RetroArch 1.5.0 – Released!

Libretro Team

RetroArch 1.5.0 has just been released!

Where to get it?

You can get the latest version here.

On Android, you can expect version 1.5.0 to be downloadable on the Google Play Store later today. If you want to install the APK manually, you can do so by downloading it from the URL linked to above.

Changes since last version (1.4.1)

  • MOBILE: Single-tap for menu entry selection
  • MOBILE: Long-tap a setting to reset to default
  • ANDROID: Autoconf fallback
  • ANDROID: Mouse support / Emulated mouse support
  • AUTOCONF: Fix partial matches for pad name
  • CHEEVOS: Fix crashes in the cheevos description menu
  • CHEEVOS: WIP leaderboards support
  • COMMON: Threading fixes
  • COMMON: 9-slice texture drawing support
  • CORETEXT/APPLE: Ability to load menu display font drivers and loading of custom font.
  • DOS: Add keyboard driver
  • DOS: Improve color accuracy and scaling
  • GUI: Various settings are now only visible when advanced settings is enabled
  • GUI: Allow changing icon theme on the fly
  • GUI: Add a symbol page in the OSK (Onscreen Keyboard)
  • GUI: Better dialogs for XMB
  • LOCALIZATION: Add/update Korean translation
  • LOCALIZATION: Rewrite German translation
  • LOCALIZATION: Update several English sublabels
  • LOCALIZATION: Update several Japanese labels
  • NET: Allow manual netplay content loading
  • NET: Announcing network games to the public lobby is optional now
  • NET: Bake in miniupnpc
  • NET: Fix netplay join for contentless cores
  • NET: LAN games show next to lobbies with (LAN) and connect via the private IP address
  • NET: Use new lobby system with MITM (Man In The Middle) support
  • NET: Fix netplay rooms being pushed on the wrong tab
  • NUKLEAR: Update to current version
  • SCANNER: Always add 7z & zip to supported extensions
  • VULKAN: Find supported composite alpha in swapchain
  • VULKAN: Add snow/bokeh shader pipeline effects – at parity with GL now
  • WIIU: Keyboard support
  • WINDOWS: Logging to file no longer spawns an empty window
  • WINDOWS: Fix loading of core/content via file menu

We’ll go into some of the important features in more detail below.

UPNP support out of the box! (Windows/MacOS/Linux/Android/iOS)

Previously, in order for netplay to work, you as the hoster would need to manually port forward on your router. Starting with version 1.5.0, RetroArch now supports UPNP out of the box! If you have a home network router that supports UPNP, you should now be able to host netplay games without having to manually open ports on your router!

NOTE: The platforms that come with UPNP support out of the box as of this point includes: Android, MacOS, Linux, iOS, and Windows. If you have a version of RetroArch for any other platform, it’s likely it does not have UPNP support, and therefore you would still need to fallback on manual port forwarding if you want to host a game.

Menu improvements

An often-heard complaint was that touch navigation on mobile devices was not intuitive enough. You had to double tap in order to select an entry instead of being able to single tap which is the norm for most mobile programs out there.

We have changed this so that you now only have to single tap. Also, you can now ‘long-tap’ a setting in order to ‘reset’ it to default. This is useful in case you are tinkering with some setting using touch and you want to set it back to its default setting.

Other new features – changing the icon theme now works on-the-fly, so you no longer need to restart RetroArch for these changes to take effect.

Android controller detection improvements

If RetroArch cannot find a preconfigured entry for your gamepad on Android, it will now try to use the Android standard default controls for the gamepad instead. This should help with a bunch of gamepads that are lacking a current autoconfiguration file, and should prevent the user from having to manually setup the controls.

Vulkan improvements

Previously, the menu effects ‘Snow’ and ‘Bokeh’ were not available if you were running RetroArch with the Vulkan video driver enabled. Now you can use them with Vulkan as well!

In case you don’t know how to access these, go to Settings -> User Interface -> Menu -> Menu Shader Pipeline.

RetroArch 1.4.1 Progress report – DOS/Windows 9x/Windows 2K

Libretro Team

RetroArch has now been ported to Windows 98SE/2000 as well as DOS. These are very early work-in-progress ports but in their current state do allow you to start up RetroArch and load a core/game.

Windows

For Windows, the current releases and nightly builds do not support XP or below due to changes in the msys2/mingw toolchain. While older Windows versions are indeed supported by the RetroArch codebase, they need to be manually compiled with Visual Studio (Express or Pro) to run properly. For XP and above, Visual Studio 2010 is supported. The solution/project file is located in the pkg/msvc folder of the source along with older msvc solutions. For Windows 98/2000, we support Visual Studio 2005. A DirectX 9.0c SDK is also required, and in order to target 98, a version no newer than December 2006 must be used.

The Windows 98/2000 port may work with our existing OpenGL driver if your graphics card supports a high enough version of OpenGL, but this has not yet been tested. So far 98/2000 has only been tested against a new experimental GDI video driver which does not require hardware acceleration like OpenGL or DirectX (the GDI driver works on newer Windows versions as well). With the GDI driver, the RGUI menu is fully supported and there is also preliminary support for XMB with minimal (text-only) rendering.

For input/joypad and audio support on 98/2000, the DirectX 9.0c runtime should continue to work as it does with newer Windows versions. Windows 98SE requires a DirectX runtime no newer than December 2006, and Windows 2000 can go up to February 2010.

Cores for 98/2000 will also currently need to be compiled manually due to the mingw toolchain used by the buildbot. It’s possible that we may setup a new buildbot target for the older Windows ports at a later date.

DOS

The DOS port requires DJGPP to compile (we cross-compile from Linux), and also requires the CWSDPMI server included with that toolchain to access 32-bit protected mode. An experimental “Mode 13h” VGA driver is implemented to provide 320×200 video with 256 colors. Keyboard input support is currently very minimal, only the A/B/X/Y, Start/Select and arrow keys work. There is also no audio support yet.

Cores for DOS will need to be compiled manually, as well as statically linked with RetroArch itself, similar to how our console ports work. This means that a compiled RetroArch EXE file will correspond to just one specific built-in core. FCEUmm and Snes9x2010 are known to work, but due to the default timer tick in DOS being 18hz, gameplay is currently very slow. Work is ongoing to reprogram the interrupt timer which should allow full speed gameplay.

Release

No release yet! You have to compile from source,  and things are still very much a Work-In-Progress!

Compilation instructions

Compilation instructions will be added at a certain point on our Documentation site.

https://buildbot.libretro.com/docs/