RetroArch – Manual content scanning coming very soon!

Libretro Team

One of the most requested features for RetroArch, manual content scanning, will finally be added!
How it will work compared to the current database-based scanning:

  • You select a content directory
  • You specify a ‘system name’ to be used as the playlist & database names, with the option of automatically using the content directory name, or a custom string (or any standard database name)
  • You optionally specify a default core for the resultant playlist (if selected, content will be filtered by supported extensions)
  • You can optionally specify a manual list of file extensions to include (so if you have a folder with bin/cue files, you can just enter ‘cue’, and skip the bins)
  • You can either scan content to a new playlist, or just add missing content to an existing playlist (i.e. so you can use it to pick up ‘leftovers’ if you did a normal scan and have items that didn’t match the database)

In essence, this is kinda like the Qt playlist builder thing, but it works everywhere, and all platforms

It’s purely file based – doesn’t scan the databases – so users will get playlists containing all their ROMs. This has always been the biggest complaint about RetroArch – i.e. “I scanned my games and stuff is missing – what can I do?”

This and more coming up in RetroArch 1.8.2!

Doom 3 Libretro core dhewm3 coming soon to Core Updater!

Libretro Team

The #Doom 3 source port dhewm3 finally hits #Libretro/#RetroArch, allowing you to play Doom 3 natively on #RetroArch! This is all thanks to the efforts of Rinnegatamante, who previously did the Quake 2 and 3 source ports to libretro/RetroArch.

In the video above you will see us running through the beginning sections. This video was recorded at a resolution of 1440p (256×1440) running at 120 frames per second. To top all this off, internally the game is rendering at a 4K resolution (3840×2160), yet it still outputs to 1440p ultimately.

This will hit the buildbot Core Downloader soon, targeting at first Linux and Windows. We will see which other platforms it can be ported to later on. It’s a far more demanding games than previous id Tech games at least.

Design decisions

Some decisions were made during the porting of this:

  • Right now it’s using the gamepad only as a control scheme, and requires pretty much the use of two analog sticks. There might be more controller configurations in the future, including full-fledged keyboard and mouse support. For now, as stated before, it’s only the gamepad.
  • Internal resolution can be increased up to 4K (3840×2160). It will make sense to increase this later on.
  • Just like the Quake 2/3 cores before it, with minimal tweaking Doom 3 runs generally great on higher refresh rates.
  • For Doom 3 we are targeting fixed framerates (you can set the target framerate as a core option). We are well aware that while the game was made for Geforce 3, a lot of this hardware and even more recent ones struggled to reach a solid 30fps framerate, never mind a stable 60fps.