Cet ensemble d'émulateur a été mis à jour. Les améliorations sont les suivantes: Usability improvements - Windows Drag and Drop support: Courtesy of mudlord, with the Windows version, you can now drag and drop a ROM (or any other content) onto RetroArch’s window, and it will attempt to load the correct core for it. If there is more than one core available for the type of content you dragged and dropped, it will present you with a slidedown list of cores to select from. - Vastly improved content downloading features: Starting with v1.3.6, RetroArch users can download compatible freeware content, such as the shareware release of Doom, right from the app. This video goes through the steps, which include fetching the core from the online updater, fetching the content from the repository and then launching the core and content we just downloaded. - Menu customization and aesthetics – XMB and MaterialUI: RetroArch v1.3.6 adds support for a number of themes in the default mobile menu, including both bright and dark themes. There’s also the ability now to set a custom wallpaper in XMB and be able to colorize it with a color gradient. To do this, you go to Settings -> Menu, you set a wallpaper, and from there you have to set ‘Menu Shader Pipeline’ to OFF. You can then choose from one of the color palettes in ‘Color Theme’ in order to shade the background wallpaper, or just select ‘Plain’ in case you don’t want to colorize it. - Undo Load/Save State: Have you ever gotten through a tough part of a game and wanted to make a savestate only to hit the “load state” button instead and have to do it all over again? Or maybe you were practicing a particularly difficult maneuver–for a speedrun, perhaps–and accidentally saved a bad run over your practice point because you hit “save state” instead of “load state”? While savestates are considered one of the great advantages to emulating retro games, they can also lead to these frustrating situations where they wipe out progress instead of saving it, all because of one slip of the finger. RetroArch now has the ability to undo a save- or load-state action through some automatic state-shuffling that happens behind the scenes, so you never have to worry about these situations again. *Undo Load State – Before the ‘current’ state is altered by e.g. a ‘Load Savestate’ operation, ‘current’ is saved in memory and ‘Undo Load State’ restores it; you can also undo this option by using it again, which will make you flip-flop between 2 states. *Undo Save State – If there was a savestate file that was overwritten, this option restores it.
New Features The main event of RetroArch 1.3.6 is obviously the fact that it makes it possible to run the N64 Vulkan core, paraLLEl. Previous versions of RetroArch will not be able to run this because of the new extensions to libretro Vulkan which we had to push to make this renderer possible.
- Vulkan *Async compute core support – ready for ParaLLEl: It was already possible to run Vulkan-enabled libretro cores, but with this release, a few crucial features have been added. Support for queue transfers was added and a context negotiation interface was added. *With this we can now use multiple queues to overlap compute and shading in the frontend level, i.e. asynchronous compute. ParaLLEl would certainly not have been as fast or as effective were it not for this. *ParaLLEl now joins triple-A games like Rise of the Tomb Raider and Doom in heavily relying on Vulkan’s async compute capabilities for maximum efficiency. A test core was also written as a proof of concept for this interface. *If you want to read more about ParaLLEl, we have a compendium blog post for you to digest here. - Supports Windows, Linux, Android equally well now: The previous version already had Vulkan support to varying degrees, but now we feel we are finally at the point where Vulkan driver support in RetroArch is very much mature across most of the supported platforms. *Vulkan should work now on Android, on Windows, and on Linux, provided your GPU has a working Vulkan driver. *On Linux we now support even more video driver context features, such as VK_KHR_display support. This is a platform-agnostic KMS-like backend for Vulkan, which should allow you to run RetroArch with Vulkan without the need of an X11 or Wayland server running. *On Windows and Android, we include Vulkan support now. Vulkan has been tested on Android with NVIDIA Shield Tablet/Console, and both work. Be aware that there are some minuscule things which might not work correctly yet with Vulkan on Android. For instance, orientation changing still doesn’t work. This will be investigated. *Max swapchain images – driving latency even lower with Vulkan and friends RetroArch already has built up quite a reputation for itself for being able to drive latency down to very low levels. But with new technologies, there is always room for improvement. *Max amount of swapchain images has now been implemented for both the DRM/KMS context driver for OpenGL (usable on Linux) and Vulkan now. What this entails, is that you can programmatically tell your video card to provide you with either triple buffering (3), double buffering (2) or single buffering (1). The previous default with DRM/KMS was 3 (triple buffering), so setting it to 2 could potentially shave off latency by at least 1 frame (as was verified by others). Setting to 1 won’t often get you single buffering with most monitors and drivers due to tearing and they will fall-back to (2) double buffering. *With Vulkan, RetroArch can programmatically infer to the video card what kind of buffering method it likes to be able to use, a vast improvement over the nonexistent options that existed before with OpenGL (from a platform-agnostic perspective). *What Vulkan brings to the table on Android: Vulkan has been tested to run on Android devices that support Vulkan, like Shield Tablet/Console. Latency has always been very bad on Android in the past. With Vulkan, frame times are significantly lower than with OpenGL, and we no longer have to leave Threaded Video enabled by default. Instead, we can turn off Threaded Video and letting RetroArch monitor the refresh rate dynamically, which is the more desirable solution since it allows for less jittery screen updates. *Audio latency can also be driven down significantly now with Vulkan. The current default is 128ms, with Vulkan we can drive it down to 64 or even 32ms. *Couple this with the aforementioned swapchain images support and there are multiple ways to drive latency down on Android now. - OpenGL music visualizer (for FFmpeg-enabled builds) *Versions of RetroArch like the Linux and Windows port happen to feature built-in integrated FFmpeg support, which allows you to watch movies and listen to music from within the confines of RetroArch. *We have added a music visualizer now. The scene is drawn as a cylindrical mesh with FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) heightmap lookups. Different colors are shaded using mid/side channels as well as left/right information for height. *Note that this requires at least GLES3 support (which is available as well through an extension which most GPUs should support by now).
Improvements to cores - TyrQuake: *User leileilol contributed a very cool feature to TyrQuake, Quake 64-style RGB colored lighting, except done in software. *To be able to use this feature, you need to create a subdir in your Quake data directory called ‘maps’, and you need to move ‘.lit’ files to this directory. These are the lighting map files that the Tyrquake core will use in order to determine how light should be positioned. *From there on out, you load up the Tyrquake core, you go to Quick Menu -> Options, you enable Colored Lighting. Restart the core and if your files are placed correctly, you should now see the difference. *Be aware that in order to do this, the game renderer shifts to 24bit color RGB rendering, and this in turn makes things significantly slower, although it should still be fairly playable even at higher resolutions. *To download this, go to ‘Add Content’ -> ‘Download Content’. Go to ‘Tyrquake’, and download ‘quake-colored-lighting-pack.zip’. This should extract this zip to your Downloads dir, and inside the Quake directory. From there, you can just load Quake and the colored lighting maps should be found providing the ‘Colored Lighting’ option has been enabled. - SNES9x emulator input lag reduction *A user on our forum, Brunnis, began some investigations into input latency and found that there were significant gains to be made in Super Nintendo emulators by rescheduling when input polling and video blitting are being performed. Based upon these findings and after some pull requests made to SNES9x, SNES9x Next, and FCEUmm, at least 1 to 2 frames of input lag should be shaved off now. - News for iOS 10 beta users *There is now a separate version for iOS 10 users. Apple once again changed a lot of things which makes it even more difficult for us to distribute RetroArch the regular way. *Dynamic libraries cores cannot be opened from the Documents directory of the app anymore in iOS 10. They can be opened from the app bundle, as long as they are code-signed. This reverts back to the previous behavior of RetroArch, where the cores need to be in the modules directory of the app bundle.
Go to this directory:
https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/tree/master/pkg/apple
and open RetroArch_iOS10.xcodeproj inside Xcode.
Note – you will need to manually compile the cores, sign them, and drag them over to the modules directory inside Xcode.
Example –
1. You’d download a core with libretro-super.
A quick example (type this inside the commandline)
git clone https://github.com/libretro/libretro-super.git
./libretro-fetch.sh 2048
./libretro-build.sh 2048
This will compile the 2048 core inside /dist/ios.
2. Move the contents of this directory over to the ‘modules’ directory inside the RetroArch iOS 10 Xcode solution. It should presumably handle signing by itself.
Bugfixes/other miscellanous things - Stability/memory leak fixes – We subjected RetroArch to numerous Valgrind/Coverity/Xcode Memory leak checks in order to fix a plethora of memory leaks that had reared their ugly heads inbetween releases. We pretty much eliminated all of them. Not a sexy feature to brag about, but it involved lots of sweat, tears and effort, and the ramifications it has on the overall stability of the program is considerable. - There were some problems with Cg and GLSL shader selections which should now be taken care of. - ScummVM games can now be scanned in various ways (courtesy of RobLoach) Downloading multiple updates at once could crash RetroArch – now fixed. Several cores have gotten Retro Achievements support now. The official list of systems that support achievements now is: Mega Drive, Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color, NES, PC Engine, Sega CD, Sega 32X, and Sega Master System. You can now turn the supported extensions filter on or off from the file browser. Effort to addressing user experience feedback I think a couple of things should be addressed first and foremost. First, there is every intent to indeed make things like a WIMP (Windows Icons Mouse Pointers) interface around RetroArch. To this end, we are starting to make crossplatform UI widget toolkit code that will make it easy for us to target Qt/GTK/Win32 UI/Cocoa in one fell swoop. - We have also spent a lot of time plugging some of the rough edges around RetroArch and making the user interface more pleasurable to work with. - Youtube libretro channel *Hunterk/hizzlekizzle is going to be running the libretro Youtube channel from now on, and we’ll start putting up quick and direct Youtube videos there on how to be able to use RetroArch. It is our intent that this will do a couple of things:
1. Show people that RetroArch is easy to use and has numerous great features beneath the surface too. 2. It allows users to give constructive criticism and feedback on the UI operations they see and how they think they should be improved. 3. We hope to engage some seasoned C/C++ coders to help us get some of these UI elements done sooner rather than later. Most of RetroArch development mostly relies on a handful of guys – 5 at the most. It is a LOT of hard work for what amounts to a hobbyist project, and if we had a lot more developers seasoned in C/C++, stuff could be done quicker. 4. There is no intention at all to make RetroArch ‘obtuse’ for the sake of it, there is every intention to make it more accessible for people. Additional help would go a very long way towards that. - Regarding the current UIs and their direction, it is obviously meant to be a console-like UI experience. This might not be what desktop users are used to on their PCs but it is what we designed menu drivers like XMB to be. It is true that keyboard and mouse are mostly seen as afterthoughts in this UI but really, we wrote the UI with game consoles and something where a gamepad is the primary input device at all times, particularly since a keyboard to us is a poor way of playing these console-based games anyway. Anyway, menu drivers like XMB and MaterialUI will never have any WIMP UI elements. HOWEVER, in upcoming versions, we will be able to flesh out the menubar and to allow for more basic WIMP UI elements.
RetroArch is meant to be a cutting-edge program that is ultra-powerful in terms of features. With that comes a bit of added complexity. However, we have every intent of making things easier, and with every release we put a lot of time and effort into improving things. But again, more developers would help out a substantial lot in speeding up certain parts that we are working on.
Our vision for the project involves an enormous workload and we’re considering differnt ways of generating additional support. If a Patreon might allow us to get more developers and get more stuff done faster, we might consider it. But we want such things to be carefully deliberated by both our internal development staff and the users at large. I hope you’ll be able to appreciate the relative rough edges around the program and appreciate the scope and the craft we have poured into the program. Please appreciate that we are pouring a lot of blood, sweat and tears into the program and that mostly we try to maintain an upper stiff chin when faced with all the criticism, but we do care and we do intend to do better. Volunteer coders are very welcome though, by people who have some time to spare and who want to make a difference. We ask for your understanding here, and we hope that by finally speaking out on this, users can gain a better understanding of our intent and be able to appreciate the program better in light of that.
Android, Blog, Ffmpeg, Mupen64, Nintendo 64, nVidia, OpenGL, ParaLLEl, RetroArch, Vulkan, Windows AMD, Android, Apple, iOS, Mupen64, nVidia, OpenGL, OSX, ParaLLEl, RetroArch, Vulkan, Windows1 Comment Lutro – easy retro game creation powered by Libretro July 17, 2016July 17, 2016 Squarepusher We are going to be making Libretro (and RetroArch, by extension) more usable for content creators, and the first part in that endeavor is the official launch of Lutro.
Lutro is an in-development Love 2D reimplementation written in Lua and implemented as a libretro core. With Lutro, it is possible to easily create Lua games with no knowledge of C being necessary, or having to compile any code.
Sample games To demonstrate the flexibility and power of Lutro, we have assembled a few Lutro-based games which you can freely download from our server. They are purposefully kept simple so that the content creator can use them for their own attempts at creating a game.
LutroPong
l6sLDcD
A recreation of the game Pong for Lutro.
Sienna
FG38fh0
This is a Love2D-based endless runner game that has been ported to Lutro.
Platformer uFAfcFj
One of kivutar’s first proof of concept demos showing off Lutro. It’s a scrolling 2D platform game with no real game mechanics beyond jumping.
LutroSpaceship O51KsjH
Another 2D platformer showcase example for Lutro, this time illustrating how a Metroidvania-style game could work as a Lutro game. It has several screens which were implemented and some game mechanics including combat, item collecting, jumping, etc.
The Game Of Life MMxo6Cj
A recreation of Conway’s The Game Of Life. Press one of the buttons to regenerate the algorithm again. Can be quite CPU intensive depending on the system and environment you run Lutro on and/or whether or not LuaJIT is available.
Tetris
oWfW8TM
A recreation of Tetris for Lutro.
How to use the existing Lutro games Start up RetroArch (version 1.3.6 or later).
Make sure you have downloaded the Lutro core first. To do that, do the following:
Downloading the Lutro core
1. Go to ‘Online Updater’.
2. Go to ‘Core Updater’.
3. Browse through the list and select ‘Lutro’. This will download the core. Once done, exit this screen and go back to the main menu by pressing the back button.
Downloading a game
There are several games we allow you to download from our servers.
1. Go to ‘Add Content’.
2. Go to ‘Download Content’.
3. Select the folder ‘lutro’.
4. Download any of the games. Once you’re done, press the back button or another key to go back to the main menu.
5. Go to ‘Load Content’.
6. Go to ‘Select Downloaded File and Detect Core’.
7. Go to the lutro directory.
8. Select the subdir of the Lutro game you want to play.
9. Select ‘main.lua’, and the game will start up.
Case study example : LutroSpaceship In order to show off how Lutro could be used to create a good 2D game, kivutar has created a Metroidvania-style platformer game. It’s called ‘LutroSpaceship’. In it, you are thrown into a 2D Metroidvania style world with multiple screens you can explore. You can swing your lightsword to kill enemies. Enemies will drop collectibles that you can pick up. There are several traps you will have to avoid such as a laser beam. The game ends once you have reached a passageway.
As a budding content creator, you can pick up where we left off in this demo and continue the game from there. All it takes is some familiarity with how Love2D-based games work, a text editor and editing the Lua source files. After having edited these files, you can run the game again and immediately sample your changes.
Work in progress
Be aware that Lutro right now is not feature-complete with Love2D.
There are several missing API functions that still have to be implemented. View the list here. We will keep this updated as we go along. We are in the process of adding an audio mixer to Lutro to complete some of the remaining missing Love2D functionality. Right now, there is no hardware rendering acceleration, everything is done mainly on the framebuffer. This would not be ideal for games that rely heavily on 3D-based rendering or transformation/scaling but it does have the advantage that the Lutro core/games can run on systems where there is no OpenGL support to begin with. Blog, Lutro Libretro, Love2D, Lua, Lutro, RetroArch5 Comments First ever revolutionary N64 Vulkan emulator coming soon – only for libretro (paraLLEl) July 12, 2016July 12, 2016 Squarepusher 140228_38849_ultra
For years, Nintendo 64 emulation has been pretty bad and lagging significantly behind Nintendo Gamecube/Wii emulation. At least 90 to 95% of the remaining problems are at the RDP level, the N64’s video subcomponent chip. By moving away from High-Level Emulation of the RDP, we could solve most of the remaining problems. The problem has been that for a long time, it seemed impossible to do this at playable speeds. Software rendering is too slow for a GPU from this timeframe, and older versions of OpenGL have too many crippling limitations in order to allow for a 1:1 reprogramming and port of Angrylion to GL.
At last, this dire situation will change in the upcoming days and we can finally release to the public something that will revolutionize N64 emulation forever so that we can move away from all of the hacky HLE video plugins that have been released in recent years.
The world’s first-ever low-level N64 video plugin implemented using the Vulkan API!
And not just any video plugin either. This is a reimplementation/port of Angrylion to Vulkan. This will be the first time most will be able to get anywhere close to playable speeds with an accuracy-based N64 video renderer.
This hardware renderer is unique for the following reasons:
This is the first N64 emulator project ever so far to receive Vulkan support. This is the first time ever that an emulator takes advantage of asynchronous compute (exclusive only to DirectD12/Vulkan) for hardware rasterization of an emulated GPU. This is the first time ever that the Angrylion renderer has been ported to a graphics API. It is the first time an RDP LLE video renderer for N64 has been capable of running at fullspeed. It marks a shift away from decades of inaccurate high-level emulation of the N64’s RDP which made for buggy N64 emulation in general. How to use it?
When it will be released in the upcoming days, this is what you will need in order to use it.
You will need the latest RetroArch version (either nightlies or the upcoming 1.3.5 version). The libretro API has been updated to make asynchronous compute cores possible, hence why ‘Mupen64plus HW libretro’ will not work on any older version of RetroArch. Your video card also needs to support the Vulkan graphics API. When RetroArch 1.3.5 gets released
Download the new RetroArch 1.3.5, go to ‘Online Updater’, go to ‘Core Updater’.
From there, go to ‘Experimental’, and download Mupen64plus HW. This will download the Vulkan-enabled Mupen64plus core.
Before trying to use it, make sure your video card supports the Vulkan API otherwise it won’t work!
Why RDP LLE? Why is this significant?
For years, Nintendo 64 emulators have fixated upon a High-Level Emulation approach to emulate the RDP, the N64’s video rasterizer. Examples include Glide64, Rice, GLN64 (and its recent fork, GlideN64).
It is a practical but imperfect way of emulating the RDP for many reasons:
These plugins require numerous game-specific hacks and workarounds. It becomes a real maintenance chore and there’s plenty of missing graphical effects to this day. Examples include: missing lens flares in Turok: The Dinosaur Hunter, corrupt backgrounds in Killer Instinct Gold and GoldenEye 007, fiddly auxilliary frame buffer glitches, inaccurate approximations of graphical effects due to combiner issues, etc. Most of these HLE RDP plugins recycle a lot of old code. For instance, Gliden64 is mostly a collage of GLN64 + Glide64 code, but the code recycling goes deeper than that. Low-level triangle rasterization functions in both Glide64 and Gliden64 are borrowed from Z64 GL, an RDP plugin by Ziggy. The problem is that bugs still exist in these sections of the code. Most of the low-level rasterization functions that keep being borrowed in these high-level plugins are directly responsible for many of the remaining glitches you can see. And since the code was written by outside people who are no longer active in the scene, it doesn’t seem likely it is ever going to get fixed. There are other legacy issues. The most notorious one of all is of course Glide64, which originally targeted (you guessed it) the obsolete 3Dfx graphics API Glide. We are talking GL 1.2 / 1.3-ish era here, really stone-age. An OpenGL wrapper for Glide had to be written around Glide64 in order to get it to run with OpenGL-supported video cards in the first place, but the wrapper code unfortunately is far from optimal. Other plugins like Z64 GL still seem to use OpenGL 1.4x-era code and lots of questionable fixed function wrapper code. Many games use custom RSP microcode to do certain game tasks. For instance, Rogue Squadron uses custom RSP microcode for terrain heightmap generation, while games like Resident Evil 2 and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time use the RSP for video and image decompression routines. Usually this would call for a high-level implementation/approximation of what the game would expect to be returned to the RDP, and to also implement corresponding high-level displaylist implementations on the RDP rasterization side. Many games simply have never had their custom microcode properly reverse engineered, so the only way to play these games is to use a combination of a low-level RSP plugin and a low-level RDP renderer. Most of the existing microcode was actually handed to devs on a silver platter and it seems the remaining microcodes will probably never be reversed for this reason. You run into pretty big bottlenecks with traditional GL rendering for which no real solutions exist, frame buffer bottlenecks, depth buffer bottlenecks, etc. More recent versions of OpenGL (4.3+) have made it possible to fix some of the issues, like better depth compare, faster and more efficient framebuffer to framebuffer copying, but it’s still honestly a big inoptimal mess. Coverage emulation is usually completely stubbed out in HLE video plugins. All of these plugins have so far completely avoided trying to emulate the VI interface. The VI interface basically reads from the RDP’s frame buffer and sends it to the digital-to-analog converter to create the video output. Along the way it applies several postprocessing effects including what appears to be 8x MSAA. I guess some can blame for this VI interface for leading to the ‘smudged’/’smoothed out’/’blurry’ look of many N64 games. But hey, we’re going for authentic here :) Enter this new renderer. It takes as a base Angrylion (the most accurate RDP rasterizer yet so far) and it uses compute shaders to transfer the workload to the GPU instead of the CPU. Angrylion has been known to render nearly all games accurately unlike regular HLE N64. The only problem has been that it has been too slow to run at full-speed because of it being completely software rendered, which puts all the strain on the CPU. RDP LLE changes that around so that this rendering bottleneck is completely gone. With RDP LLE, the only remaining bottleneck will be the interpreter RSP plugin that a low-level RDP plugin has to use.
Work remaining to be done
With this video renderer we have aimed for a GL 4.3 / Vulkan featureset in order to escape most of the bottlenecks and limitations that usually drags N64 emulation down. From now on, there will be two big remaining tasks to be done:
We will have to port the code over to OpenGL 4.3+. Lower subsets of OpenGL won’t work as this renderer requires compute shader support. With the RDP bottleneck being completely gone with this renderer, RSP has now become the main bottleneck. We will have to write a recompiler for the RSP in order to attain even better performance and reduce the RSP bottleneck as much as possible. So far, only Project64 has an RSP recompiler like this, but there are plans of using Daeken’s generic recompiler system in order to come up with something equivalent for Mupen64plus libretro. Asynchronous compute raymarching libretro test core 72AE6jG
In order to make this renderer possible, extensions to the libretro API had to be added.
For educational reasons and in order to serve as a proof of concept on how to make your own libretro core that takes advantage of the recently added asynchronous compute capabilities, a test core has been made, called ‘libretro-test-vulkan-async-compute‘.
It is a basic test program that demonstrates raymarching being done in Vulkan. We’d very much like to see people improve upon this and collaborate to make a more impressive core out of it.
You can find the sourcecode for this sample test core inside RetroArch’s source code directory tree (cores/libretro-test-vulkan-async-compute in specific).
Conclusion It has been a long time coming, but finally with paraLLEl, N64 emulation can finally become ‘good enough’ and we no longer need to have patchwork renderer plugins that try to fix graphics issues on a per-game basis.
|
|