Tag: download

RetroArch 1.7.0 Released

Merry Christmas everyone. Hope you are enjoying the days with your family.

Big Christmas release from the RetroArch release: RetroArch 1.7.0. Grab the latest release from here or from the Google Play Store.

From their blog post:

General changelog

– CHEEVOS: Add badges for achievements, shows thumbnail images of achievements.
– CHEEVOS: Leaderboard support.
– CHEEVOS: Only disable savestates on hardcore mode if achievements are not available.
– COMMANDLINE: Fix fullscreen toggle switch.
– COMMON: Add ‘Automatically Load Content To Playlist’ feature, enabled by default.
– COMMON: Fix slowmotion ratio always being reset back to 1.
– COMMON: Optimized NBIO implementations now for Apple, Windows, and Linux. Uses mmap for Linux/Windows/BSD if/when available. File I/O should now be much faster for loading images inside the menu.
– COMMON: Native Blissbox support now for latest firmware as of writing (2.0). Implementation through libusb and/or native Windows HID.
– COMMON: New lightgun API.
– COMMON: New VFS (Virtual File System) API.
– COMMON: Fixed some playlist bugs.
– COMMON: New snow shader.
– COMMON: Fix Quick Menu title, no longer shows ‘Select File’.
– COMMON: Fix loading cores that require no content one after another.
– COMMON: Map Delete key to Y button for non-unified menu keyboard controls.
– COMMON: Fix for relative paths being normalised and generating a duplicate history entry.
– EMSCRIPTEN: Fix references to browserfs.
– FREEBSD: Support libusb HID input driver.
– HAIKU: Buildfix.
– INPUT: Map clear button to DEL key.
– LINUX/X11: Add RetroArch logo to window title bar.
– LINUX/X11: Input driver now supports new lightgun code.
– LINUX/X11: Support window transparency (requires a compositing window manager).
– LOBBIES: Fix for crash on join netplay rooms via touch / glui.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Italian translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Japanese translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Portuguese-Brazilian translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Polish translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Russian translation.
– MENU: Snowflake menu shader effect.
– OSX/PPC: Fix the GL2 renderchain, had to use EXT versions of framebuffer/renderbuffer functions.
– PS3: HTTP requests / downloads should now work.
– PS3: Core Updater now works.
– PS3: Improved font rendering, enable STB Unicode font renderer.
– PSP: Make it work with Vita’s Adrenaline.
– PSP: Fix audio sync.
– PSP: Fix content loading, port should be functional again.
– PSP: Use 64MB when available.
– SCANNER: Fix crash from Windows-incompatible format string.
– VITA: Improve packaging, installation times.
– WIIU: Disabled the controller patcher for now since it was the source of many stability issues.
– VULKAN: Various stability fixes for WSI.
– WINDOWS: Add MSVC 2017 solution.
– WINDOWS: Get rid of the empty console window in MSVC 2010 builds.
– WINDOWS: Raw input driver now supports new lightgun code.
– WINDOWS: Use configured OSD/text message color on GDI driver.
– WINDOWS/XINPUT: Populate XInput VID/PID from DInput so autoconfig doesn’t rely solely on joypad names
– WINDOWS/XINPUT: Fix crash that occurs in some situations with Steam running and a Steam Controller plugged in.
– WINDOWS: Improve version reporting under System Information.
– WINDOWS: Support window transparency.
– WINDOWS: Correct usage of GetWindowPlacement per MS docs, fixes game window position on Win95/98.
– WINDOWS: Added Visual Studio 2017 support.

Highlights

Integrated Bliss-box support

Grab the newest firmware for this device and you can enjoy out-of-the-box Blissbox support with RetroArch on the following platforms:

  • Linux
  • Windows

For more information, read this separate article here.

This is a legit game changer. This peripheral will allow you to use real physical gamepads from all sorts of different game consoles through one interface.

Right now, only one of these devices is supported.

Badges for achievements

Improved lightgun support

Lightgun and mouse support has been added to both Beetle PSX and Beetle/Mednafen Saturn.

In other input-related news, mouse support has also been added to Beetle/Mednafen PCFX.

Windows 95/Windows 98 (non-SE) support

In a time and era where big companies get lazy and just throw away 32bit support for anything from drivers to operating systems, we have gone to the complete opposite side of the spectrum and started adding even more ancient/obsolete systems instead.

We already had a Windows 98 Second Edition/Millennium Edition/Windows 2000 version of RetroArch. But now, we go back even further in time! The MSVC 2003 version is a version of RetroArch that works on Windows 95 and Windows 98 (the First Version, before Second Edition).

Some things you should know about this version:

  • Rough around the edges, has been mainly tested so far on VMs (Virtual Machines) instead of real hardware.
  • Uses GDI as the default video driver. Our Direct3D driver so far requires DirectX 9 and Cg. It will take some work to make it backwards compatible with DirectX8.
  • We omitted the Windows NT 3.51/4 versions for now. The main issue with these versions is that they do not support DirectInput, so we have no real input drivers available for them.

Right out of the gate, there are 21 cores available for the Windows 95/98 version. Not too shabby, eh?

For more information, read this separate article here.

Improved PlayStation3 port

So many important improvements that have been made to the PlayStation3 port as a result of our newfound friendly collaboration with an RPCS3 dev:

    • Downloads now work
    • Netplay now works. You can netplay between two PS3s, or with another system that is also of the big-endian architecture. For instance – netplay between RetroArch PS3 and RetroArch Wii U works. NOTE: There might still be some endian-specific code in certain cores that can cause bugs.
    • Content Downloader works. You can download many demos and freeware homebrew games from this.
    • Thumbnail Downloader works. You can download boxarts and titles/snaps for your games from here.
    • Core Updater works. Now you can directly download freshly updated cores directly through the built-in Core Updater. New cores will be added over time, and best of all, you don’t need to install a new RetroArch version in order to obtain these new cores either.
    • Improved font rendering inside the menu. Non-Western languages are now also supported by this improved font rendering, including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, etc.

New menu shader effects

PSP port works again

Wii U port works again

Wii U port should work fine again after some issues in previous versions.

Automatic scanning of content


This new option, when enabled, will add any new content you load from the file browser (Load Content) to your playlists. If a playlist does not already exist for the specific core and/or game, one will be created on-the-fly. This option is disabled by default, so watch the video if you’d like to learn how to enable it.

There’s more

There’s a ton more that we have properly not covered in this blog article, but we leave it up to the user to discover that for themselves.

What’s coming next for RetroArch

We will have a separate blog post on this soon, as well as more separate blog articles detailing some of the other progress that has been made on the cores front.

If you’d like to show your support for RetroArch, consider donating to them. Check here in order to learn more.

Lakka 2.1 Stable release

The Lakka team released their latest stable build marked as version 2.1.

What is new? From their blog post:

 

After 6 month of intense development and bugfixes, the team is proud to announce the stable release of Lakka 2.1!

This release is a huge step forward in many aspects: UI, emulator cores, and supported hardware.

Changelog

  • Merged LibreELEC 8.2 stable
    • Kernel updates for PC, RPi and more
    • New wifi drivers and fixes
    • Samba 4
    • RPi firmware updates
    • Switch back to OpenSSL
  • RetroArch updated to 1.6.9
    • Updated cores to latest upstream versions
    • Updated shaders (clearly improved compability on some graphic cards)
    • Completely new game engine by Rob Loach: ChaiLove
    • Kiosk mode: Enabling the kiosk mode will prevent users to access the settings. You can setup a password to disable the kiosk mode. This work is provided by Brunnis.
    • Updated game database and metadata
    • Updated joypad autoconfigs
    • More beautiful animated background, we are now using additive blending to make the ribbon shine
    • Icon sets more complete
    • Font selection fix, useful to set a font that supports simplified Chinese
    • Record config selection fix, it will make it easier to use recording and streaming from the interface
    • Simplified netplay menu, we removed the old netplay menu from the main menu
    • Updated translations
    • Scanner fixes, scanning for Gamecube CDs
    • Favorites ROMs tab
    • Parallel-N64 (Nintendo 64) with multithreaded Angrylion
    • Completely new cores:
      • Citra – Nintendo 3DS (only PC 64-bit image)
      • Dolphin – Nintendo GameCube / Wii (all images)
      • OpenLara – Tomb Raider (all images
      • Redream – Sega Dreamcast (all images)
      • MeowPC98 – PC98 (all images)
      • MelonDS – Nintendo DS (all images)
      • SameBoy – Nintendo Game Boy/Game Boy Color (all images)
      • MAME2003-Midway (all images)
      • px68k – Portable SHARP X68000 (all images)
  • Support for S812 Amlogic TV Boxes (thanks to Ntemis)
  • Fix for the boot arguments of Odroid-XU3/4 (thanks to gouchi)
  • HDMI audio fixes on WeTek Play 2
  • Ability to use the Raspberry Pi as a Wi-Fi access point (thanks to duduke)
  • Audio support for the RGB-Pi SCART adapter (thanks to the Recalbox team for the donation of this adapter, and to vik for the donation of a CRT screen)
  • Support for twin joypads like the Xin Mo
  • New Rockchip based boards: ASUS TinkerBoard, MiQi, ROCK64
  • Allwinner images: We now have completely new builds for Allwinner boards, based on the mainline kernel and u-boot. With this new project, we can support many new boards with very little efforts. Being based on a recent kernel increase compatibility with newer joypads and dongles. These new images will replace the a10, a20, H3 and Bananapi images.
  • OdroidXU4 update: A kernel and u-boot update fixes the eMMC boot, improves TV detection and adds more resolutions. Special thanks to Hardkernel for gifting an XU4 device and the new eMMC modules.
  • U-boot on Rockchip and Allwinner updated to 2017.11 stable
  • Netcat packaged, useful to use network commands in RetroArch
  • Sixpair packaged
  • Kernel highlights:
    • Rockchip images: 4.4.99 LTS
    • Allwinner images: 4.14 LTS
    • More gamepad modules enabled
    • Real time kernel for PC and RPi, should reduce input lag
    • Performance governor for PC and RPi, should stabilize framerate

Known issues

  • DualShock 4 input bugs on some controllers
  • Keyboard input bug on Parallel-N64 on PC
  • Parallel-N64 crashes on PC 32bit
  • Animated background and audio issues in Shared Context mode (with Dolphin)
  • Typing Wi-Fi password with a keyboard on RPi is broken, use a joypad instead

Installing or upgrading

You can upgrade from Lakka 2.0 or 2.1 by dropping the img.gz into the Update folder and rebooting.

Except for the new Allwinner and S802 and S812 images, where you will have to do a manual upgrade.

RetroArch 1.6.9 released

RetroArch released their latest version 1.6.9. Download your copy from here.

From their blog post:

General changelog

– Audio: Fix the Audio DSP picker
– CHEEVOS: Add support for Atari Lynx cheevos.
– CHEEVOS: Add support for RetroAchievements Leaderboards.
– GUI: (MaterialUI) Fix crash that happened on context reset with Vulkan.
– GUI: (MaterialUI) Skip querying and drawing items that are not visible; Cache content height and bbox calculation.
– GUI: (MaterialUI) Fix entry box highlight calculation.
– GUI: (XMB) Skip drawing the fading list when it is already transparent. Optimization.
– GUI: (XMB) Comment out visible item calculation in xmb_draw_items().
– GUI: (RGUI) Prevent crashes when using a non-English language reliant on UTF8.
– GUI: Add menu option for OSD background color.
– GUI: Add menu option for OSD text color.
– GUI: Add menu option to remove frame count from OSD.
– GUI: Allow wraparound of int/float settings when pressing the left key
– INPUT/LIBRETRO: Add support for more mouse buttons (buttons 4/5)
– INPUT/LIBRETRO: Add support for analog buttons
– INPUT: Always show the controls menu even if descriptors are not set
– INPUT: Fix input descriptors not being set on cores that don’t implement the controllers interface
– INPUT: Apply descriptors only for the amount of cores the core supports
– INPUT: Implement keyboard to gamepad input remapping (limited to one gamepad device for now)
– INPUT: Fix absolute mouse move handling on the winraw driver
– INPUT: Ignore keyboard input if window is not active on udev driver
– INPUT: Sanitize the filenames of autoconfig profiles before saving
– LOBBIES: Fix crash on navigating left / right from the lobby menu
– LOCALIZATION: Update Dutch translation
– LOCALIZATION: Update Italian translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Japanese translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Portuguese-Brazilian translation.
– LOCALIZATION: Update Russian translation.
– LINUX/ARMHF: Set buildbot updater URL to armhf location instead of blank string
– LINUX/PI: Broadcom VC4: Add Videocore config option
– LINUX/UDEV: Fix – RetroArch reads keyboard input when not focused with the udev input driver.
– NETPLAY: Fix disconnection not fully deinitializing Netplay.
– NETPLAY: Fix lan rooms when there is more than one room
– NETPLAY: Fix lan rooms on systems where all addresses are treated as IPv6
– COMMON: Fix clear/free loop conditionals in playlists.
– WINDOWS/GDI: Fix flickering of text.
– WINDOWS/GDI: Fix graphics corruption on Windows 98
– WINDOWS/GDI: Allow compiling without DirectInput8 for NT support
– WINDOWS/WGL: Try to use wglSwapLayerBuffers instead of SwapBuffers if possible (for more optimal performance).
– WINDOWS: Fix menubar text corruption on Japanese locale systems
– WINDOWS: Support Unicode file I/O (can now display CJK characters in file browser for example).
– WINDOWS: Support Windows 95, NT3.51, NT4
– WINDOWS: add Makefile.griffin targets for msvc6,2003,2005,2010,2012,2013
– WII: Use custom, embedded libogc SDK.
– WIIU: Initial touchscreen support for WiiU gamepad.
– WIIU: Add Cheevos support.
– SCANNER: Fix archive scanning.
– SCANNER: Support CHD files.
– SCANNER: Support Gamecube ISO scanning.
– SCANNER: Use primary data track of disc images for CRC lookups rather than cue files. This is slower but finds matches more reliably, and is necessary for CHD files to work at all. Update your databases!
– SCANNER: Fall back on looking inside archives when matching MAME/FBA content (most recent cores only). If you had difficulty with content being detected before, you may have better luck now. Update your databases and core info!

Highlights

Scanner system supports more formats

CHD and Gamecube ISO files can now be scanned. A lot of libretro cores have gained the ability to use CHD image files, some of them being all the Mednafen-derived cores (also known as Beetle cores). There is also a new fallback used for scanning MAME/FBA content which looks inside an archive for matching files. If you had trouble having the scanner detect your content before, you might be more usccessful now.

Retro Achievements – Leaderboard support

Unicode support for Windows users

Unicode is now supported for file I/O (Input/Output). What this means, is that game content that uses CJK characters and/or other non-ASCII characters can now be read by RetroArch. These files will also show up from within the filebrowser. Useful for our Japanese users.

NOTE: MaterialUI (the default UI on Android) might still exhibit issues displaying Japanese on Android. This is due to a font renderer that will need to be improved in a future version in order to display these extra characters properly.

Kiosk Mode and more


You can now tailor RetroArch’s UI even more to your own personal preferences. You can choose which submenus to hide, and which to show.

There’s also a special mode called ‘Kiosk Mode’. When enabled, you won’t be able to access any settings, and/or install/upgrade any cores. The guy who implemented this feature likely intended it as a parental control feature to make sure that kids don’t get to mess with any of the internal settings by accident that could end up breaking something. There’s also a password lock you can enable so that any access to settings can still be curtailed.

See the PDF article here for a more detailed breakdown of Kiosk Mode –

https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/files/1320429/RetroArch.Kiosk.Mode.v4.pdf

Input enhancements


The libretro API has been enhanced by David Walters in the following ways:

  • Button input was previously all-digital, now button input can be analog as well. As a proof of concept, this has already been implemented for the Beetle Saturn core. Analog triggers now work as expected. This feature will be necessary for future systems like PlayStation2, where each face button on the gamepad was an analogue button.
  • Mouse buttons 4 and 5 were added. A proof of concept has already been implemented for Beetle Saturn. The mouse on the Sega Saturn had at least 5 buttons instead of the PlayStation mouse’s 2.


Mouse support and lightgun support has also been added to Beetle PSX, a much-requested feature. There are also some proposals on how to improve lightgun support in libretro so that it is more conducive to non-mouse based lightgun solutions. As ever, additions to the libretro API have to be backwards compatible and they should not break ABI, so that existing frontends will not be adversely affected but at the same time new frontends can reap the benefits of these new features all the same.

What’s coming next for RetroArch

We will have a separate blog post on this soon.

In the meantime, check out the addendum to this post –

https://www.libretro.com/index.php/core-updates-since-last-release/

This details all of the changes to the cores that have happened since the last release.

Recalbox 17.11.02

Recalbox kept their promise with releasing more often then only once or twice a year and came up with a version fixing one or the other bug as per below list. More important is that the release versioning got changed: instead of going with an incremental number, they will use the date going forward. Like for this version, it is 17.11.02. Pretty easy I would say.

Here are the improvements:

  • New firmwares for x86 (mostly for INTEL devices)
  • Moonlight now finally runs without crashing at start
  • Better logs on bluetooth pairing
  • Slightly increased the bluetooth scanning time
  • Fixed a bug on bluetooth that applied a 8bitdo-only fix to any paired device
  • The security option can now be correctly disabled
  • Pad reordering now works with PPSSPP
  • Moga pro pad now supported
  • BlueMSX default options changed (MSX2/60Hz/ym2413=enabled)

Get the latest version from their page: https://www.recalbox.com/diyrecalbox

From their blog: https://www.recalbox.com/blog/en/post/blog-2017-11-01-recalbox-17.11.02/

 

RetroArch 1.6.3 is out

Libretro announced on their blog the release of the next version of RetroArch which is v1.6.3. To get the newest release go over to this page.

From their “General changelog” this is what changed:

IOS: Fix GL regression – 32bit color format cores were no longer rendering
CHEEVOS: Add support for N64 cheevos and other small fixes.
CHEEVOS: Add ‘Achievements -> Achievements Verbose Mode’. Ability to display cheevos related messages in OSD, useful for RetroAchievements users.
AUDIO: Audio mixer’s volume can now be independently increased/decreased, and muted.
AUDIO: Mute now no longer disables/enables audio but instead properly mutes the audio volume. Mute is also independent from the audio mixer volume.
INPUT: Add mouse index selection; ability now to select between different mice
INPUT: Fix ‘All Users Control Menu’ setting
LINUX: Add a tinyalsa audio driver. Doesn’t require asoundlib, should be self-contained and lower-level.
LOBBIES: Announce the RetroArch version too
LOCALIZATION: Add Traditional Chinese translation
LOCALIZATION: Update French translation
LOCALIZATION: Update Italian translation
LOCALIZATION: Update Japanese translation
LOCALIZATION: Update Russian translation
MENU: Add ‘User Interface -> Views’. Ability to display/hide online updater and core updater options.
NETPLAY: Disconnecting one client shouldn’t cause everyone to disconnect anymore
NETWORK: SSL/TLS support, disabled by default
SCANNER: Fix PS1 game scanning
SCANNER: Move content list builder into scanner task with progress, fixes menu freeze with large playlists
SDL2: Fix ‘SDL2 driver does not see the hat on wired Xbox 360 controller”
SETTINGS: Fix regression ‘Custom Viewport is no longer overridable per-core or per-game’
VITA: Add cheevos support
VITA: Add support for external USB if mounted
WAYLAND: Fix menu mouse input
WII: Add support for single-port ‘PS1/PS2 to USB controller adapter’

There are many port specific changes too, which details you will find on their blog post.