Thank you Libretro!

RetroArch General
#166

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”! :wink: 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.

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#167

Good story! Yes, emulation is easy to use and often the best option. Run ahead is often omitted, but remember it can eliminate input lag even original hardware had/has. I’d go even further and say that the improvements on later systems like GameCube, PS2, PSP, Wii and others also benefit a lot from the community and developers, if you search for ways to use 4K textures, I myself added a lot of custom button layouts for my PS controller for GC/Wii games, patches for proper widescreen (even for Saturn and PS1 games), doubling or unlocking framerates, the list goes on and on. As for the BlastEm question, I really can’t say and it’s out of the scope of this thread, you should search here in the forums, maybe someone else asked it already.

Edit: This is a n example of upscaled textures, UI, etc, and the emulators for GC/Wii, PSP and PS2 I mentioned above are not necessarily the Retroarch cores, since I prefer using these as standalone for different reasons

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And DKR for Wii using PS button layouts and HD textures

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There’s so many reasons why emulation is the best option most of the time, it’s hard to imagine otherwise. Cables, CRT monitors, TVs, space needed, etc.

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#168

Thanks for the kind words :slight_smile:

Mask of Destiny (Blastem creator’s screenname) is definitely still working on it.

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#169

Wow! I’ve never seen those consoles look so great! Couldn’t imagine they could. Yeah, PS2 and GC/Wii have been on the standalone for long time. Hopefully those ports will get even with standalones one day. Thanks for sharing! I’ll look into it, because what I seriously missed were handhelds that I couldn’t… or didn’t spend enough time to set up for looking good enough to want to play. Thank you for advise on run ahead too! You’re right, that’s the feature I didn’t try yet. I will.

hunterk, whew! Thank you so much for the relief!!! I’m so glad to hear it. I hope he comes back to active development and new releases. The emulator’s got such a potential. Not that there’s something wrong with GenesisPlusGX, I love it, it’s full of features and it’s great to have those nuked sound engines as options. But again, the more MD emulators are out there, the merrier ))

Sorry for flooding a thread not for this with my stupid questions! ) But it really troubled me for some time. Thank you all again!

#170

Hey man, feel free to ask, I just believe it was already asked somewhere in the forums!

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#171

Thank you! libretro is a total game changer!

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#172

Great stuff!! Thank you for doing what you do.

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#173

Thanks again liberto! Is it possible to update the beetle core to a later version of mednafen? My troops keep disappearing in Dragon Force II. XD

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#174

It should already have all of the fixes backported except for a single one related to CD speed (IIRC). Try using the software-rendered non-HW version, which has fewer visual bugs than the HW renderers.

EDIT: whoops, my mistake. you were talking about saturn.

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#175

Dragon Force II is a Saturn exclusive, he’s asking for an updated core here in the thanks thread.

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#176

good call. in that case, @towely8, you can try using this lib, which is from a new(er) snapshot: https://github.com/hunterk/libretro_builds/releases/download/Windows_64-bit/mednafen_saturn_libretro.dll.zip

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#177

Thank you all for your hard work going into this fantastic project!

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#178

I couldn’t find an email that could send this message, but I’ll send it here. I apologize if it’s in the wrong place.

I would like to congratulate and thank the developers and those responsible for the retroarch Netplay system and especially for providing a server in Brazil for connections.

I recently found out that my ISP has put me on a CGNAT connection, which means that I can no longer open rooms via port forwarding direct connections.

The Relay Server (especially for Brazilians on CGNAT) is essential for us to have the opportunity to continue playing online.

Thank you so much for everything.

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#179

Thank you for all the work

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#180

Thank you Libretro team! I’ve been using Dolphin Emulator however it really struggles with audio if it’s set to DSP LLE which is needed for Dolby Pro Logic II Surround Sound. Turns out from v3.5 they switched from asynchronous audio to synchronous audio as they prioritised the much less demanding DSP HLE which only outputs stereo. v3.0 runs fine with asynchronous DSP LLE. To run DSP LLE synchronously I’d have to upgrade my i5 10400 to something with much faster single core speeds.

Before I did that expensive change I remembered RetroArch now had a Dolphin core well why not try that first. Well it works! Games that stutter in Dolphin with DSP LLE recompiler are now running playably. Surround sound is back!

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#181

Thanks for all the great work.

#182

Thanks all the contributors of this great software. Been using all kinds of emulators since decades, but the discovery of RA some years ago was a game changer. Everything centralized (controls, shaders and so on…) ! Cannot leave it now ! :grin:

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#183

You guys are great! I modded my nes classic to play the included games using retroarch. I am just amazed at the options and improvements compared to the official emulator that came with it. thanks so much!!

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#184

I just can’t wait to have RA on my PS5 after a decent jailbreak for it xD

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#185

Thank you everyone involved in developing RetroArch. And thank you for the community that I can be part of and supporting each other. RetroArch transformed how I utilize videogame emulation. Before I learned about it through RetroPie a few years back, one of my biggest complains was all the different emulators and setups that are so vastly different. A unification with my own efforts through custom scripts was only partially possible, without spending too much time on it. In short, RetroArch is basically what I was always hoping for and even more! And it is available for so many platforms, including so many systems, including so many configurations and unification of settings!

I could talk all day long here, but then, it would become a documentation. lol

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