What Happens to Cores that Devepment has Stopped?

RetroArch General
#1

This year we see the Developers for BSNES and Mesen and Mesen-S Cores have Retired from working on there Cores/Emulators.

So will they stay on Retroarch even with no updates going to Happen?

#2

Yeah, most of our cores are in that state for some reason or another. We keep them going. One of the benefits of libretro is that it’s usually really easy to keep cores alive, since you don’t need to maintain any funky GUI code or keep up with platform-specific APIs.

2 Likes
#3

Is there a good way to know which cores are still in development? Do they have individual change logs? For instance, I only found out that DOSBox-core (not DOSBox-SVN) was the current, best DOSBox core to use because somebody mentioned it in an answer to one of my threads.

(I do love your regular blog posts about core development, but was wondering whether e.g. I could see what’s been happening with any given core lately).

#4

Aside from the blog posts, the only thing to do is look at commit logs in the repos themselves.

#5

Thanks, hunterk! To find a specific core’s repo, I would just look for the core’s name in the search field on this page?

2 Likes
#6

Yes, that’s not going to help with any cores that are built from upstream, though, as they won’t be in our org, which can be confusing. I’ve historically just checked the libretro-super scripts to find those, but those scripts are being deprecated, so I’m not sure if there’s a good replacement for that process yet.

#7

I’ve heard about mesen’s author, but did not know anything about byuu. Has he really retired from the emu scene (not temporarily)?

Sad, bsnes libretro core has had great improvements on the last year, like cheats support or run-ahead (which previously were only working with snes9x). My memory is very bad and I’m now more focused on other projects, but last time I checked I think snes9x libretro was still superior to bsnes in terms of libretro features (I think achievements are supported on snes9x but not on bsnes). I’m always looking for the most accurate emulation, but for snes I had to change my default core to snes9x because of this.

Bsnes is a state of the art piece of software, I hope it receives some love if the original author is not anymore.

Greetings.

2 Likes