Neo Geo Pocket Color (NGPC) - R.A.C.E. Core

Libretro Cores
#1

About 10 years ago, I worked on the RACE Neo Geo Pocket emulator. It’s nice and fast even on slow systems. It even has some very good ARM assembly optimizations built in.

The NeoPop NGPC emulator is the main core that almost all NGPC emulators use, because it was well known and easily portable. The problem is that it’s not optimized like RACE is.

Recently, I’ve been getting into RetroPie stuff, and I noticed that the NGPC emulation is slow on my Raspberry Pi Zero. I’d like to have a full-speed emulator that runs Neo Geo Pocket Color software well, as that’s a system that’s near and dear to my heart.

So, I want to know how to go about porting this to libretro so that it can be included into RetroPie / EmulationStation / RetroArch, etc.

My time is actually quite limited, so I’d actually love to help someone that’s very knowledgeable in libretro to do the porting. I feel like it should be a fairly simple task, but I’ve not worked with this stuff recently.

The source has been available for years, but it isn’t widely known. http://koyote-land.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/koyote-land/RACE/

There’s also source for the PSP version that I worked on and was taken over by a guy called “Akop.” That may be the best version to focus on, as it included some nice state saving and such. http://svn.akop.org/psp/tags/race/2.16/

What help or suggestions are available?

#2

[QUOTE=Flavor;43343]About 10 years ago, I worked on the RACE Neo Geo Pocket emulator. It’s nice and fast even on slow systems. It even has some very good ARM assembly optimizations built in.

The NeoPop NGPC emulator is the main core that almost all NGPC emulators use, because it was well known and easily portable. The problem is that it’s not optimized like RACE is.

Recently, I’ve been getting into RetroPie stuff, and I noticed that the NGPC emulation is slow on my Raspberry Pi Zero. I’d like to have a full-speed emulator that runs Neo Geo Pocket Color software well, as that’s a system that’s near and dear to my heart.

So, I want to know how to go about porting this to libretro so that it can be included into RetroPie / EmulationStation / RetroArch, etc.

My time is actually quite limited, so I’d actually love to help someone that’s very knowledgeable in libretro to do the porting. I feel like it should be a fairly simple task, but I’ve not worked with this stuff recently.

The source has been available for years, but it isn’t widely known. http://koyote-land.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/koyote-land/RACE/

There’s also source for the PSP version that I worked on and was taken over by a guy called “Akop.” That may be the best version to focus on, as it included some nice state saving and such. http://svn.akop.org/psp/tags/race/2.16/

What help or suggestions are available?[/QUOTE]

Hi, is meeting us on IRC an option? #libretro on freenode? I would be on there and I could see about porting this if you are able to hang out in the channel and respond to some basic questions I might have about it during the process where we get this done.

Thanks in advance.

#3

Awesome. Yeah, I could likely do that MAYBE later today. This week is a bit odd, and next week I will be traveling. I’d really like to see this happen, though, so we’ll make it work.

#4

Has there been any progress on this?

I had to go out of town, and it’s tough for me to hop on IRC while I’m traveling.

#5

I don’t think anything has started yet. I didn’t see a repo for it under the libretro organization at github, at least. Do you already have a version control setup? If not, is there a tarball somewhere that I can go ahead and get uploaded to github? That’ll at least get the ball rolling.

#6

I likely can not do much while I am traveling.

I think @twinaphex grabbed my src, though. I’m pretty sure he looked over the code, but I don’t know if he tried porting anything, yet.

#7

Looks like someone asked about the PSP port here and the developer posted his source.

http://www.akihabara-online.com/Foro/viewtopic.php?p=8779

Cheers :slight_smile:

#8

[QUOTE=usraek;46879]Looks like someone asked about the PSP port here and the developer posted his source.

http://www.akihabara-online.com/Foro/viewtopic.php?p=8779

Cheers :)[/QUOTE]

Yeah, that someone was me, and I didn’t notice the reply there until I got your post just now. Thanks!!!

#9

Derp. I didn’t even see the user name. omg.

#10

Well, I definitely have not been keeping up with this, but I did pop some stuff up on GitHub. https://github.com/TheFlav/RACE-NGPC-Emulator-PSP (the source from ‘theelf’) https://github.com/TheFlav/RACE-NGPC-Emulator (the older non-PSP source)