Retroarch - what are your experiences?

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Jubatian
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Retroarch - what are your experiences?

Post by Jubatian »

I tried to look in RetroArch ( http://www.retroarch.com/ ), mostly to look into what would be necessary to port an emulator to it (CUzeBox).

However I couldn't get a very compelling first impression, so I would like to ask if anyone here could set it up, use it, whatever.

It comes with Debian 9, so I first tried starting that. The menu was difficult to figure out (doesn't react to mouse, action keys are 'X' and 'Z', and you can't access the menu labeled "Help" until randomly tapping on your keyboard in a desperate attempt to accidentally find it). There were no cores in it, I found that it would download a core, I selected one (Uzebox as somebody already ported UZEM to it), but I couldn't find what I should see then (no apparent change anywhere).

OK, let's read the documentation. I went on the site, and hit the link labeled "DOCS". I get this: https://buildbot.libretro.com/docs/ , not sure what to do there, at least on the https://buildbot.libretro.com/docs/guides/files/ path I found a single PDF which describes the same method which I figured out on my own for CUzeBox (running both video and audio in sync using a frame rate controller).

Then I tried the "Get Retroarch" link to see whether I have anything broken. There I saw it had an online build, so I naturally wanted to try it ( https://buildbot.libretro.com/web/ ). No matter what I choose in the dropdown, after some loading, clicking either the big invader icon or "Run" on the top, I end up in a "MAIN MENU", with menus like "Quick Menu", "Load Content" and likes, and at best I can crash my browser with it (I couldn't succeed running anything, I am using Firefox, but I think it should work if it advertises itself especially by Firefox's logo).

Anyone knows what to do with this to make it actually start something?
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Artcfox
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Re: Retroarch - what are your experiences?

Post by Artcfox »

I found the Uzem core for it here: https://buildbot.libretro.com/nightly/l ... 64/latest/

Extract the .so file and put it in this directory:

Code: Select all

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libretro/
and then it will load the Uzem 2.0 core.

The config file for it is:

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/etc/retroarch.cfg
X is the key that you need to use instead of Enter (I found that by trial and error).

I navigated to a folder where bugz.uze was and tried to load it, but it crashed on me with the following error:

Code: Select all

SD Emulation of following files:
Failed to open /home/user/uzebox-games/bugz.srm: No such file or directory
Segmentation fault
user@debian:~/uzebox/cuzebox$ Protocol error: bad 3 (Window); Sequence Number 5
 Opcode (20, 0) = GetProperty
 Bad resource 23068674 (0x1600002)
 at -e line 15.
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Artcfox
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Re: Retroarch - what are your experiences?

Post by Artcfox »

It looks like this may be the problem, but I'm not going to compile it from source code to test it: https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/issues/1521
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