Noob wants to install Retroarch on Linux?

RetroArch General
#1

Hello,

It says Retroarch supports Linux but I have done some search and couldn’t find out what to do. Should I start to learn compile sources to do it myself? I’m using openSUSE 12.3. Is there a .rpm anywhere to install?

Thanks!

#2

Both me and Maister are Arch Linux fans by heart.

I know that hunterk and almostalive maintain PPA repositories (for Ubuntu) - perhaps there is somebody else that caters to OpenSUSE or other RPM-based distributions in specific?

#3

hunterk has a ppa repo for ubuntu and I try to keep the libretro cores updated on AUR Arch Linux.

I don’t know of anybody providing rpm files for retroarch though but hopefully someone will read this and might be able to do that for you.

#4

You could try using alien to convert the debs from my ppa over to rpms. They don’t really do anything fancy, so I would expect it to work fine. However, if you’d like to learn to compile them yourself, they’re generally pretty straightforward without a bunch of weird dependencies.

#5

Thank you. So I just compiled it yesterday on my openSUSE. The compilation looks fine. However, don’t know how to use it… In console I tried “retroarch --help”, but sorry I don’t know what I should do next.

So my noob questions are:

  1. Should I edit /etc/retroarch.cfg or just leave it alone?
  2. I was suggested on github to run “retroarch -L /…/RetroArch-master/libretro-super/libretro-fba/libretro-fba.so /…/game.zip”, but both two games I tried have no sound.
  3. No input methods were detected? In console it shows sth like this: P1 Coin - assigned to key: RetroPad Button Select, port: 0. P1 Coin - has nSwitch.nCode: 6. P1 Start - assigned to key: RetroPad Button Start, port: 0. P1 Start - has nSwitch.nCode: 2. P1 Up - assigned to key: RetroPad D-Pad Up, port: 0.
  4. Any easy way to start the game, rather than type so many long paths to start a game?

Thank you for the program. I have retroarch installed on my android too. It was easier to use there.

p.s. I have problem to compile retrophoenix: “make”: Package gtk±2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path. Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gtk±2.0.pc’ to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable No package ‘gtk±2.0’ found g++ -O3 -std=gnu++0x -Wno-narrowing -Iphoenix -I. -DPHOENIX_GTK -c -o phoenix/phoenix.o phoenix/phoenix.cpp phoenix/phoenix.cpp:29:23: fatal error: gtk/gtk.h: No such file or directory compilation terminated. make: *** [phoenix/phoenix.o] Error 1

“make -f Makefile.qt”: moc -i -o phoenix/qt/qt.moc phoenix/qt/qt.moc.hpp make: moc: Command not found make: *** [phoenix/qt/qt.moc] Error 127

#6

You need the development packages for either gtk+2.0 or qt4. In Debian-land, those are libgtk2.0-dev or libqt4-dev. I don’t know what the equivalent is in SuSE.

#7

Installed gtk2-devel solved the “make” problem.

Now I have phoenix installed, will try that first to see.

#8

Now I have this error both from running retroarch in CLI or from Retrophoenix. BTW

RetroArch [ERROR] :: Couldn’t find any audio driver named “alsa” RetroArch [ERROR] :: Fatal error received in: “find_audio_driver()”

I noticed that in the retroarch.cfg which it generated has the line “audio_driver = “alsa””.

#9

You’ll have to install development headers for ALSA and recompile, and if your distro is Pulseaudio based, you should install dev headers for that as well.

#10

Alright. I’ll do that.

I changed audio driver in cfg to “oss” and it could launch, still without sound though. But the game was running in like x2 or x3 speed. Does that have sth to do with the problematic audio issue? Do I need to install video related devel headers before compiling as well…?

Thanks.

#11

Yes, install the alsa-devel and/or pulseaudio-devel packages and recompile. When you choose alsa or pulse for your audio, it should run at the proper speed.

#12

Thank you so much for the help! It’s working fine now.

Last problem, I don’t find core genplus.so although it has its folder under retroarch-super.

It seems it wasn’t compiled when I followed the guide which should generate every core automatically?

Edit: I have just manually compiled the genplus core.

Thanks for all the help. Really appreciate it.