RetroArch 1.10.1 changes

[jSTE0]

RetroArch 1.10.1 has been announced but apart from 2 items for Miyoo (nearest audio resampler and battery level) mentioned in the release notes, there were also many new cores introduced (from comparing the archives):

• ardous (Arduboy)
• bluemsx (MSX/SVI/ColecoVision/SG-1000)
• ecwolf (Wolf3D)
• gearcoleco (ColecoVision)
• mame2000 (Arcade)
• snes9x2002 (SNES)
• wasm4 (WASM-4)

1.10.2 brings these core improvements:

• picodrive (SMS/GG/MD/CD/32X, Arm assembler cores enabled, including SH-2 dynarec for 32X)

and new cores:

• a5200 (Atari 5200)
• bk (Electronika BK)
• cannonball (Out Run)
• chailove (ChaiLove)
• fceumm (NES)
• freechaf (Fairchild Channel F)
• freeintv (Mattel Intellivision)
• gearboy (GB/GBC)
• gearsystem (SMS/GG/SG-1000)
• gong (Pong)
• jaxe (CHIP-8)
• jumpnbump (Jump 'n Bump)
• minivmac (Apple Macintosh II)
• mrboom (Bomberman clone)
• pcsx_rearmed (Sony PlayStation)
• pocketcdg (PocketCDG cdg and mp3 player)
• quasi88 (NEC PC-8800)
• vaporspec (Vapor Spec)
• x1 (Sharp X1)

1.10.3 brings these core improvements:

• smsplusgx (SMS/GG background rendering fix)
• snes9x2002 (configurable transparency effects)

and more new cores:

• dinothawr (block pushing puzzle game)
• gme (Game Music Emu)
• lowresnx (LowRes NX fantasy console)
• reminiscence (Flashback engine)
• tyrquake (Quake engine)
• xrick (Rick Dangerous clone)

[salvacam]

I couldn't compile freechaf, I have to see the PR to see what I was doing wrong

[jSTE0]

It was actually compiled already, just a minor bug meant the artifact wasn't stored in the right directory: libretro/FreeChaF#27.

[Apaczer]

That's a lot for one mere RA update 😱 . I would only add:

MENU/RGUI:

• new "Standalone Cores" feature

VIDEO:

• new 2xfilters Upscale_240x160-.. for GBA

NOTES:

• mame2000 & snes9x2002 will play better than their younger variants.
• blueMSX has support for ColecoVision, but gearcoleco has better compatibility AFAIK
• gearsystem & fceumm might not perform well (as from beta test)
• you can find *.wasm carts from official repo (no mouse support)
• you can find *.hex files for Arduboy in eried's repo (not well optimized now)

[Apaczer]

picodrive (SMS/GG/MD/CD/32X, Arm assembler cores enabled, including SH-2 dynarec for 32X)

@jSTE0 that was huge improvement, especially for M-CD titles an above. The CD emulation went from bare 30÷40fps to fully playable 60fps on that core. I believe it puts now on par the libretro core with the standalone (did not test 32X yet, so can't be sure).

other TESTS:
gearboy - 49÷54fps [GB] Metroid II
fceumm - 45÷51fps [NES] Ninja Gaiden (nevertheless not bad!)
gearsystem - 35÷40fps [SMS] Castle of Illusion MM (v. accurate emulator)
gearsystem - 54÷60fps [SG-1000] Hustle Chumy ; Space Invaders (fully playable IMO)
wasm - depends from game (some good recommendations: Puyo ; Snake ; wasm4nia ; Sokoban ; Lime Volleyball ; hills)
ardous - 13fps÷18fps (this core is work in progress, and IIRC the main dev is working on new CPU emulation).

[jSTE0]

All from a single build flag, thanks to picoarch for finding the right flag.
That's a lot of useful testing, sounds like we need a guide for the "best" emulator for each platform (where best can mean performance, compatibility or some other measure).

[Apaczer]

It would be hard to bisect some of emulated platforms by their best option, for eg.:

• Master System/Game Gear - the Picodrive core performance is better if no emulated CPU overclocking is needed (for that you should use GenesisPlusGX core which allows that, especially for GG), however if you value more accurate option in terms of output image it would be recommended to use standalone Picodrive as you can read here: [Miyoo & Master System] Improper vertical scaling irixxxx/picodrive#59. The reasing behind this issue is that libretro frontend on Miyoo does not allow scaling image by "core_provided" aspect ratios, so you left with full 4:3 VDP (the cores' scaling options will not work in this scenario). I believe the "video_dingux_ipu_keep_aspect" is responsible for this. EDIT: On the other hand standalone doesn't allow for full screen scaling (as from official releases) and you left with CRT's NTSC aspect r. - more accurate but some may prefer the 4:3 option from libretro.

Possibly will be much easier for other platforms: eg. PCSX (only 1 PCSX ReARMed), SNES (perf. drPocketSNES)...

[Apaczer]

Lot of new cores surfaced lately, mostly demoscene related 😄.
I was keen to test out the most recent ChaiLove core, as it features launcher implementation. Did not work afterall on Miyoo, but would be fun idea to launch any app just through RetroArch (especially with @jahed's #302 approach).

[Apaczer]

Some words of gratitute from RA user 😆 . Thought guys you would want to know, there are men who really appreciate your work.

[Apaczer]

@jSTE0 I saw significant performance boost especially within PCSX ReARMed (over 10%, the 2D titles are very pleasing now) and SMS+GX core, even snes9x2002 performs on satisfactory level. Is this due to libretro/RetroArch@55b77cb ? I'm quite amazed.

BTW good job on TyrQuake, tried it with 20fps capped and no problem (standalone Quake was a mess) and thanks for xrick (pure classic for me)!

[jSTE0]

Is this due to libretro/RetroArch@55b77cb ?

Good find but I doubt it, it literally saves 1 instruction, i.e. 1 clock cycle, per frame. There's probably an additional tiny benefit in loading fewer cache lines but once it's done that it has to copy the rendered frame to the framebuffer, which is 320x240x2=150KiB, far larger than the 16KiB L1 data cache.
I think it's more to do with libretro/RetroArch#13814 which is the switch to the ALSA audio driver. This cuts out SDL as the middleware, going directly to the ALSA userspace library, so it's not executing as much code. You can try switching back to SDL (and an older PCSX ReARMed core, switching iTempo to 0 also made a difference) and see if the performance goes down again.

BTW good job on TyrQuake

Thanks, it was just a straight compile and testing which frame rate gives smooth audio. I set the default at 15fps (the on-screen fps counter sometimes showed as low as 12) as I couldn't get 20fps to be smooth. I leave mine at stock clocks though.

thanks for xrick (pure classic for me)!

You're welcome, again another straightforward build.
I'm pleased to see that we now have 61 cores (thanks to @salvacam for porting most of them, and RetroArch itself), 3 more than OpenDingux MIPS (I looked there to see which cores to try). I did try a few more cores but they were slow (~30 fps: crocods, lutro, vice-x64) or too slow (<20fps: tic-80, uzem).

[Apaczer]

I think it's more to do with libretro/RetroArch#13814 which is the switch to the ALSA audio driver

Indeed, I didn't notice it has switched by default to alsa, which worked miracles on cores that didn't have audio overrides!

I leave mine at stock clocks though.

My current OC is set to 864MHz on all high demanding emulators and RA - I've been using modified OC table accordingly Apaczer/gmenu2x_miyoocfw@2611e31 (it shows tangible boost).

I did try a few more cores but they were slow (~30 fps: crocods, lutro, vice-x64) or too slow (<20fps: tic-80, uzem)

Was wondering about DOSBox-pure core, saw one in mips builds but didn't try to compile it. I know that DOSBox can be cross-compiled and works, but lack of on screen keyboard makes it a bit hard to use if at all.

[jSTE0]

My current OC is set to 864MHz on all high demanding emulators and RA

I haven't been brave enough to OC some more, it's already overclocked as shipped as the Allwinner datasheet says 533MHz.

I have built DOSBox Pure, it launches into the menu, which is too small to read as it's 80-column text, shows 35fps and an emulation speed of 50% (enabled in the core options). That doesn't bode well for performance and I haven't found the time to try any software on it yet.

[jSTE0]

I have tried DOSBox Pure with the Commander Keen demo that comes with the CFW (I forgot that was there). It reports 25fps, emulation speed of ~35% and the game plays in slow motion as a result. Changing the CPU Core to dynamic, which uses the dynrec at all times, made no difference to performance. The dynrec is being built so I'm not sure why it made no difference.

The standalone version of DOSBox plays it smoothly but that's not a straight recompile of the upstream as it has a virtual keyboard, any idea where the source for that is?

[Apaczer]

The standalone version of DOSBox plays it smoothly but that's not a straight recompile of the upstream as it has a virtual keyboard, any idea where the source for that is?

Most of the src code for MiyooCFW programs can be found on Steward's repo and compile instructions are available on his website which include in this case configure script and adding LIBS flags to Makefile

[jSTE0]

Tried a few more cores (fps is from RetroArch's OSD, which does appear to read rather optimistically) but not planning to submit them upstream:

• fbalpha2012_neogeo: works but it's slow, around 30-35fps. It's based on FBA 0.97.24 (uses MAME 0.145u5 set) compared to the standalone version which is fba-a320 based on FBA 0.96.86 (MAME 0.126) so I guess it has became more accurate and hence slower in that time. This was on @jahed's wishlist but looks like it'll have to be the standalone version.
• vba_next: also slow, around 30fps and subjectively feels slower than mGBA. GBA-only and is slow even with the max manual frameskip of 4 so probably no real benefit as mGBA is already available.
• vemulator: works for some titles, doesn't always output sound (not sure if it's an issue with the emulator or content), but sometimes crashes when closing content. I did fix a few memory leaks but it still crashes.
• snes9x2005_plus: managed to fix the sound routines (related to unaligned memory access, need to work out the right set of compiler macros to avoid reducing performance of other platforms). Unsurprisingly it's slower than the non-plus version and the frameskip results in inconsistent frame times and jerkiness. Not useful at present, given the lower performance, but possibly in the future as it does give playable frame rates with neonloop's dynarec, if/when that gets submitted upstream.