Recommended Cores

RetroArch Windows devices
#1

Hi everyone,

libretro together with retroarch becomes better and better. Meanwhile I am trying to switch from standalone emulators (snes9x, kega fusion, etc) to retroarch. However due to the amount of cores it would be great to know which cores are recommended with the best compatibility.

SNES, Genesis, NES, Gameboy (Color), Gameboy Advance are in the main interest. Furthermore it seems some cores do not play every game. I tried for example Donkey Kong Country with the SNES9x and SNES9x Next core (the differences are unknown to me), but both cores display a black screen.

In general I would say less cores are better for the overview than a lot of possibilities (especially snes is a little bit confusing). I like the focus on mednafen cores also known as beetle. So I know that the beetle cores are highly optimised for libretro.

#2

[QUOTE=papermanzero;45819]Hi everyone,

libretro together with retroarch becomes better and better. Meanwhile I am trying to switch from standalone emulators (snes9x, kega fusion, etc) to retroarch. However due to the amount of cores it would be great to know which cores are recommended with the best compatibility.

SNES, Genesis, NES, Gameboy (Color), Gameboy Advance are in the main interest. Furthermore it seems some cores do not play every game. I tried for example Donkey Kong Country with the SNES9x and SNES9x Next core (the differences are unknown to me), but both cores display a black screen.

In general I would say less cores are better for the overview than a lot of possibilities (especially snes is a little bit confusing). I like the focus on mednafen cores also known as beetle. So I know that the beetle cores are highly optimised for libretro.[/QUOTE]

Don’t know how your rig look like but I’m striving for accuracy so I’m gonna recommend those that I think is the most accurate in Libretro.

NES/Famicom/Famicom Disk System: Nestopia SNES/Super Famicom: bsnes Accuracy GB/GBC: Gambatte GBA: mGBA Sega Genesis: [B]Genesis Plus GX

[/B]Good luck!

EDIT:

These cores plays all my games perfectly fine!

#3

Thanks a lot. I will try that. I am looking for accuracy and compatibility. I would like to have cores with the highest compatibility of games and which uses the benefits of retroarch (like shader and fast forwarding).

#4

Could you provide some more details of your setup? This is not a known problem. In fact, I’ve played through a large part of Donkey Kong Country on snes9x-next. As a sanity check, I just tried the latest nightly build of snes9x-next with this game and it works fine.

#5

Probably just a bad rom.

#6

Yup, seems like the most likely issue.

#7

Donkey Kong Country works fine with me using SNES9x, have you tried a different rom?

#8

The rom(s) are fine. It is working with the regular snes9x and bsnes. The whole donkey kong country series is affected. Non snes9x core likes it. But it seems many PAL games have the issue. Also Illusion of Time (Illusion of Gaia in US) is not working. The bsnes core is working without problem.

If I scan the roms folder, most of those roms are not detected as well. By the way, the rom scanning method is also not detecting homebrew and rom hacks. The german “Seiken Densetsu 3” translation called “Secret of Mana 2” is also not detected. But as said, all these games are working properly in other emulators.

#9

[QUOTE=papermanzero;45830]The rom(s) are fine. It is working with the regular snes9x and bsnes. The whole donkey kong country series is affected. Non snes9x core likes it. But it seems many PAL games have the issue. Also Illusion of Time (Illusion of Gaia in US) is not working. The bsnes core is working without problem.[/QUOTE] Just tested Donkey Kong Country PAL in snes9x-next, or snes9x2010 as it’s now called, and things worked fine. I could at least get to the first level and start playing. Not sure what to think…

#10

I just tried Illusion of Time (Europe and Germany) and Donkey Kong Country (Europe) with Snes9x and did not get any blackscreen.

Also if rom’s crc does not match the No-Intro database they will not be scanned and added to a playlist.

#11

the current mGBA core is outdated. You are better off with VBA-M. A few games i tested that have demanding 3D graphics (one was Payback) crashed on mGBA after a while but worked fine on VBA. Only the standalone mGBA is good enough.

#12

Compared to the PPSSPP Libretro core which definitely is outdated today, mGBA is fairly up to date and even the standalone version has it’s share of issues.

Personally I’ll take mGBA in Libretro over anything any day of the week, benefits with using the mGBA Libretro core compared to the standalone emu is that you can get accurate GBA colors and you can use a LCD shader that mimics the GBA screen + accuracy is still high so you’re not loosing that much.

VBA-M is good but got it’s fair share of issues too, so it’s a split decision.

mGBA still wins in my book but the games I have works out of the box anyway.

#13

Payback freezes in standalone too. Those things should really be reported if you run across them…

#14

[QUOTE=papermanzero;45830]The rom(s) are fine. It is working with the regular snes9x and bsnes. The whole donkey kong country series is affected. Non snes9x core likes it. But it seems many PAL games have the issue. Also Illusion of Time (Illusion of Gaia in US) is not working. The bsnes core is working without problem.

If I scan the roms folder, most of those roms are not detected as well. By the way, the rom scanning method is also not detecting homebrew and rom hacks. The german “Seiken Densetsu 3” translation called “Secret of Mana 2” is also not detected. But as said, all these games are working properly in other emulators.[/QUOTE]

You have to manually add those roms to the playlist or use something like Retroarch PLaylist Generator

#15

Yes, I saw the Playlist Generator which is awesome.

I tried the PAL games again. For unknown reasons they are working. However there is a possible explanation: I loaded several roms (maybe 10) and the last rom resulted in a black screen with the snes9x core. Could it be that there is a bug, that after several rom loading attempts the core stops to work?

#16

Im going to try and do exactly what you did and load 10 roms to test out. Careful with the Playlist tool, i had an issue with it with nes games, once i selected the bnes core in the tool, retroarch would not allow me to use any other core with those roms and i had to delete the playlist (just in case it ever happens to you).

#17

Thanks for the hint concerning the playlist. I will monitor the strange loading behaviour, maybe I can make the issue reproducible.

#18

I did report it and i remember someone saying that the latest version of the standalone has fixed those issues.

#19

I think its your roms, i loaded more than 30 and played each for a few minutes and everything ran fine, you mentioned you had some hacked roms is any of those the ones that are causing the black screens?

#20

Now that I think of it, I may have experienced the same issue… It has happened maybe three times in all of my RetroArch usage. The first two times happened during testing with NES or SNES cores that I had modified myself. The game would not start at all, just go into a black screen. Pressing F1 would bring up the menu and I could close the game and retry. When I retried, the game would launch correctly.

Yesterday afternoon it actually happened again! I was demoing RetroArch to a friend and launching a game just turned into a black screen. Unfortunately, I can’t remember if it was Nestopia, snes9x2010, bsnes-accuracy or bsnes-mercury-balanced…

So, could be that there’s an actual issue here after all.