In the last weeks we have been making progressive steps to be more open to our users, like publishing our emulator porting libraries in github and allowing users to create their own themes, but we believed that we could do more. So, since today we have opened a forum to hear from you!! In our forums you can request features, ask for support, read our latest _unofficial_ news, and even share info and material about retro games and emulators.
Until now we have been using Facebook to be in touch with the users, but it’s hard to keep track of all the conversations, so we hope that these forums will allow us to build community with you, without restrictions.
With no further due, please go and start with our welcome message:
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about why other frontends are so popular while they are only “front-ends”. Don’t take me wrong, I know that they have a lot of work behind, but I honestly think that RetroX is way ahead of most Android frontends in terms of ease of use and features. Only that it seems that this is not enough.
Watching videos in YouTube I find a lot of reviews of RetroPie / Emulation Station and some reviews of other frontends for Android presented as “the best”. Sometimes I write to the authors of those videos and they have never heard of RetroX before.
I have come to the conclusion that a lot of people is attracted by visuals, and I remember the old days of Linux when a lot of people wanted to install it just to have “The 3D cube”. So their rationale is to be attracted first and then try to figure out how to make it work, and probably it doesn’t matter how hard it could be, they just want to have what they saw. (It happened a lot with Linux circa 2004). The approach of RetroX has been the oposite, give the best technology to make the process easier, but if people is not attracted first, they will never get to that point.
Personally I prefer a clean view, soft colors, smooth fonts, but that’s me! Other people clearly prefer more “joyful” views. I’ve received some comments about this from several people (Allan Mcdonald, Lee Conduit and others) but I was too focused in other priorities that I didn’t worry much about it. I should add that one of my reasons to say “no” is that I thought I would spend a lot of time finding the appropiate colors, icons, background etc. Time that I prefer to focus on new features.
But now I opened my mind about it.
I will add a new “view/layout” to RetroX to make it themeable by anyone. This will allow other people to use their own skills and tastes to create their own realization of how RetroX should look. I’ll keep the current modes and will add a new “themeable” mode. From what I’ve seen in EmulationStation with a few elements people can create really beautiful themes, so I think that this will take RetroX to new unexplored grounds.
Why not before? May be I wasn’t aware of how communities can add their own views of what is best. Yes, I’m a bit of a dictator in RetroX but this new theme system will compensate my lack of graphical skills. I can provide the foundations and anyone interested will be able to build over it, something that was brought back to my mind after opening the source code of the RetroX libraries.
The above post was published in the RetroManiaUK group on Facebook, on Aprils 1st, but it is not an April fools joke. A few days ago I started to work on this feature, and it is looking good!
Finally Sega Dreamcast has arrived to RetroX!! This is one of the most requested system and we put it at the top of the list in our 2017 roadmap, so a lot of people were waiting for it.
I will divide this post on two aspects of this release: Users and Developers.
Users
Consider this an initial release. I left some parts to later updates because they required more days and I prefer to release as soon as I can.
Settings – Performance options (frame skipping, specific fixes/optimizations)
BIOS boot
Get rid of the required clock set up
Most of these are options available in the original emulator, but not exposed in this port.
Note that this emulator doesn’t support save states, only saving progress through the original Dreamcast VMU “memory cards”. As you may expect, those saves are stored with your RetroX account in our cloud.
For developers
Honestly I was a bit reluctant to work on this system, because it is always a challenge to port a complete new emulator to RetroX. There is always a little detail that require several iterations and testing, all emulator are written different! Although this was not the exception, I didn’t think it would take the few time that it took to make the port (scattered hours among three days). Sometimes this kind of work can take at least one week.
The code base which is the Reicast emulator is very clean and fortunately most changes could be done only in the Java part. Also, the fact that this emulator doesn’t support saving states reduced the complexity of the port a lot.
This port was made in this new era of RetroX where the code is committed in public, so anyone interested can follow the track of how the changes were made. If anybody is interested in porting a new emulator, this will be an excellent example case.
The problem that took most of the time was something that didn’t happen before. Once the options menu was displayed, the GL surface went blank. I had to do several tests to know exactly what was the problem, and my conclusion is that for some reason, part of the GL surface was altered in a way that it was not visible anymore. Finally I came to a workaround, which is to add the view and remove it after use (not hide/gone it), this forced to GL surface to reset completely. The code ended to be more dirty but it worked.
In comparison, the Mupen64 emulator also used a GL surface but it doesn’t have this problem. Looking at the root cause would require a lot of iterations, so I just went with the workaround.
