Noob Question RE: Nightlies

RetroArch General
#1

Firstly, please excuse my ignorance. I’m not trolling or demanding anything from the RA team.

What’s the point of all these updates to the cores? Some are updated incredibly frequently but, more often than not, I don’t see any difference as an end user.

Another thing that perplex me is why some games don’t work in a RA core but do in the stand alone version of the emulator. A simple example would be that in RA BlueMSX and fMSX the game Xevious doesn’t load yet in both the standalone emus the game runs fine. There’re another few like that in, say, the Mupen emu.

I’m not a coder but I am genuinely interested in what goes into these core updates. :slight_smile:

#2

Most of the time, the updates have nothing to do with your platform. All of our supported platforms use the same codebase, so if we update something for, say, Vita, it also triggers a new build for, say, Windows, even if the resulting binary is 100% identical to the one before it.

For the other question, not all ports are created equally. If there’s something that’s not hooked up (or hooked up incorrectly) in the libretro port, it may cause a game not to work if the game relies on that functionality. As for mupen64plus-libretro, it’s substantially different from upstream at this point, so it could be any number of things causing the disparity.

#3

Thanks for the explanation. It makes a bit more sense to me now.