I dunno. I tried emulating Oracle of Ages like a year ago, and couldn’t get it to run smooth in Retroarch. A standalone emulator worked fine. Chrono Cross and Alundra, either.
I keep hearing stuff about how Retroarch is so good. But I haven’t seen it, in three very different use cases (games from 3 different consoles).
About the only positive I come away with from Retroarch, is that it simplifies finding an emulator.
chemists get !mix, that lets them combine two items
there’s some basic stuff like high potion + phoenix down = revive with full hp/mp and then more esoteric stuff like dragon fang + potion = level up by 20 for the duration of the battle (repeatable to a cap of 255) and when you get mime later on you can also mime these I believe without expending the ingredients
one funny trick involves using holy water + turtle shell (i think!) which puts berserk status on the enemy without actually checking if they’re vulnerable to it or not on the final boss, who transitions to a second form using a spell in the ai script
so the game immediately goes to the ending instead
i just wanna sit down and play more.friends of ringo ishikawa the dialogue and characterization is very good
hard to say what your exact issues are, and hey computers can be odd sometimes, but correctly emulating a standard gameboy/megadrive game is certainly something a number of retroarch cores can achieve; it might be worth diving deep and trying to figure out for the other benefits retroarch offers. not sure how much config stuff you fooled around with, but could be as simple as increasing/decreasing your audio latency buffer, or swapping the Audio Driver. Also, I prefer using the RGUI menu_driver over the XMB style, and enabling UI -> Show Advanced Settings.
Give this a glance:
this might be the pitch to the layman, but the real benefit retroarch offers is a standardized input/output pipeline that can and does get a large amount of focused development. retroarch is the most popular piece of emulation software and has been for years and has attracted lots of smarties; just recent stuff like run-ahead and the strides toward proper crt output implementation is enough to justify the entire project, but across the board input/output latency, video/audio sync, is usually better for libretro cores running in retroarch than their standalone equivalents.
I’m simply talking about general speed. None of the games I have tried, have run at full speed (Alundra, Crusader of Centy, Chrono Cross, Zeldo Oracle of Ages). In addition to other issues, like totally busted sound (Centy) or slow sound (Zelda Oracle)(but that was probably tied to the fact the game as a whole, was running slow). I think Alundra’s sound was slow and pitch shifted, too. But again, game wasn’t full speed, in general.
All of these games plopped right into standalone emulators and played at full speed.
*Keep in mind this is a dual core i5 laptop, where the CPU speed of 3.2ghz, is probably close to the minimum acceptable for most emulators.
Although I dunno, because people run PSone games on Vitas so…
It could be as simple as a conflict between audio sync and vsync
If it cant find your saves, make sure the directory its looking for saves in hasn’t been reset in some way.
Personally, I avoid using the playlist feature if something doesn’t natively scan because it seems to break more often than not.
If you are on a nightly build of retroarch, it’s definitely worth switching back to stable.
retroach isn’t an emulator, it’s an intricate puzzle box that you solve and instead of flaying off all of your skin and subjecting you to eternal damnation, it plays games
though honestly setting everything up is much like having one’s skin flayed off
my experience with retroarch has been similarly frustrating, though thankfully I haven’t encountered any performance issues yet
I really hate that it copies the xmb interface too
it drives me crazy that if you want to have an actual nice interface for selecting games you have to install a separate launcher program that interfaces with it
like… what is the point of retroarch at that point? I only installed it because of the nice crt shaders it lets me use, though I imagine I can probably still use those with a lot of standalone emulators too, with varying amounts of hassle.
Is there a retroarch frontend that copies the ZSNES GUI so I can maximize that late-90s/early-00s emulator nostalgia?
whatever you’re experiencing is definitely a configuration issue in terms of how retroarch is interacting with your Windows environment, and even if clockspeed were a good measure of CPU power, you still have fifty times as much as you need for a megadrive emulator, and retroarch isn’t somehow running the least efficient megadrive emulator in the world. it’s not a performance problem per se.
that’s fair. I can see how it can be a lifesaver for platforms where your only input is a controller
is a way better approach to doing this specifically for desktop environments as opposed to for everything else, but it’s macOS only and (very sadly) doesn’t support retroarch cores, so you can’t use it as a drop-in alternative frontend and still benefit from all the upstream work.
anyway, Retroarch has a WIMP interface now, and its good but its still early days for it. You don’t need to use the XMB interface anymore.
I think it’s kind of hideous and I wish they hadn’t used Qt
but that’s non-Cocoa non-Electron GUI frameworks for you
the Switch-esque Ozone driver has also been available for a couple version, as well, iirc
some parts of the UX are totally bonkers if you’re trying to use it without a controller on a PC for the first time, like the knots you have to twist yourself into to figure out how to set core specific options (I have to load a game then press L3+R3 simultaneously? what the hell?) are initially like “why am I doing this” so I am 100% not a retroarch desktop interface apologist, if you hate it you hate it
I gave up on using it because I couldn’t make it stop opening some cores at like 6000px wide to scale across all my monitors and when I reported this as an issue they closed my bug as “intended behaviour” because they really aren’t that interested in supporting a use case of “I’m playing this game in a window that is not a linear multiple of its original resolution, with my keyboard” which is still what emulation is to me a lot of the time and I still donate to them
it really does make wonderful sense as a cross platform project though
the real pre-play heavy config & selection UI is File Explorer
like if you gotta pick one or the other I think a 10 foot interface actually makes more sense for a program who’s only purpose is to play game pad video games it is almost noble for something that has gotten this complex
