Newcomer is here

[Friendly_Nazi]

Hi everyone!

I am a newcomer with RetroArch and this forum. In this topic I would like to tell my opinion about the emulator and give some recommendations to the developers. For the beginning I must mention that I used many different emulators, such as ePSXe, Mednafen, Nestopia, puNES, ZSNES, Snes9x, Bnes and lots of others. I knew about RetroArch along ago, but never tried it. I always thought it is some weird unbalanced all-in-one emulator. But not long ago I decided to give it a try and downloaded RetroArch. Need to say that i was surprised. Interface is simple and it is sufficiently flexible in terms of settings. What concerns about Windows version of RetroArch – it works perfectly and stable. Now I would like to thank the developers for this great development project! Would also like to particularly thank the people responsible for development and supporting of shaders! With that marvelous NTSC shaders I have a feeling that I sit in front of a real old TV. Impressive old-school gaming experience! Talking about RetroArch in general it has big potential and even a brighter future. Thank you all good people who develop and support RetroArch!

But there are also disadvantages in the emulator (let me call it that). I used to play all emulated games on a keyboard. No, really: a keyboard, not a gamepad. For example for NES I use such configuration: up – w, down – s, left – a, right – d, B button – num 4, A button – num 5. For PSX, So when I was setting up RetroArch for the first time I was confused about the input configuration. After some time poking in settings I realized that there is now way to set up custom configuration for keyboard buttons. Default input configuration is uncomfortable for me. So I was forced to use a gamepad. Latter I tried to change keyboard configuration through the retroarch.cfg, but I could not set up numpad buttons. Second sad thing is about the lack of separate input configurations for each console. It would be very convenient to set up custom input configurations for certain consoles. I’m sure that many gamers have the same thoughts and wishes.

Also I would like to ask experts about Triple Buffering option. In a video card setting Vsync is enabled and RetroArch runs fine without any screen tearing. But what about Triple Buffering option? How it acts on the emulator performance?

What about puNES and Kega Fusion cores? They will be available in future?

Thanks to all who read this thread! Have a nice day! Sorry for bad English.

[Oggom]

Hello there, that’s quite a long post so I’ll try replying bit by bit.

I would like to tell my opinion about the emulator

Technically speaking, RetroArch is not an emulator at all. It’s a “libretro player” which allows running any program that has been ported to the libretro API. Most of them just happen to be emulators since this is what libsnes (the precursor of libretro) was originally designed for.

So when I was setting up RetroArch for the first time I was confused about the input configuration. After some time poking in settings I realized that there is now way to set up custom configuration for keyboard buttons. Default input configuration is uncomfortable for me. So I was forced to use a gamepad. Latter I tried to change keyboard configuration through the retroarch.cfg, but I could not set up numpad buttons.

First off, use a nightly build if you aren’t already since the current “stable” build is ancient and not worth using anymore: http://buildbot.libretro.com/nightly/

To change the keyboard mapping you’ll need to go to Settings -> Input settings -> Joypad mapping and change the bind mode from RetroPad to RetroKeyboard first. However, input mapping with RGUI is currently broken on Windows and doesn’t recognize all keys properly, so I would definitely recommend editing retroarch.cfg for this. Numpad keys are mapped as “keypadX” with X being the number of the button you want to map.

Second sad thing is about the lack of separate input configurations for each console.

Settings -> General settings -> State allows you to enable Configuration Per-Core which should take care of that, but I’ve never used it so I don’t know exactly how it works

Also I would like to ask experts about Triple Buffering option. In a video card setting Vsync is enabled and RetroArch runs fine without any screen tearing. But what about Triple Buffering option? How it acts on the emulator performance?

Triple Buffering increases latency by one frame, but provides better performance than VSync. Unless you have issues with VSync i wouldn’t recommend using it.

What about puNES and Kega Fusion cores? They will be available in future?

They are both closed source and therefore impossible to port to libretro unless the authors do it themselves.

puNES appears to be more accurate than Nestopia, but I don’t think there’s any real benefit in it over the latter. Kega Fusion is completely outperformed by Genesis Plus GX in everything except for 32X emulation. It’s also written in X86 assembly which makes it non-portable.

Unrelated to this, but people might not to take you serious with that username.

[Friendly_Nazi]

First off, use a nightly build if you aren’t already since the current “stable” build is ancient and not worth using anymore: http//buildbot.libretro.com/nightly/

I’m using a stable build of RetroArch and several nightly cores. I thought that a nightly build of RetroArch is quite unstable so I did not use it. If you say that it is enough stable than I will download it. Thanks for the information!

[QUOTE=Oggom;20117]To change the keyboard mapping you’ll need to go to Settings -> Input settings -> Joypad mapping and change the bind mode from RetroPad to RetroKeyboard first. However, input mapping with RGUI is currently broken on Windows and doesn’t recognize all keys properly, so I would definitely recommend editing retroarch.cfg for this. Numpad keys are mapped as “keypadX” with X being the number of the button you want to map.[/QUOTE] Very useful information! Thank you!

Unrelated to this, but people might not to take you serious with that username.

I have nothing to do with Nazism. I hate it as every normal human being. Poorly chosen username, my bad.