

Libretro Frontends
#1

Hello,

I would like to know if it would be possible to create a frontend using Java and Slick2D (a set of tools wrapped around LWGJL, I can still use GL11) ? I think I should use JNI, but I don’t really know how to use the API, I looked RetroArch but I can’t see exactly what are the “steps” to launch a game (like initialise the core, load the ROM and make a game loop)… there is no real documentation provided, and the RetroArch code is quite big to be used as a tiny example/hello world.

Could you help me ?

Thanks !

#2

Your best bet would be to have the front end call retroarch via a command line. It is what the other frontends do.

So essentially you’d pass through your frontend something like “retroarch -L /path/to/libretro/core.so game.rom”.

They have a wiki here for the command line parameters, but they might have changed some since the last edit was in July, 2014.