Politics of LibRetro vs RetroArch

Libretro Cores
#1

My understanding, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is that LibRetro wants its cores to be used by other Emulator Developers, right? Otherwise, the projects wouldn’t be separated and made open-source.

Retro-Arch on the other hand has done a lot of work with input mapping, audio back-end, shaders, etc… and I’m wondering if that code is also open source and if it is available for others to use.

I bring this up because I see Emulator Front-Ends such as Launchbox putting a lot more time into the front-end but I wish they could use the LibRetro cores.

Is there anyway to make it easy for front-ends to do so?

#2

Yes, RetroArch is open-source, available under the GPLv3 license, and many launchers already rely on it. RetroPie is basically EmulationStation plus RetroArch (it has other standalone emulators available, of course, but ibretro cores via RetroArch make up the backbone).

Anyone is welcome to implement a frontend for the libretro API but it’s a lot of low-level work, which doesn’t usually fit with the skillsets associated with launcher work, ditto for emu-coding vs frontend coding. In those cases, it doesn’t usually make sense for launcher authors to implement the low-level frontend work poorly when they could just launch RetroArch, which already does those things very well, instead.