Libretro Cores progress Report – Beetle PSX HW Dynarec news, New Neo Geo Pocket emulator core, and more!

Libretro Team

RACE – new Neo Geo Pocket Color emulator core

Description: SNK Neo Geo Pocket Color emulator

We have released the new SNK Neo Geo Pocket Color emulator core for the following platforms –

  • Android
  • iOS
  • macOS
  • PSP
  • PS Vita
  • Linux
  • Switch
  • Windows

This is an existing old Neo Geo Pocket emulator that unlike NeoPop and its derivatives (Mednafen/Beetle NGP) focuses on performance.

You can get it right now on the Core Updater.

There might still be some savestate and netplay issues with this core. However, the main attraction of this core and by far its ultimate selling point is the performance. It is orders of magnitude faster than Beetle NGP. Watch the video to see exactly how substantial the performance improvement is. For lower-spec systems like PSP, PS2 and 3DS, Beetle NGP (being based on NeoPop) is not able to run at fullspeed, whereas RACE runs at fullspeed on PSP and PS Vita right now.

Beetle PSX HW

Description: PlayStation 1 emulator

* (Vulkan) When rendering games above their native resolution, textures would often become corrupted. Turns out this was a rounding issue. This has been fixed.

* (Dynarec) The Linux/Android portion of the project is getting close to completion, while the Windows part has kinda languished. Therefore, we have made the decision with the current dynarec bounty coders that we focus right now primarily on Linux/Android for an initial release, which hopefully can happen around the end of January. We think that once it’s in people’s hands and results are satisfactory on Android/Linux that the Windows issues can be sorted out from there on out. With CPU-bound games, performance should be roughly 2 times faster.

We are currently assembling testers on our Discord to put the dynarec on Linux to the test.

Beetle PCE Fast

Description: NEC PC Engine emulator

* Added mouse support
* Fix turbo button core option

Kronos

Description: Sega Saturn emulator

* Update to version 2.0

BlueMSX

Description: MSX home computer emulator

The MSX emulator core finally works for the first time on PSP and PS Vita.

Game & Watch – GW

Description: Game & Watch emulator
A regression was fixed in this core, it should finally work on Android again.

Atari 800

Description: Atari 800 home computer emulator
Fix for non-working virtual keyboard.

Virtual Keyboard didn’t work at all.
Right now not all keys are mapped, but at least most important are working now.

FB Neo

Description: Multiple arcade machine emulator
FB Neo has been updated to the latest version.

MAME 2000 – Faster Z80/68K CPU cores for ARM – Big performance boost on Vita

Description: Multiple arcade machine emulator

The MAME 2000 libretro core is now using the ARM-optimized Cyclone and DrZ80 CPU cores on PS Vita. We’re going to be testing this out on various other 32bit ARM devices as well and rolling it out there as well. This should give a significant boost in performance and bring it in-line with MAME4All for 32bit ARM devices.

NOTE: Only the games that make heavy use of Z80 and 68K CPU cores will see significant performance gains from this.

MAME 2003 Plus

Description: Multiple arcade machine emulator

* Fix for Eagle Shot Golf on ARM hardware

Flycast

Description: Sega Dreamcast/NAOMI emulator

* Avoid TA data buffer overflow. Fixes Ooga Booga crashes on multiplayer (offline and online)
* Vulkan: Workaround for Intel driver bug when depth write is disabled
* Vulkan: Add anisotropic filtering core option.

VICE

Description: Commodore 64 emulator

* 1 Frame of input lag removal

P-UAE

Description: Commodore Amiga emulator

* 1 Frame of input lag removal
* Amiga CD32 support

bsnes

Description: Super Nintendo emulator

* New core option – enable this for runahead support. This is likely temporary until a better solution can be found.

RetroArch – Netplay Relay server updates

Libretro Team

We are going to release a new hotfix update soon, probably called RetroArch 1.8.3. This will not be a spectacular new release but a necessary patch/bugfix release.

We will also be releasing more information soon about many exciting Libretro core developments that have happened recently.

Netplay Relay server updates

– We fixed a critical bug that would cause all players to be disconnected from the relay server if one player was leaving the game. That bug had been open for one year and we were finally able to fix it.

– Fix the “spectator” bug when using the relay server – When a player switches into the spectator mode (pressing “i”) while using the relay server, all players will disconnect.

– Overall stability has also improved. We fixed a memory leak that would cause the relay server to become unresponsive after some time.

We also updated our relay server infrastructure so that we can roll out new server locations easier should the need arise. This also enables us to roll out server fixes faster.

Roadmap

There is one on our roadmap that we are going to address soon:

  • Fix the “header bug” when using the relay server –
    Currently some client combination can’t play together using the relay server, since they get a “invalid header” error message when joining the netplay session . For example, some Android devices can suffer from this with a netplay session hosted by a PC user.

You don’t need to upgrade your current RetroArch version to benefit from these improvements. It’s all server-bound.