What do I need to create a new retroarch core?

aLaix · 6 January 2021 06:53

Hello everybody, happy holidays,

Second post here, my friend and I have been working on a NES emulator for some years now, and we just finished our first libretro core implementation! Of course the emulator has still issues to be fixed, and we still need to implement some important features of the API like save states.
But in the mean time, I wanted to ask what do we need to implement in order to create a new retroarch core? Is there a guide or a checklist of things we need to comply to make it an official core?
Currently this is the state of the libretro implementation https://github.com/aLaix2/O-Nes-Sama/tree/master/libretro Is there a place that explains what all those values in the .info file mean?
Thanks

***** O-Nes-Sama emulator team *****

hunterk · 6 January 2021 14:51

The best reference for the info files is here:

github.com

libretro/libretro-super/blob/master/dist/info/00_example_libretro.info

## All data is optional, but helps improve user experience.

# Software Information - Information about the core software itself
# Name displayed when the user is selecting the core:
# display_name = "Nintendo - Game Boy (Core Name)"

# Categories that the core belongs to (optional):
# categories = "Emulator"

# Name of the authors who wrote the core:
# authors = "Martin Freij|R. Belmont|R. Danbrook"

# Name of the core:
# corename = "Nestopia"

# List of extensions the core supports:
# supported_extensions = "nes|fds"

# License of the cores source code:
# license = "GPLv3"

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If, by “official”, you mean “appears in the online updater”, there’s not a whole lot to it these days. You just need a gitlab-ci.yml recipe in the main repo and have a talk with the guys who handle the continuous integration system so they know to track the repo.

hunterk · 10 January 2021 14:11

A post was split to a new topic: Can’t use controls (unpair 0/0)

aLaix · 13 January 2021 04:32

Thanks hunterk, we will fix the issues in the emulator, create a gitlab-ci.yml and come back here