RetroArch 1.7.0 -Released!

Libretro Team

RetroArch 1.7.0 has just been released! Grab it here.

This latest version has also been uploaded to the Google Play Store.

We here at RetroArch/Libretro wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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

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.
– 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.

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.

RetroArch Roadmap for v1.7.0 and beyond

Libretro Team

We don’t usually talk about all the behind the scenes development stuff that we do. We usually prefer to let the work speak for itself. Nevertheless, we feel compelled to share with you from now on a brief roadmap status update that basically shows what we are currently working on codebase-wise, where RA will go next, etc. We also hope this will be of use to existing upstream contributors.

Compatibility with OpenGL 1.x

From its inception, RetroArch’s OpenGL driver has targeted OpenGL 2.0 and/or later. There are a lot of people on ageing computers that don’t have a GL 2.x compliant driver. We have been putting a lot of work into modularizing the renderchain code, splitting it up from the main GL driver into their own files. This will pave the road towards a basic OpenGL 1.x renderchain which should at least work with OpenGL 1.3 and up. We might be able to target even lower versions later on, but time will tell.

Certain features this GL 1.x renderchain will not have:
* FBO support. FBOs wasn’t a thing with OpenGL until at least version 2.0 (not counting extensions). This also means no libretro GL support, so don’t expect hardware rendered cores with OpenGL 1.x.
* Shaders. Again, this is tied back to a couple of factors, one of them being the lack of FBO support which makes multi-pass shaders impossible to implement. But also, shaders are impossible in general for this 1.x mode. GL 1.x did not yet have shader support. Shaders didn’t become a thing until GL 2.x. GLSL/Cg/HLSL did not exist yet at this time and the entire rendering pipeline was fixed-function.
* There will be no fast framebuffer readback paths (in so far as that stuff is actually ‘fast’ with GL to begin with). No PBO support, which wasn’t a thing back in GL 1.x days. So expect slow screenshot taking and/or recording.
* VAOs (Vertex Array Object) and VBOs (Vertex Buffer Object) weren’t yet a thing until GL 3.x and GL 2.x respectively.

We have no idea yet when this will start working. The main issue is testing it on ancient GPUs that only have GL 1.x drivers.

Xbox OG/Xbox 360

For a long time, the Xbox OG and 360 versions of RetroArch and cores have been de-listed. This had several technical reasons, one of which being that it was a big maintenance burden and struggle to keep having to update all the separate Visual Studio solution files for these platforms. For all other platforms, we build cores using a universal Makefile, which typically contains one file (called Makefile.common) which conditionally defines which files are to be compiled in. By having to maintain some separate solution file, we need to update two files instead of one, and worse, having to start IDEs in order to edit them (or even worse), having to manually edit them with a text editor, which can tend to be error prone on top.

In order to do away with these issues, we have now reverse-engineered how we can still have a Makefile target for MSVC that uses MS’ compilers/linkers/assemblers from within the confines of a Makefile-based solution. Note that this solution does not depend on Microsoft’s nmake and uses plain make.

Now that we have accomplished being able to compile and link cores with MSVC without any MSVC solution file, we now feel the time is right to start reintroducing the Xbox OG and 360 ports.

The Xbox port work also feeds into several other things we have been working on concurrently, such as :

  • Better Direct3D support. Xbox OG will need Direct3D 8, whereas Xbox 360 needs Direct3D 9 + HLSL.
  • The latest compiler that can be used for Xbox OG is Visual Studio 2003, whereas for Xbox 360 this is Visual Studio 2010 (right now). To this end, we have updated a lot of core Makefiles to include targets for these platforms, and not just for the Xbox platforms, but PC as well.

Direct3D work – supporting more versions, etc.

In the past, we have had two separate Direct3D drivers – one for XDK (shorthand for Xbox platforms), and one for PC (Direct3D9-based). Because we intend on supporting the Xbox platforms again, we no longer want the maintenance burden of having two video drivers that essentially are similar in lots of ways. To this end, we have started modularizing the Direct3D driver so that multiple backends are possible to be implemented.

Not only is it possible to have a Direct 3D 8 / 9 codepath, but it is also possible to have separate renderchains. For instance, the Xbox 360 will be able to use the HLSL renderchain, whereas on PC the user has the option to choose between Cg (which would use the Cg renderchain), and/or HLSL (which would use the HLSL renderchain).

We also intend for there to be a fallback path to Direct 3D 8 in case your GPU and its drivers do not support Direct 3D 9 for whatever reason. Backwards compatibility is very important to us and it’s increasingly getting harder to keep supporting all of these various versions in one single codebase. These are unique challenges to which there is often not a clear-cut solution, so we have to improvise a little on the fly and do unconventional things in order to make this happen.

Windows 95

Brad Parker likes extending backwards compatibility of RetroArch to older versions of Windows, and this in turn makes our codebase more flexible so that we can keep the Xbox OG and 360 ports alive.

People might mistake this for taking up resources and time that could be better spent elsewhere, but the opposite is true – by setting up the foundation in our codebase just once, it will be automated and take care of itself from that point on. Also, there is lots of overlap between platforms. For instance,
the latest compiler that can still churn out binaries for Windows 95 is Visual Studio 2003. This incidentally happens to be the last compiler that can create binaries for Xbox OG. So already here we have overlap whenever we need to make a core compatible with MSVC 2003 and we have to create the necessary Makefile targets for it.

For Windows 95, we are thinking of defaulting to the GDI video driver instead of Direct3D since we assume that the kind of machines running Windows 95 typically would not have either a video driver with Direct 3D 9 support or a GPU that supports it to begin with. Windows 95 still supported DirectX so we should be able to default to ‘DirectInput’ as the input driver. Windows NT 3.5 will pose more of a problem here though – back then, NT did not have any DirectX support at all, so a DirectInput driver is not possible and we lack any other input driver that we could use. Windows Raw Input driver cannot work on this ancient NT version. We are not sure yet what approach we will take there.

Nevertheless, Windows 95 will be first out of the starting gates.

New hardware platforms we intend to support

We have obtained some new hardware over the past few months:

  1. NES/SNES Classic
  2. GCW Zero
  3. SteamLink

It is our intention to have this be part of our main release schedule in future releases. We understand that for a system like SNES Classic, a different approach will be required vs. just the usual ‘full fat’ version of RetroArch that people have grown accustomed to, and we will certainly be taking a long hard look at RetroArch Clover for inspiration on what we will do. Our first approach is likely going to be something similar to RetroArch Clover that ultimately piggybacks off Hakchi and which complements the main UI of the platform rather than trying to replace it.