Hello all, I first noticed Retroarch in it’s 1.5 days, and its progress has boomed since then. Congrats to the fine work! This is my first post to your forum.
Since taking advantage of its cover art feature, I began to have an idea of a similar feature for game manuals. I am not a coder, but I have modelled the idea to the best of my capability. I’m also not aware of specific legal issues with linking to copyrighted material, but if it is similar to boxart, I don’t foresee a problem.
I’ve found repositories online for manuals, such as replacementdocs.com, gamesdatabase.org, and emumovies.com. I don’t know if libretro sources its own database for boxart and images, or if it links outside of itself. I do know that a manuals database would easily be 10x the size of an image archive, and that at least pdf support will need to exist in libretro.
Since the size would be great, even for a per-core download, I would suggest adding it as a per-game download option from the Quick Menu.
To actually access the manual is another story. I presume the image viewer core would be the first and only option. Support for browsing pdf would need to be baked in, via poppler or other compatible open-source software.
Also, I got the impression developers were not interested in having multiple cores active simultaneously, so a link to the downloaded manual from the Quick Menu would be out of the question. It may have to reside in the main menu, or the sub menu where you’re asked to choose a core for a particular game. Perhaps a manuals directory on top of the image viewer playlist?
I hope this gets the attention of the right people, and that the idea I’ve proposed is sufficiently fleshed out. I think a lot of people would take advantage of a fantastic potential feature like this. Thank you for reading through this long post! -Geoff.