On Netplay

RetroArch General
#1

I’m somewhat surprised the netplay for this emulator isn’t discussed a tad more, as it seems to handle lag quite well, and about half of the supported platforms have yet to have an emulator with as good of netplay support.

The one thing that it does seem to be lacking is some method of netplay savestateing, mostly as a method of pausing a long saveless game, or as a method of recovering from desyncs and disconnects. (I tend to play lots of co-op stuff, or take turns in non co-op stuff.) It wouldn’t really matter to me if the state loading/saving could only be handled by a complete forced disconnect. Would also be useful for the spectator mode, as currently if you want to do a broadcast of a game, you must do the entire thing live. Just being able to save state on disconnect, and load a state on connect, would be amazingly useful.

Beyond this, I also somewhat wish that you could have netplay and spectators at the same time, but that is far less of an issue.

Other then that, this is more then likely going to be my main console netplay emulator for some time, atleast for games with a proper save or password system, so thanks for the fantastic work.

Now, what to play what to play?

#2

Yeah, RetroArch is, above all else, a high-tech system. Maister has implemented some very clever features in the emulator’s backend that are unfortunately hidden and therefore unknown to most users. Such features are the main reasons I love RetroArch.

As for broadcasting non-live, you could use the .bsv (input movie) recording feature if you want to show someone your gameplay later. Also, you can run a .bsv file and record it to video with the ffmpeg h264 rgb lossless video dump feature, which can be further encoded to a lossy format for general viewership with a bit of encoding knowledge.

Hmm. A network save feature would be handy, yeah. Further, it could have a “continue from last” feature if RetroArch saved the state periodically (like it does anyway for netplay and rewind), but instead of just to RAM, to hard drive. This might be similar to any good web browser’s crash recovery system. This might not even need to be limited to netplay. RetroArch could keep a constant crash-recovery state available for every type of usage. That would definitely be cool. It could even immediately save the state and the entire rewind buffer to a file upon exiting (what’s bound to esc by default)! Or, at least, a configurable portion of its end, since my rewind buffer is set to 8GB and I wouldn’t want to save that much periodically or on exit.