ParaLLEl Compatibility

I just did a casual test of the ParaLLEl using Pokemon Stadium 2 and Pokemon Snap, since I planned to stream those in the near future and they’re both notable problem cases for N64 emulation…or at least, were when I bothered to even try it, which was years ago. That people are actually trying to tackle the system properly is a welcome surprise for me. The former seemed to work mostly okay, but the latter had major framerate issues so I didn’t even bother trying to play. (It also seemed like the former game was rendering at my full desktop resolution rather than 480p, though that might be because I’m not used to games in RetroArch using that high a resolution. The latter was definitely normal res, though.)

This isn’t a thread about those issues per se, though. It’s more because I checked the Libretro wiki and found no information or compatibility lists about ParaLLEl, and the forums don’t seem to be discussing it much either. I couldn’t find it on the Libretro GitHub, so I’m wondering if there’s a current compatibility list out there so I can see which games are worth trying and which games I shouldn’t bother with, and documentation for the settings that differ from the mainline Mupen64 core.

(Is there any particular reason the Transfer Pak isn’t supported in Mupen64 or ParaLLEl, by the way? I would assume it’s in part because the controller plugins are replaced by the Libretro API, but I don’t see any technical barriers to coding the support back in using Libretro features or a partial implementation of a pad plugin.)

There’s no compatibility list because it wouldn’t be helpful for us at the moment. While it’s still quite early, Tiny Tiger (the main dev for ParaLLEl) is aware of the main issues and will be working on them. He’s also working on an RSP JIT, which should speed it up quite a bit (it’s currently the main bottleneck on all but very weak GPUs). Once he tackles all of the low-hanging fruit (interlacing issues, etc.), we’ll probably want to do a compatibility list to figure out the stragglers.

In the meantime, if users want to do a compatibility list, they’re welcome to it, though it’ll likely change quite a bit fairly regularly.

Dunno about the transfer pak. Probably Twinaphex just didn’t bother hooking it up. A lot of mupen’s stuff is hooked up to the libretro API strangely and it’s possible that one’s harder to implement then others. /shrug