It’s almost time for a new release of RetroArch, and there a number of big changes coming up. First of all, RetroArch 0.9.9 will mark the release of RetroArch on iOS and Blackberry 10/Playbook Tablet OS. These ports were made possible with the help of CatalystG and meancoot, respectively – for which many thanks. The iOS port will be released on Cydia and on our forum. It is possible to run it on a non-jailbroken device – but it will require that you are able to code-sign yourself (ie. if you are a registered Apple developer with the ability to code sign).

PCSX ReARMed on iOS

For iOS, perhaps the single biggest hurdle was getting PCSX-ReARMed working, which required notaz to rewrite much of the assembly code to work with Apple’s ancient GAS assembler version (big thanks to him for that!). With that completed, this should be the first time PCSX ReARMed will appear on iOS – through RetroArch.

RGUI

Elsewhere, Themaister and Squarepusher have been toiling away at a million other features, including the promotion of RGUI to a robust and feature-filled in-game menu system for the platforms that otherwise lacked such a thing, particularly the PC platform (i.e., Windows, Mac OS X and Linux). From its humble beginnings with the Gamecube/Wii port, RGUI now provides a way to change emulation cores, swap out ROMs, configure shaders and more, all without leaving the fullscreen gaming interface:

Cave Story (NXEngine)

ToadKing and Squarepusher have also done some work on ‘uncrippling’ Cave Story (ie. NXEngine). Previously, the file I/O would make it unbearably slow on consoles. This has mostly been fixed now that everything is pre-cached into RAM at initial startup. There are still some incidental dips to 59.50fps and 59.2fps, though, which causes some sound stuttering. The cause of these dips is still unknown but we feel that–compared to before–NXEngine can be safely released on consoles now without being an utter embarrassment. “Xbox 1/360 will require some further patching up of the codebase because NX Engine did some global symbol table trickery and the MSVC linkers have the (oh so ‘smart’) tendency to ‘strip away’ unreferenced symbols as an ‘optimization feature’ with no way to stop it from doing that (even /ref:noopt doesn’t help there),” Squarepusher noted.

TyrQuake

The port of TyrQuake will also be bundled with RetroArch 0.9.9. A lot of work went into making it work on Xbox 1 and Xbox 360 – including making the C99 codebase cross-compilable as C++98 and (for Xbox 1) resorting to a hacked-up template ‘typeof’ implementation (ye, don’t ask) for MSVC 2003. “I also threw in some additional ‘hackish’ features like ‘dither filtering’ (borrowed it from some guy that implemented it earlier) – this more or less looks like the Unreal 1 software renderer’s ‘bilinear filtering’ implementation,” Squarepusher said. “There is also a third-person chase cam view and a way to ‘lerp’ the animations (ie. add key-frame interpolation in order to make the animation of enemy models look smoother and have more frames of animation than they originally did).”

“I plan to eventually rebase the TyrQuake port and push it upstream to the original authors (ie. the maintainers of TyrQuake) – I did a lot of careless code rewriting that I’ll be sure to avoid for the rebase,” he added.

Shaders

There has been a major overhaul of the way shaders are handled, which has paved the way for advanced, multipass shaders that can be easily setup by end users without needing to tinker with any code. As part of these changes, the old XML/GLSL shaders with fixed-pipeline functions have been deprecated, but will still work just fine. In the future, we ask that interested shader authors try to stick to the multiplatform Cg format when possible. The GLSL/GLES formats will still be supported for compatibility with platforms that don’t support Nvidia’s Cg Toolkit, such as Android and iOS, and Cg shaders can be converted to these legacy formats programmatically using Themaister’s cg2glsl python script.

A couple of examples of newly written shaders that utilize some of the recently added features are Themaister’s NTSC Composite shader, which should work well on any libretro core, and Harlequin’s Gameboy shader:

There is no firm release date for v0.9.9, but if you would like to try any of these features out or get involved in the development, you can grab the code from git and compile it yourself for your platform of choice. If you have any questions about these features or RetroArch/libretro in general, stop by the libretro forums or drop by #retroarch on Freenode IRC.

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