Thanks OP for creating such a cute topic about opportunity to say something nice to good people!
Many, many thanks for all you are doing, libretro team!!!
My story with Retroarch is this. Back in 2018 I was charmed with consoles from Analogue, mostly SNES and MD replicas, I don’t know why though, as I don’t have any cartridges in possession ) Held my breath for the release of a new episode from “My Life In Gaming” guys with review on upcoming MD in April 2019 before buying, and there, right out of nowhere, coincidence or not, they showed the difference of those simple “filters” (on Analogue ones and in emulators) we always had and I once thought were the top of what can be done to the pixels, and introduced me to Shaders and scanlines world using my favorite game as an example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq5eQhCN6Co mark 6.00) I mean, I or course heard about those before, never understanding their meaning, but this time I got it visually. And found out it’s what it should be… Wow, that was an impact! I finally realized what I was missing all those years and saw how much more beautiful my favorite games can and should look.
Truly… beautiful…
I immediately tried it, got around menu and settings, loaded a game, applied a shader and… and never looked back since. Standalone emulators don’t excite me anymore. Their shaders (if any) don’t look good to me, or maybe they need more tweaking. Yeah it’s been all about crt shaders ever since ) And the only association with them for me sounds “Retroarch shaders”!
No console can give me that as far as I know. So I decided to stay with my laptop and your amazing software on it ) It’s actually everywhere now ) all laptops, PC and even tried it on my smart once.
Right now I use “Guest advanced” shader, used Geom before and Pi before that and something else ) I tried all and understood I prefer sharper look, without blurriness, at some point Pi looked the sharpest one. And it started. Load shader, apply, try, change, compare… This constructor never ends ) Many thanks, hats off!!! to all the developers who continue to make and introduce new shaders, work on cores and, of course, on frontend itself! You are amazing people. All the best to you all and your families! So much progress lately from all around, I imagine the work amount over Nintendo 64 parallel engines alone! Titanic work!!! DosBox Pure… Eased the life of Dos games lovers. Even PCSX2 is here! You are very cool people! Please, go on. Too bad so many left recently… Very unexpectedly and instantly. Sour, Mike…
And poor thing Near… Is not to be forgotten.
Almost everything is here at least for me, I only wish to one day see Kega Fusion among cores ) Yeah, I know, contains legal code… But still… Magic, maybe? )) I think world needs more Mega Drive emulators! )
And punes port would be something! Doesn’t seem he’s interested, unfortunately.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Please, keep doing what you do despite of spikes to the wheels from enemies. It’s always like that, you know it ) But we just move forward doing our thing.
You have our full support! Just ask if you need any help with any goddamn ) organized crime/corporations threats, any goddamn weirdos or whatever they throw at us. Because remember, only together we’re the real power!
The real deal, you know!
One question. You all know each other, can you, please, tell if Mike abandoned blastem? That’s an emulator I was keeping a lot of expectations about and I hope it realizes someday. I hope, not too late… Who knows what happens tomorrow nowadays.
But I’ve noticed he hasn’t updated his builds since some time, half a year. But it looks he is active on twitter. So I assumed…
Did he do any statement about retiring? No way, as far as I know, that emulator is his big goal. Is it a temporary lose of interest?
Oh, and one more thing. If you please ) I took my liberties, I don’t know where to ask these questions.
Thank you for taking care about sound part of Retroarch. What you did with freeze upon disconnecting sound output device is a great fix! I maybe running too much into the future and maybe (hopefully) this is on your todo list, but do you think it would be possible to further make it restore sound upon re-connection and switch… drivers or whatever, if you connect another output device? Like Video Players (I can judge by MPC-BE, for instance) do it. While starting with my DAC on and playing sound through headphones, MPC switches to HDMI output when I disconnect it passing it to my TV. And switching fast. Is it possible in Retroarch? Right now, after you disconnect a sound signal there won’t be any sound without restarting, right?
P.S. Goddamn! ) Look what emotions do to us. Sorry for this poem! Or is it just a wall of text? It didn’t look so long in the window.