RetroArch 1.8.5 released!

Libretro Team


RetroArch 1.8.5 has just been released.

Grab it here.

We will release a Cores Progress report soon going over all the core changes that have happened since the last report. It’s an exhaustive list, and especially the older consoles will receive a lot of new cores and improvements.

Remember that this project exists for the benefit of our users, and that we wouldn’t keep doing this were it not for spreading the love with our users. This project exists because of your support and belief in us to keep going doing great things. If you’d like to show your support, consider donating to us. Check here in order to learn more. In addition to being able to support us on Patreon, there is now also the option to sponsor us on Github Sponsors! You can also help us out by buying some of our merch on our Teespring store!

What’s changed?

New default menu – Ozone

Based on the results of a popular vote poll we held on Twitter, Ozone is now the default menu driver moving forward for RetroArch. If you still would like to use the previous menu (XMB), you can still do that – just go to Settings, Drivers, change Menu to ‘xmb’, and restart RetroArch.

There are also some important changes made to the scaling of the Ozone menu. It now scales based on DPI, and you are also able to configure the scaling to whatever suits your preferences. The widgets/notifications are now also scaled appropriately.

Do note that Lakka will stay with the XMB menu as the default menu, but you will definitely be able to switch to Ozone there as an optional feature.

There have also been plenty of important Quality of life improvements made to the menu. To learn more about this, see the section ‘Changelog’.

Important bugfix/crash fixes

An important bug has been fixed which would prevent RetroArch from launching on 64-bit x86 Chromebook hardware.

The threaded video driver on Linux was previously very unstable with OpenGL. We have managed to fix the majority of these issues.

Changelog

1.8.5

  • 3DS: Keep the bottom screen hidden on sleep/wakeup. When the 3DS wakes back up after being closed, the bottom screen needs to be reinitialized. Adding the condition here will cause the screen to be turned on or off based on the state of ctr_bottom_screen_enabled, as you’d expect
  • ANDROID/CHROMEBOOK/CRASH: Fix Chromebook crashes (on x86 x64) when touching the screen
  • BUGFIX: Prevent double input when using ‘return’ key (hardware) to close on-screen keyboard
  • BUGFIX: Fix mouse capture hotkey not working
  • BUGFIX: Avoid overflow when calculating multiplying performance counter
  • BUGFIX: Retroarch overlay displaying “Game remap file loaded.” on the overlay instead of “Core remap file loaded.” when only a core remap file is present
  • CHEEVOS/BUGFIX: Achievement triggers could cause Retroarch to Crash
  • CHEEVOS: Don’t block Sameboy core because it only exposes some memory
  • CHEEVOS: Support for extended Sega CD memory
  • CHEEVOS: Show RetroAchievements Hash in content information list
  • CHEEVOS: If the core says it’s exposing SYSTEM_RAM, give it the benefit of the doubt
  • CHEEVOS: RetroAchievements rich presence for RA.org website/Discord
  • CHEEVOS: Reset token when username or password changes
  • CHEEVOS: Display measured progress on locked achievements
  • CHEEVOS: Queue multiple popups
  • CHEEVOS: Add delay retries to leaderboard submits
  • CHEEVOS: Prevent buffer overflow when encountering an unknown macro
  • CORE UPDATER: Prevent hang when fetching core list if HTTP transfer fails
  • DISK CONTROL: Add disk labels to ‘disk inserted’ notifications
  • EMSCRIPTEN: Recreate input event listeners properly
  • FFMPEG CORE: Fix crash on seeking when using HW decoding in some cases
  • LIBRETRO: Add disk control interface API extension
  • LINUX: Avoid possible crash when running retroarch at startup
  • LINUX/GLX: Fix threaded video crashes/instability because of GLX OML sync callbacks
  • LOCALIZATION: Update French translation
  • LOCALIZATION: Update Korean translation
  • LOCALIZATION: Update Polish translation
  • LOCALIZATION: Update Spanish translation
  • LOCALIZATION: Update Portuguese Brazilian translation
  • MENU: Add Menu Scroll Acceleration option
  • MENU: Automatically select currently checked item when opening drop-down lists
  • MENU: Fix smooth (vertical) line ticker scroll speed
  • MENU: Don’t flush on override/remap messages
  • MENU/DATETIME: Adds some new timedate styles that follow the DD/MM/YYYY format, found in several European countries
  • MENU/DATETIME: Modifies the existing translation files in order to accommodate the new options that are now available
  • MENU/DATETIME: Reorders the timedate view options based on a decreasing order of the quantity of information displayed, so that they are more convenient to switch around and easily categorized
  • MENU/BUGFIX: Fix bug – if you were in XMB and you would set menu driver to RGUI, you could no longer go to the left or right tab
  • MENU/MATERIALUI: Add option to remove navigation bar
  • MENU/OZONE: Add DPI-based scaling
  • MENU/OZONE: Add rudimentary pointer support
  • MENU/OZONE: Add ‘Nord’ and ‘Gruvbox Dark’ themes
  • MENU/OZONE/POINTER: Pointer can be used to switch between sidebar and entries list
  • MENU/OZONE/POINTER: Pointer can be used to select sidebar and entries list items
  • MENU/OZONE/POINTER: Both sidebar and entries list can be scrolled by dragging
  • MENU/OZONE/POINTER: Clicking/pressing the header or footer produces a ‘cancel’ action
  • MENU/OZONE/POINTER: Cursor focus follows mouse pointer from sidebar to entries list (and vice versa)
  • MENU/OZONE/POINTER: In entries list, item under cursor is automatically selected (with some fudging to ensure this doesn’t break mouse wheel scrolling)
  • MENU/OZONE/POINTER: In sidebar, item under cursor is not automatically selected (this is too jarring)
  • MENU/RGUI: Add ‘Flux’ theme
  • MENU/XMB: New color themes ‘Cube Purple’, ‘Family Red’, etc
  • NETPLAY/MENU/BUGFIX: Fix Netplay Stateless Mode doesn’t save. Affects other netplay settings which can be overridden by commandline option
  • ODROID GO ADVANCE: Rotation support
  • NETPLAY/ROOMS/BUGFIX: Prevent out-of-bounds array indexing when displaying/selecting netplay rooms in menus
  • SCANNER: Add ‘Arcade DAT Filter’ Option
  • SCANNER: Add scanning Korea and Asia PS1 discs
  • SCANNER: Add support for scanning PSP Korean
  • VIDEO: Set hardware ‘Bilinear filtering’ off by default
  • VIDEO/WIDGETS: Widgets are now menu-independent
  • VIDEO/WIDGETS: Allow notifications to use full screen width when not displaying menu
  • VIDEO/WIDGETS: DPI-based scaling
  • VIDEO/WIDGETS: Fix volume widget scaling
  • VIDEO/WIDGETS: Add independent widget scale override settings for fullscreen/windowed modes
  • VIDEO/WIDGETS/BUGFIX: Prevent improper display of (old style) OSD text when widgets are enabled
  • VIDEO/WIDGETS/THREADED/BUGFIX: Fix issue – corruption of menu widgets when running some cores (e.g. VICE) with threaded video enabled
  • WIFI/CONNMANCTL: Display more characters from SSID

Final Burn Neo Progress Report

BarbuDreadMon

A lot happened since my last progress report, so it might be a good time to keep you updated about FBNeo progress.

NES/FDS support

I see most of you saying “Isn’t FBNeo an arcade emulator ?”. Well, not exactly, we do some console emulation too, i already mentioned it in my last post. You might think there is nothing exciting about having a new NES/FDS emulator, but here is the deal : it’s probably one of the best ones available, we have yet to find glitches, even on games known for glitching on pretty much every other NES/FDS emulators. The downside is that, since it’s accuracy oriented, it won’t run that well on low-end devices. The emulator was written from scratch, mainly by reading nesdev, dink worked on it for 7 months, getting tons of help/testing/code/imagery from team 🙂

If you try to find another emulator that will render the following screen without any kind of glitch, you might be in a pinch, codemasters games are generally the bane of nes emulation.

As usual, usage of specific romsets is required (dat files are available at the usual place), it’s mostly based on No-Intro dumps. If your favorite NES/FDS game (even hacks or unofficial translations) is missing, you can request support on our forum. Currently we support around 1300 games.

New arcade games

I’ll probably forget some :

  • Rabbit : a fighting game from 1997, one of the only Electronic Arts arcade games
  • Express Raider : a beat’em’up from 1987
  • Super Dodge Ball : a dodgeball game from 1987
  • Tom Tom Magic : a flipper game from 1997
  • Thief : a maze game from 1982
  • Shark Attack : a game where you are a great white shark who attacks divers, from 1981
  • NATO Defense : another maze game from 1982
  • Victory : a shooter game where you defend an island, from 1982
  • Sega System 24 : a Sega arcade hardware from early 90s, you can see the list of games here
  • Akka Arrh : a space shooter from 1982
  • Alien Rescue : a homebrew from monstersgoboom.itch.io, running on pacman hardware
  • Magic Purple : a platform game from 1996
  • King of Boxer : a boxing game from 1985
  • Dead Angle : a shooter game from 1988
  • Buggy Challenge : a racing game from 1985
  • Denjin Makai : a beat’em’up from 1995
  • Godzilla : a fighting game from 1993
  • Heated Barrel : a run’n’gun from 1992
  • Legionnaire : a beat’em’up from 1992
  • SD Gundam Sangokushi Rainbow Tairiku Senki : a run’n’gun from 1993
  • Pitpat Puzzle : a puzzle game from 1997
  • Berzerk : a maze/shooter game from 1980
  • Frenzy : follow up of berzerk, from 1982

Here is a screenshot of rabbit

New hacks

  • Final Fight 30th Anniversary Edition : an advanced hack of Final Fight, among other features/improvements it supports 3 players
  • Otto Project PZ : do you know about crazy otto ? if not you might want to read this. This hack is an attempt to reproduce this game which was a prototype of ms pacman.
  • Lots and lots of hacks of many popular games and systems, including neogeo, cps, donkey kong and mortal kombat

Here is a screenshot of Otto Project PZ

Improvements and fixes

There are hundreds of them so i’ll just mention the latest improvement i did : i added a Hires 1080p mode to every vector games, you can enable it through dipswitches (in core options)

You can find more about what was fixed by looking at our issue tracker

Improvements and fixes specific to the libretro port

  • fixed a crash that would happen when switching neogeo bios while using readahead
  • prevent user from using incompatible neogeo bios with specific games
  • improved default mapping for many games, including the usage of analog triggers as default to accelerate and brake in many racing games
  • added an alternative way to load subsystems, more friendly with devices using static linking like android (more details in my FAQ)
  • improved & sanitized core options, one thing worth mentioning is the CPU clock feature that got fixed (previously the values displayed were different from what was actually applied) and now allows to underclock too (which can be useful to reproduce slowdowns from original hardware, or to lower hardware requirements)