Development Suggestions

General Development
#1

This is a thread for RetroArch development suggestions. Not asking for new cores, just for changes and/or new features to RetroArch itself.

No guarantees that something suggested here will actually happen soon or ever, but patches and/or pull requests will greatly improve the chances.

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Several Issues & Questions
Change names of games in a playlist?
#2

Add the ability to move overlays, vertically and horizontally and not just zoom adjustment that we have at the moment

#3

If anyone knows how to rewrite the turbo button code, this issue is still there. (turbo stops working during game slowdown / randomly with some games)

#4

It’d be cool to see the Windows UI get fleshed out more. And eventually have all features of the full screen UIs. The little dialog that got added for changing shader parameters works really well.

It’d also be really useful to be able to save core and game specific overrides from the UI. You could have separate settings menus (Settings (Core) and Settings (Content)) kind of like MAME’s “general” and “this game” menus.

I imagine doing those would take quite a bit of work though.

3 Likes
#7

Bear with me on this one, it might sound odd at first.

Suggestion: Button/key combination to load the auto save state.

The idea of using this is to create an auto state that you want to always be able to load back to, regardless of how you use your standard save states. Setup for it will involve setting up the desired auto state, then disabling auto save state option while keeping auto load state enabled. This effectively becomes a more powerful alternative to resetting the game. There are two practical (and very useful, I might add) scenarios where this can help with setting up the best gaming experience possible:

  1. For skipping BIOS or company logo screens and getting straight to the game on startup. This can cut several seconds of play time, particularly if you don’t use a speedup option.
  2. For loading a specific game in a multi-game compilation and having the start of that game reload upon “resetting” it (which is actually just reloading the auto state). Think of the games where you could effectively make standalone releases of games (or certain versions of them) where they’d otherwise not exist. Super Mario All-Stars, Dragon Quest I & II, Ninja Gaiden Trilogy, Konami GB Collection, etc.

Obviously there’s a caveat: Using this means of “resetting” games will ignore/negate any changes made to the native save file (if a given game has that feature). Of course, since people will need to set up the auto states beforehand to take advantage of this, they should likely be aware of this fact already. If not, it can still stay there as a power option.

What do you think?

#9

Well, I guess its specificity helps with stopping a lot of people from misusing it and ruining their native saves! Or not… I don’t know what others would know.

It seems I run my own gauntlet of dumb ideas or comments around here. Standalone emulators do separate binds for states all the time, narrowing it from slots 0 to 9. One could also always make an auto state, then make it a regular state as well.

#10

What about just making the state read-only in your file-system?

#11

One could certainly do that if they don’t want to ever accidentally overwrite it. I’m guessing you might mean the auto state, which would also be good. I wasn’t thinking of that since there’s already separate options to auto save over or load it, but it would certainly be nifty when using a configuration that would otherwise be universal for many games.

I’m kind of thinking about this from the perspective of a controller user. One would set up the auto state and simultaneously make it a regular state, as well. Then that person would make it so the auto state isn’t saved over again (either option will work). Once that setup is done, the user could set up a hotkey to the controller to load that state, but not one to save over it again. Then there’d be both the auto state to load up a specific point on start-up, plus a hotkey combination to reload that identical state (now also a regular state) to serve as an alternate reset.

#13

Given that RetroArch can (Apparently? I didn’t realize this until recently.) have upwards of 100 or more save states for a single game, that’s probably the best idea. Kind of what I was initially thinking, since having separate key controls for individual save states would be both too restrictive and add more coding than necessary. This is assuming that the standard save/load state key commands work just as they are already do (as in, you can also toggle what slot is being used for them).

#14

I love this program, but to make a few suggestions

  1. Audio expansion-> a system to set the speaker layout of the audio system and have the system expand the audio to take advantage of all speakers (similar to the PEOPS Dsound 1.9 audio plugin for epsxe/pcsx-r but for all cores) for simulated surround sound.

  2. The ability to assign multiple keys to the same retropad button. Ideally also a way to assign key combinations (ex: Xbox Button+face key-> rapid fire) though that’s less necessary.

  3. More plug-and-play settings for >2 players . Using Retroarch on an HTPC with four controllers is an exercise in frustration as not every system supports four player, every system that does support four player handles it differently, and many systems (snes, PS1) require different multitap settings depending on game (does it connect to player 1 or player 2). I realize that this is 100% not a retroarch problem as these were issues on the original systems, however it would be nice if retroarch had a table of all the correct settings it could reference and ever time you started a game it 1) checked how many controllers were connected, 2) checked if the game supported multitap, 3) if it supports multitap, assign the correct multitap/device configuration for the specific game. That way you could jump right into a game without having to think about which setting it needs.

#15

[QUOTE=atsumori;23825] 2) The ability to assign multiple keys to the same retropad button. Ideally also a way to assign key combinations (ex: Xbox Button+face key-> rapid fire) though that’s less necessary.

  1. More plug-and-play settings for >2 players . Using Retroarch on an HTPC with four controllers is an exercise in frustration as not every system supports four player, every system that does support four player handles it differently, and many systems (snes, PS1) require different multitap settings depending on game (does it connect to player 1 or player 2). I realize that this is 100% not a retroarch problem as these were issues on the original systems, however it would be nice if retroarch had a table of all the correct settings it could reference and ever time you started a game it 1) checked how many controllers were connected, 2) checked if the game supported multitap, 3) if it supports multitap, assign the correct multitap/device configuration for the specific game. That way you could jump right into a game without having to think about which setting it needs.[/QUOTE] #3 would be just as you mentioned: changes to specific cores, not to RetroArch itself. That’s not what this thread is for.

You can already do what you described in the latter part of #2 with hotkeys. Set the Xbox Button as the hotkey. Then any other external command that you assign to a button will be done only when you hold down that hotkey (Xbox Button, in this case) and press the corresponding button.

Although the former part would also be pretty neat.

#16

Would love to have RetroArch detect available sound devices and allow you to select which one. I’m currently trying to work out exactly what audio_device needs to be set to to output to my TV over HDMI using the dsound driver, rather than using the default device, but I’m utterly lost. Having RetroArch give me the options available to me would be a huge help.

If anyone can tell me how to find the info I need (using Windows 7) that would be great too. Google is proving unhelpful.

#17

I’m still getting back to an April nightly for GLUI on windows 7.

The old nightly is like this. Fresh from today with DPI override on 110 like this.

That’s on a 1080p screen, lot of empty space with smaller fonts and trimmed names. It feels like a phone app on a tablet, It would be great if it could scale better.

#18

Let the “Custom Ratio …” video option accessible in Quick Menu.

I’ve been testing the latests nightly builds and have seen the menus have changed quite a lot in a good way. The only thing I didn’t like was to not have an easily “custom ratio” option accessible after entering RA quick menu. This is an option often necessary when testing games and shaders.

EDIT: Probably all the “Aspect Ratio” options should be accessible in Quick Menu.

#19

I’ve tried searching for it but I couldn’t find anyone even asking about it. Will there ever be any kind of artwork in retroarch for the games? Covers, Infos, Ratings, Description etc.

I’m currently using Hyperspin for that but its just… so bloated, flash based and ugh…

#20

yeah, that’s in the works, actually. hopefully be available sometime fairly soon. I’m not sure if it’s planned for 1.2 (probably not) but maybe soon after.

#21

[QUOTE=shadoom;24353]I’ve tried searching for it but I couldn’t find anyone even asking about it. Will there ever be any kind of artwork in retroarch for the games? Covers, Infos, Ratings, Description etc.

I’m currently using Hyperspin for that but its just… so bloated, flash based and ugh…[/QUOTE] Try RetroFE out in the meantime. I’m not sure if it’s less bloated (runs kinda slow on my old Core 2 Duo laptop), but it’s at least not flash based.

#22

4 Player Support for all Systems, namely Genesis/SNES would be nice.

2 Likes
#24

Based on all the negative feedback the newly released 1.2 Android version is getting on the Play Store, it would seem that you need to make it clear to users that they need to use the core updater upon starting RA for the first time to actually download cores. Lots of people are complaining that they start RA, select a ROM and just get a message about no core detected. :wink:

#25

I would like to have the option to load ROMs from network on the android build, sins most ppl (like me ) dont have room for all the ROMs on the device, :slight_smile:

3 Likes