Hi. Good Morning. I would like to know some things about the project. Something more than I can read here:
When did the project start? When did it start being RetroArch? Who is the founder (s) of the idea? Who are the current developers of the project? What have been the most relevant advances of RetroArch? When did they implement the modern gui? Why did they base Lakka on OpenELEC, not on Ubuntu?
Thank you :¬)
It started as SSNES in late 2010 and the name changed to RetroArch in April of 2012. Originally, SSNES was Themaister’s hobby frontend for byuu’s libsnes, which was an API for hooking into bsnes’ emulation core. Themaister ported SSNES to PS3 as part of an effort to get bsnes on there (this was abandoned when it became clear that it would never reach full speed). Twinaphex was porting various standalone emulators to PS3 at the time and approached Themaister about the idea of using SSNES as a single frontend for all of his ports to reduce maintenance burden. They decided that libsnes covered the basic functions of an emulator well enough to work for a variety of different applications.
Themaister later graduated from uni and got a job that precluded him from working extensively on it, while Twinphex took over as the lead developer.
RetroArch has always focused on having efficient, cutting-edge audio/video drivers and features. Dynamic rate control (that is, dynamically resampling the audio to ensure that audio buffers don’t empty) allows for perfect vsync without audio pops; taking savestates every frame allows for real-time rewind and lag-hiding netplay; the “retropad” input abstraction–though controversial–allows users to switch among cores without needing to constantly fiddle with input mapping.
RetroArch was CLI-only for a long time, as it was originally conceived as a classic unix-style utility that other programs could leverage as a backend. The simplistic “RGUI” menu was added for use with the Wii port, but it was useful everywhere and was the only GUI for a long time (it’s still very useful for CRT/arcade cabinet applications, as it scales gracefully down to 240p). Kivutar later created the beautiful and modern Lakka frontend (2014?), which he integrated directly into RetroArch as the XMB menu.
I believe OpenELEC was chosen because it’s more appropriate for stripped-down embedded platforms and devboards than the comparatively bulky Ubuntu.
A bit of history. Thank you hunterk!