My Latest Nightly Experience (Not Very Good)

RetroArch Android devices
#1

Just tried to download the latest Nightly (4/3/2015) for my 2013 Nexus 7 tablet to see if I could finally get SM64 working properly with my gamepad (Play Store version has a serious input issue where the z button does not work unless nothing else is pressed, meaning no long jumps, making some parts of the game impossible). I have tried the nightlies several times in the past, but this one was absolutely disastrous compared to previous versions.

I’m running Android 5.0.2, stock kernel, but rooted. Gamepad I was trying to use is a Saitek Cyborg V3 Rumble Pad, which I’ve had for quite a long time, and it works flawlessly with RetroArch nightlies on my PC, as well as with other emulators and apps on my tablet.

I saw the note saying not to use the Android GUI, so the first thing I did after downloading all the available cores was push Load RetroArch, and the usual welcome screen on the RGUI came up, and RetroPad overlay was active, even though I had my gamepad plugged in. I tried using my gamepad to navigate, and could use the dpad to move up and down, but using a/b to go in and out of menus did nothing, despite it popping up the message like pervious versions saying exactly what my gamepad was. I resorted to trying to use the awful, laggy touch overlay, and was interrupted by touch being active in RGUI itself. That caused RetroArch to close most of the time, because dpad up was covering the Quit RetroArch item in the RGUI menu. After 15 minutes of experimenting I was finally able to go into submenus, but not get back out (it took me another 20 minutes to figure out the left swipe or whatever it is, not sure, but its definitely not documented anywhere that I could see) I also noticed that most of the keys that are documented like on the initial startup screen, are all either PC or gamepad controls, which don’t work properly at all on this nightly (mentioned more later on).

I’d say having that touch input active in RGUI on first run is a BAD idea. Its very inaccurate even on a 7" screen, and interferes with the overlay that’s already there. I finally found the option to disable touch input, and was able to use the overlay to investigate the rest of the new menus. I messed around in input settings, but was unable to get any sort of gamepad input working whatsoever. I decided to try switching menu drivers to XMB and see if that was any better. I selected XMB, then quit RetroArch completely.

Reopened the app and pushed Load RetorArch again, and was greeted by the RGUI, with touch input enabled (left me frustrated and going wtf?, I just disabled it, and now its back again). I went back into the menu and disabled touch, and noticed most of the various settings I changed weren’t saved; they just reverted back to defaults. So I changed them all again, selected XMB, then hit save new config hoping that would force it to save. Exited completely, and finally got the XMB interface, and it was even more of a nightmare.

First thing I noticed was gamepad still didn’t work, though at least the awful touch input navigation was finally gone. Frustrated, I tried switching driver to hid instead of android, and that caused RetroArch to crash on any gamepad input, so I had to abandon that idea and go with no gamepad to see what else was broken.

I was able to navigate the XMB much more easily using the laggy touch overlay, and man was it laggy. Transitions seemed like they were in slow motion despite everything staying at 60fps. I fired up my old PSP for comparison, and its XMB interface is butter smooth and transitions are lightning fast, where RetroArch’s take on it is slow, choppy, and very sluggish. I noticed some of the icons for cores were nothing but black squares (not a big deal since those menus seem to have no function yet, just pointing that out).

I spent an hour trying to repeatedly get settings such as disabling bilinear filtering (makes retro games look terrible),aspect ratio, and other misc. things to stick to no avail. Most of the settings just reset to defaults on startup (wtf again. at least the play store version saves almost all the settings if you update them in rgui).

I tried loading up SM64 (knowing it was going to be unplayable with the touch overlay controls), and right away got 640x480 res (why is n64 native res not the default?), which looked awful because bilinear filtering wouldn’t die no matter how many times I tried getting rid of it. I was able to get the N64 resolution to stick at 320x240 after changing it twice and restarting the app completely each time. I loaded up the game, and it lagged like crazy (again, play store version stays at fullspeed on sm64), and had glitchy graphics (mostly z-buffer issues, like mario’s mustache being mostly behind his face except at certain angles). I tried starting a new game and got so frustrated with the touch overlay controls that I gave up before getting very far and came here.

I don’t know what happened, but RetroArch on Android has pretty much become completely unusable, even moreso than the Play Store version, which just has the N64 Z button problem, but at least works properly for4 non-n64 games (i mostly want it for n64 games, because mupen64 ae is broken beyond belief with sm64) Any ideas on what happened?

#2

Yeah, what happened is that touch input is new and still being worked on. It’s supposed to be disabled when an input overlay is visible, but that’s obviously not happening. It’s a known issue that just hasn’t been fixed yet.

I think the config not saving is another known issue. At least, I remember it coming up in IRC. Dunno if anything was ever done about it, but I guess not, based on your experience.

The gamepad mapping is different from in the Play store version. Now, you should go into the input settings with the overlay controls, make sure autodetect is enabled and then go to ‘bind all’ and try to map your pad. I’m not sure why you’re having latency issues with the overlay input. It works fine here, and this is the first I’ve heard of it.

For N64 getting low framerate (which I assume is what you meant by “lagged like crazy”), you’ll probably have better luck going into the core options and switching to some less accurate / more performant plugins, like Rice. This should fix the z-layering thing, too, IIRC, though some effects and games won’t work right, since Rice is the least accurate option.

In all, you might have better luck stepping back a week or so in builds. This is a common occurrence when using nightlies, bumping into bugs/features that are half-baked. Unfortunately, most projects that are bleeding-edge (like x264, ffmpeg, etc.) have a good stable version to fall back on, but it’s been so long since we’ve had a “stable” release that it’s barely the same program anymore.

#3

I have a Nexus 5, a Nexus 7 2012 a Nexus 7 2013 and a Shield Tablet. Overlay controls work fine on all of them (not laggy at all). For touch input, it’s very new, touch will be enabled only when overlays are not active in the future.

XMB is not ready for prime time but I don’t have this issues you mention with it, it’s just slow when listing roms but that feature is not ready.

Also, odd thing with settings, only input bindings don’t save for me. The rest always persists.

I just tried SM64 in the N5 and it works well. Things to consider when slowdown occurs:

  • Incorrect refresh rate selected
  • Incorrect v-sync swap interval
  • Rewind enabled
#4

I just tested mupen and it works full speed on my Nexus 5 and my Shield, but not really full speed in my N7s, I guess that’s to be expected since neither of those are really powerful in the GPU department. I didn’t test the 1.0.0.2 core though.

#5

For the laggy touch controls, i’m thinking it was probably just the touch latency of tablet touchscreens, especially the N7 which is known to have massive touch latency and phantom touches happening from time to time (mine does do that sometimes). I think I estimated it to be somewhere around 100-150ms on average last time i checked it in 4.4. basically makes any touch-controlled games unplayable for me, though they are somewhat playable on my old N4 (minus Minecraft PE, which added some sort of wacky smoothing that makes latency there over a quarter of a second). Surprisingly, the least laggy phone or tablet I’ve ever had was my very first smartphone, which was an ancient Huawei Ascend II from Cricket, that I got years ago. That one had almost non-existent touch latency (like 2-3 frames max), though it was probably just because of the tiny screen compared to a tablet, which I could imagine might make a huge difference.

I also notice even tiny amounts of input lag very easily. Its the main reason I still have a CRT hooked up to this PC. I can’t deal with the input lag/motion blur caused by modern displays most of the time.

I’ll test with a nightly from around mid-march and see what happens compared to the newest one.

All I really need is to get N64 working mostly, and maybe snes, because I can do NES on my PSP (I play Zelda Randomizer a lot, and made myself a custom tuned build of NesterJ which lets me do controller 2 up-a and a few other things not normally possible in it)

#6

I don’t see any considerable touch input lag on the N7, I finished MM2 like that :stuck_out_tongue: I think Mupen may have slowed down I remember it being faster before but I can’t be certain…

#7

yeah mupen has definitely gotten much slower. Runs perfectly on the Play Store version except for the broken gamepad controls. I tried several more nightlies ranging over the past month or two, and all of them are broken to various degrees, most of which had surprisingly slow and/or unstable mupen cores, even with accuracy set to low. Rice video just insta-crashed on every build I tried. Most builds failed to save at least part of the settings, though the gamepad worked on all of the ones I tried. I had to reload a saved config every time I started RA as control settings weren’t saved to the default config in any build I tried.

I threw the latest mupen64 AE on and it at least lets me play sm64, although with slightly goofed up graphics and terrible sound quality. I reverted back to the Play Store RetroArch, since its other cores seem for work perfectly fine. I think I’m giving up on trying to get N64 in RA on Android. Its just far too much of a hassle for me to get it working. Mupen works flawlessly on the Windows version though.