In the run-up to RetroArch 1.1 – what’s ‘new’ pt. 3

We’ve been away for half a year so there is a lot to talk about in this new upcoming release. Rest assured I’m working hard as hell to meet the Christmas sweet spot.  It will take a couple of blog posts to go through it all. So let’s start with the first one. I’m putting these articles out now because I really don’t fancy having to write all this stuff later on in the holidays when I drop this stuff.

In this blog post, let’s talk about some more about new cores and some fixes to existing cores

PCSX ReARMed

This is a Sony PlayStation emulator. A core for this has already existed for quite some time. You’ll notice though that with the release of Android 5.0, the current version on the Google Play Store is broken. The new version that we’re pushing out fixes this.

Beetle/Mednafen PSX

Apart from some updates, we also added an optional widescreen hack courtesy of PCSXR. In the long run I want to look at introducing more enhancement features like this.

CatSFC

Even though we already have a lot of Super Nintendo emulator cores (well, let’s make that ‘the most amount of SNES cores out of any project’), a lot of them still had too high performance requirements for some really low-power devices out there. CatSFC is a libretro fork of SNES9x based on SNES9x 1.43. It should be a lot faster than SNES9x Next (our current fastest SNES core if you exclude PocketSNES).

The nice thing about our fork of CatSFC is that we added some stuff to it in the progress. For instance, SNES9x’s sound pre-blargg APU has always been quite bad. So what we did with CatSFC was put it in optionally. Even with the blargg APU it’s still a lot faster than SNES9x Next.

Obviously this core might only be interesting for people that have devices where power is not at a premium, like the Raspberry Pi, Xperia Play and similar low-power systems like that. The more choice the merrier.

What will be done in the future?

– Should already be endian-safe but you never know. Will give this some test runs on some PowerPC-based Macs I currently have where even SNES9x Next can be too slow right now.

– The reason we (or well, aliaspider) originally started this CatSFC core is because we wanted a SNES emulator with a bit more performance than SNES9x Next running on the PSP.  Right now it still doesn’t run at fullspeed on PSP, so we haven’t yet succeeded at this. However, Raspberry Pi users and other devices like that should already be reaping the fruits of the labor being done right now.