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RetroArch 1.8.7 released!

Libretro Team


RetroArch 1.8.7 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.

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Highlights

There are many things this release post will not touch upon, such as all the extra cores that have been added to the various console platforms. We’ll spend some more time on that in a future Cores Progress Report post. We’ll go over some of the other highlights instead.

Netplay bugfixes

Some major netplay regressions snuck into version 1.8.5 and has remained a problem ever since. 1.8.7 finally fixes these issues.

New desktop-style Playlist View mode for MaterialUI

1.8.7 adds a new Desktop Thumbnail View to Material UI, available when using landscape display orientations. This is similar to Ozone’s playlist view. Above is a random screenshot showing what it looks like.

Notes:

This also represents a major refactor of MaterialUI’s menu entry handling code, which will make other kinds of playlist view mode easier to implement in the future.

Finally, this fixes two small existing issues:

Disable ‘Use Global Core Options File’ by default

1.8.7 changes the default setting of Use Global Core Options File to OFF.

This was only set to ON by default for consistency with legacy setups. There is no material benefit to this – in fact, a global core options file has the following downsides:

More file I/O – all options have to be read/written every time content is loaded or options are saved

Difficulty in editing option values by hand – e.g. sometimes this is necessary if a particular setting causes a core to crash, and if options for all cores are bundled together then sifting through them to find the one you need becomes a chore

Obsolescence – settings for old/unused/outdated cores hang around forever, and bloat the global options file without purpose. With per-core options, it is easy to remove settings for unwanted cores

Since settings are automatically imported from the legacy global file on first run when per-core files are enabled, changing the default behaviour will not harm any existing installation.

Don’t perform unnecessary cheevos initialisation when cheevos are disabled

Before, on all platforms with cheevos support rcheevos_load() is called each time content is loaded. This means the following happens even when cheevos are disabled:

When Cheevos (Achievements) are disabled, all these things are unnecessary work, causing increased loading times and memory usage. On platforms with low memory (i.e. consoles) the unnecessary content data duplication is potentially harmful and may cause crashes.

1.8.7 very simply adds an ‘early out’ to rcheevos_load() which prevents the above unnecessary work when cheevos are disabled.

Cheevos: option to start a session with all achievements active

Adding an option to allow the players to start a gaming session with all achievements active (even the ones they have as unlocked on RetroAchievements.org).

When cheevos_start_active = true, instead of You have X of Y achievements unlocked, the player will see a message like this:

How the option looks in XMB:

And in Ozone:

Fallback directories for shader presets

This allows us to use the Menu Config and config file directories as fallback to store shader presets when the Video Shader directory is not writable by the user, thus following the same behavior shown by the “Save shader as” menu option.

This allows users to handle their own presets without having to mess with the directory configuration on distros such as ArchLinux, where shaders (among other assets) are managed through additional packages. But it also goes a bit further and changes the order of the preset directories, searching first on the Menu Config path, then on the Video Shader path, and finally on the directory of the config file.

This would improve the portability of the configuration for Android users, because they cannot explore the default shaders directory without rooting their devices. Moreover, I think it makes more sense, as regular configuration overrides are already being stored on the Menu Config path by default.

Testing
Assuming these directory values:

Exit mobile version