Have you tried with the performance profile? There are some multi-core CPUs that could actually run it… (i guess)
[quote=“eadmaster”]
Have you tried with the performance profile? There are some multi-core CPUs that could actually run it… (i guess)[/quote]
Like what - a Cortex A15? I expect that to be ‘just’ comparable to a PS3 or Xbox 360 CPU-wise (if that) - which means you can still forget about bSNES running decently.
Going lower than A15, even on a Note 2 - you’re lucky if you can get Wii performance out of it with most cores.
I sincerely doubt it’s worth the time and effort - we have to resort to a speedhacked version of SNES9x (SNES9x Next) as-is on Android - meaning SNES9x 1.53 would be way too slow on most devices. And even the current SNES9x Next is too slow for my Cortex A8 tablet.
SNES9x is ‘good enough’ IMHO.
Multicore won’t help bsnes at all. It’s entirely single-threaded.
For android, specifically, there would need to be a native ARM assembly version of libco written to get any real chance at decent speeds. Even with blargg’s PPC ASM libco, PS3 could only achieve ~50 fps with the performance core, and this was before some of the more recent speed-killing changes.
Thanks developers for hardwork. I want to tell about my problem - i am using jxd s 601 and i cant map volume up\down buttons for L2-R2. I mapped them in options, but in game they just dont working correctly. They only working if they were unmapped and using for they initial goal - making volume up and down. Looks like Menu and Back buttons can not be mapped too, emulator just showing yellow message text with hid and code for key.
Hi Squarepusher, just wanted to let you know about this. Today I tested the latest version of snes9x EX+, which is powered by the snes9x 1.53 core. And I have to say it runs surprinsigly well on my phone (CortexA9 1ghz). At first glance I can say snes9x EX+ runs quite better than snes9x-next, but I would like to know something, does snes9x-next uses frameskip?
If retroarch cores does uses frameskip, then there could be some space for optimization. Because snes9x ex+ runs a bit better. The game I tested is Chrono Trigger (USA). I just let the game run the demo intro and compared both emulators.
Anyway, thanks again to all retroarch devs for working on this great app.
P.S. Is there any chance of icontrolpad support without bluez-ime ;). Fingers crossed.
After further investigation ;), snes9x EX+ is using auto frameskip by default, and after disabling frameskip games become terribly slow :(. Confirmed once more, android sucks for emulators. I dont like to play with frameskip, so I think I need to get a pandora.
My first post.
First of all I’d like to say big THANK YOU for Squarepusher, Maister, ToadKing and all the other devs involved in making this wonderful piece of software available to us.
I’m currently running RetroArch on my Xperia ray (MSM8255) and the only core I tried is PCSX ReARMed with Tekken 3 (what else…)
A few things I’ve noticed so far:
-
(Possible bug) In landscape mode, buttons to the right, every touch on the top left edge acts like pressing the back button and sends me straight back to core selection. Very frustrating.
-
(Suggestion) I think that the back button should act as a two-stage exit (“are you sure?”/“press again to exit”) in order to eliminate accidental exits, especially with capacitive buttons.
-
(Feature request) Is there any way to display current/actual framerate on the top left of the screen like in other emulators? Couldn’t find this option or even on the config files. Very handy to judge the effect of various shader and options.
-
(Feature request) Ability to move the app to the sd card.
Edit:
Playing with the refresh rate I was able to mostly solve the popping/crackling sound but the music isn’t full speed - does it mean OC or better device? 
Or get an iPad (with an iOS version pre v6.1.3 - an iPad Mini bought from the store should still be on 6.1.2 so it can still be jail broken with the evasi0n hack). RetroArch iOS runs beautifully and totally blows RetroArch Android away - it is like playing RetroArch on a PC or a console.
As long as Android is still amateur hour for high performance apps, games will be released first on iOS and Apple will still be selling iPads and iPhones like hot cakes. It is very simply a total travesty that Android sucks this badly compared to QNX and iOS - Google’s engineers should be ashamed of themselves.
My advice to Google is - just give us ARM Linux proper already and gut this Java Dalvik VM and the entire piece of trash framework services built around it.
RetroArch Android uses no frame skip at all.
Unfortunately given that Android sucks so badly and because first impressions do count, we might have to put it in - I want to give zero incentives for anybody to buy Broglia’s overpriced and slap dash emu ports so it looks like I will have to implement it on a per-core basis.
Not sure yet but we have hit a brick wall on Android - some devices run well without frameskip, while others don’t - it is all over the map and frankly it just makes me hate Google and Android just that bit more for getting this thing oh so wrong in the first place.
The death knell here is that it cannot deliver on RetroArch’s sync requirements - audio especially is the weakest link here of the two (video and audio).
Or get an iPad (with an iOS version pre v6.1.3 - an iPad Mini bought from the store should still be on 6.1.2 so it can still be jail broken with the evasi0n hack). RetroArch iOS runs beautifully and totally blows RetroArch Android away - it is like playing RetroArch on a PC or a console.
As long as Android is still amateur hour for high performance apps, games will be released first on iOS and Apple will still be selling iPads and iPhones like hot cakes. It is very simply a total travesty that Android sucks this badly compared to QNX and iOS - Google’s engineers should be ashamed of themselves.
My advice to Google is - just give us ARM Linux proper already and gut this Java Dalvik VM and the entire piece of trash framework services built around it.[/quote]
Pfff don’t even get me started on Android as a bastardized operating system - it isn’t just how it’s programmed and how well it performs on a speed front - it’s also how stable it is, and based on me having an HTC Desire Z and a Samsung Galaxy S3 (stock ROMs), I can say that applications crash almost as frequently as the Windows 95 applications being run on the PS3 version of DOSBox.
@Squarepusher
Mmm, so do you think Ubuntu touch will make a better job at handling emulators? If I remember correctly, it doesn’t run java.
Anyway, I will surely consider getting another device specifically for emulation purposes. But I have never been a fan of apple ;P.
Followup to my previous post: after switching kernel and ROM Tekken 3 now runs beautifully and sound seems to be perfect AFAICT, even without overclocking(!).
Looks like the old Snapdragon s2 does have some juice left in him after all isn’t it? 
Big thumbs up to the devs and Notaz.
Sadly, the issue I reported earlier (exit upon touching left screen border) happens with other games as well, which makes playing with screen overlays even more hellish than it is.
Another suggestion I thought of would be to be able to set where to look for BIOS files, that would enable users to put games in different folders without having to have duplicates of BIOS files.
I have a quick question about robert’s emus vs retroarch (more specifically his snes9x+ port). Is there a reason why his emulator still runs flawlessly when my phone (s3) is connected to a tv via mhl even with frameskipping disabled but retroarch suffers a big performance hit? I know that the s3 takes a hit whenever you plug it to a tv so I was expecting a similar fps penalty robert’s emulators but was surprised to find it still running perfectly. Maybe disabling frameskipping doesn’t actually disable it completely in his emulators (I couldn’t notice any skipping though, ran perfectlt smooth)?
As far as I know, you need to upgrade your Android version to the latest version and then this problem goes away.
That is at least what another user (Jjavmetal) reported to me.
On Android 4.0.4 (ICS - Cyanogenmod 9) I can confirm that HDMI Out is very laggy and doesn’t run good at all. It doesn’t seem like that can be helped on this specific OS revision. iOS by comparison runs just fine over HDMI Out regardless of the OS version.
it is not a RetroArch problem at least - as with anything on Android, it’s an Android issue - and the problem might (or might not?) go away with a specific Android version. I have long since given up on trying to improve the Android port on all these numerous issues it has - it is futile - the OS is shit in numerous ways and any decent OS (like iOS, like QNX) doesn’t have all these problems. The only thing you can do on ‘insert your device here’ is to mess around with the numerous options RetroArch provides and get an optimum performance level that way - it is impossible for us to ‘guarantee’ a perfect runtime state on the tenthousand devices Android supports - especially when the OS is so shit, the devices lie about their refresh rates, and you have a garbage collector hellbent on screwing up your framerate. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack.
I don’t care about Robert Broglia or his ‘emus’ (they are not ‘his emus’ at all) and frankly I’d rather people not mention that name at all from now on. The one time I tried ‘SNES9x EX’ on my Android tablet (one of the few he made for free because the entrepreneurial conartist can’t profit off that since it’s not GPL), it ran like crap with frameskipping turned off - sound was skipping like mad. Sorry but I could never get his ‘payware’ to run ‘perfectly smooth’ - auto-frameskipping is a disaster. I fail to see what people find so great in those overpriced ports.
I don’t really care what he does either way. I disrespect the guy and his business methods - and his work.
I can confirm this, on Android 4.0.4 with my tablet connected via HDMI it ran pretty slow. Once i updated to 4.1.1 everything works like a charm.
Snex9x was working better but only with frameskipping on, once i disabled it was as slow as Retroarch with the 4.0.4, so it was a OS problem i guess.
Waiting for that new version with the new cores and RGUI, tried yesterday the pc wip1 version and i love that new menu, i want to see the new cores running on pc and android versions, cant wait 
(i use more often the pc version now anyway :P)
Best regards,
Just to chime in on that issue, I’m on a rooted (original samsung rom) 4.1.2 Galaxy Note II, everything runs fine, but when I use HDMI out, lags ensues… (I know the problem is not on RetroArch side) Could it be a simply a framerate syncing issue between the weird framerate of my phone and the HDMI out (HDMI out is apparently set to 1080i@30fps) (maybe I should go the CyanogenMod route but I actually like Samsung interface/TouchWiz)
anyways, thanks for your work, I sincerly hope you don’t drop Android support!
I’m on the train a lot those days and being able to play my copy of Parasite Eve with a gameklip and wireless dualshock3 has been amazing
I’m concerned about battery life though, I guess it’s pretty good on my end, and I haven’t tried other emus on the marketplace, but would you say that RetroArch is more “power efficent” than say epsxe/fpse/imame/snes9xEx ? just curious
@Shin I don’t know that anyone has measured power efficiency, but I assume it would be similar to the others. If you do some experimenting and find otherwise, though, I’m sure many people would be interested in hearing about it.
I actually stopped using snes9x+ when retroarch came out :). I was just wondering if there was a way for retroarch to play nice with mhl. I’m on a custom samsung 4.1.2 rom and there’s still a performance hit (afaik older versions didn’t make a difference). I think the problem is because the phone has a hard time rendering dual displays (720p phone screen and 1080i/p for the tv) or something like that, resulting in some sluggishness here and there.
Wish my ipad 4 was still jailbroken. Ran into a boot issue after using evasi0n since the day it came out and could never get it to work again (ipad just restarted while using it and would never get past the apple logo anymore :(). Only thing I could do was a restore using the latest ios firmware through itunes so bbye jb.
@shin Do non samsung based roms even support mhl out? Thought devs were having issues with mali sources to get it working right.
There is a way to run the upcoming version of RetroArch on non-jailbroken iOS devices, but it will involve you ‘finding’ an UDID registrar somewhere so that you can sign RetroArch for your non-jailbroken device.
Perhaps there could be a grey ‘market’ for that kind of thing after the release. I sure as hell am not going to be doing that for people anytime soon though - I don’t need Apple on my bad side :P.
I noticed a problem while using snes9x. Don’t know if its a known issue but anyway here’s the problem:
I’ve been playing Link to the Past these past few days and whenever I’m done, I just save the game normally and a lot of times I just hit the home button of my phone (not the back button) to jump back to my launcher. This seems to introduce 2 problems if the emulator is killed in the background after some time (or if I closel all running apps with the task manager which I do regularly when my phone starts to crawl or something). First when I get back to retroarch and to the rom folder, I notice that it leaves a .smc file of the last game I was playing. Loading it doesn’t do anything. Second is my game didn’t actually save. If I didn’t close the emulator after I saved earlier, I could continue my game fine. Save also works as long as I exit the game using the back button, bringing me back to the retroarch menu (no .smc file too if I do this). Is this a known issue or am I just doing something wrong?