RetroX 3 is out now!! Yes, this version is a milestone that deserves its own version number! Apart from having the new Collections feature, all the UI for Mobile and standard TV mode has been improved… a lot.
This version also includes three new themes, one is the built in RetroX theme that matches the mobile and standard TV mode, and the other two are new amazing themes ported by Nigel Rapley, who not only has been contributing with more themes, he also added the collections support for all existing themes. A big THANKS to Nigel!
There are some other “minor” changes like:
Support for multidisc 3DO games
Improved performance on slow devices when loading big collections (big, not huge đ )
Better mobile layout for small screens with 4:3 aspect ratio (Retroid Pocket 2)
Automatically silence video previews if background music is enabled
Faster / improved downloading of artwork from the RetroX server
Multiple fixes for multi disk games
Fixed a bug that sometimes prevented moving through covers in TV mode
… and more
And here is what comes in the next days because it is already in progress:
More collections
Updated data for trending/popular/recommended games
Some themes will be compatible with smalls screens (Retroid Pocket 2)
New default covers for games without artwork (partially done now)
A new option to show only games with artwork, no more manual cleaning needed
Just for stats: This version is 233 commits with 893 files changed. 14,679 additions and 3,987 deletions
Note: Some themes may require that you get the artwork from EmuMovies, you can do get it using a free EmuMovies account under Manage Games -> EmuMovies sync
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. Â A few days ago I started to work on this feature, and it is looking good!
This is such a frequently received question, that we felt it deserved a dedicated response.
Regular launchers only need to send the ROM file to the emulator, nothing else. In this sense, adding emulators would be a simple enough process. However, RetroX is a truly unique âfrontendâ, that can do so much more.
Often front ends will just use RetroArch to support a range of platforms, but this doesnât include those that use a keyboard, mouse or a joystick. These systems just do not work on RetroArch (Android). In fact many of the systems found within RetroX arenât even supported by RetroArch (Amiga, MS-DOS, Atari computers, etc).
RetroX on the other hand can (and does) make desktop based games run as if they were on a console. There are still several improvements that can be made to RetroX to improve the experience for the user, but rest assured â we will. However the point Iâm making is that we can!
Save / Load states in the Cloud
Adding a new emulator to RetroX is not as easy as you may think. It’s not just a case of directing the ROM to the emulator. You also need to integrate each emulator (with all their own unique quirks) into the unique features of RetroX.
This requires us to take the original emulators source code and making the distinctive modifications required to be compatible. Be that Universal Controller Setups, Android TV compatibility or the most complicated of all, cloud based save states (and memory cards) which use the standard RetroX interface. This last point often requires additional code to be added for image processing to incorporate screenshots into our unique multi-slot save feature, all of which must be coded from scratch.
Adapting systems already within the RetroArch platform is a fairly simple process. However, many of the emulators integrated within RetroX are standalones, all of which again require coding from scratch (including the most challenging of all – desktop based platforms).
But we love computer games!
RetroX compatible emulator
As our developer resources are scarce (mostly me, Franco), we have to set priorities in the way new features and new emulators are added to RetroX. Sometimes there are small fixes or features that may only take a few hours, but others can require weeks or even months of work. Recent examples being the ability to add games from network based storages (cloud, NAS), or the code for cloud based save states which required changes to be applied and tested to each of the supported emulators.
To help improve the regularity of new features and improvements I made the decision several weeks ago, to adapt my working style to allow me to simultaneously work on both long term and short term features (who says men canât multi-task). However, what has become apparent is that whatever approach we take, there will always be bottle necks.
So, in an effort to reduce your levels of anxiety, I can declare which emulators we want to include within RetroX in 2017, and in which order.
I hope that this will help to reduce the amount of questions that I receive (and answer) on this subject.
In the meantime, we will continue adding new features to RetroX, with plans already in place to improve functionality in several of the existing emulators we support. Including:
Since today a new application for Android TV devices has been released: FileX Manager.  As the name suggest, this app will help you manage your files on Android TV devices like the NVIDIA Shield TV, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon FireStick, Xiaomi Mi Box and even generic chinese TV Boxes.
This app has been designed to work **without the need of a pointer **, you can perform all operations with the D-Pad in your remote.
Note that this is an early release, but why wait for the advanced features if you can start using it today. And YES, as you may be guessing, it has been put into Frambu 1.1, so you can copy or sideload anything to your Raspberry Pi based RetroX setup from now on.
The current version is FREE for all the RetroX users. No trial, no ads, just you and your files.
This is a standalone application with more advanced features than the same file browser that you find embedded in RetroX, thatâs not a surprise because both use the same codebase.
With FileX you can:
Manage your local files
Manage your files stored in Google Drive, DropBox, One Drive and Box cloud services
Manage your files stored in your NAS or shared in a Windows Network (SMB/CIFS)
Open compressed files as if they were simple folders (zip, 7z and rar files are supported)
RetroBoxTV “God save the states” release is finally out!
This is the first update that brings some features ONLY for Activated Accounts (AA). This is because the new features will increase the load in our servers, and some features don’t make sense to free users anyway because they see only a few games.
The main feature (AA only) is of course, cloud based save states and memory cards. This basically means that you can play a game in one device and continue playing in another device. The save states and memory cards are now tied to your user account, it doesn’t matter what device you are using.
At the beginning, if you already have more than one device, the first one will upload all its save states and memory cards, the following devices will only upload the files that are not in the cloud to prevent overwriting, and it will only download the files that are not in the current device, again to prevent overwriting. Once you get all your devices running, the new saves will turn into the official ones for your account.
New Save States user interface
With this new feature, the current user interface for save/load states and slot selection was not cutting it. There was no way to distinguish between current and previous save states so I made a complete change on how the emulators handle that part. As you can see in the screenshots attached, now all save states are shown with a screenshot of the moment they were created, that will help you to recognize easily what slot has what state. The only emulator where I couldn’t get screenshots was the N64 emulator, for now it will only show the N64 logo, but I hope to revisit that code in the future.
The cloud based save states will be free to all AA for now, but if this feature turns to be an storage issue in the future, we may have to bring a way to fund it, but don’t worry, we thought that the worst case would be a small yearly subscription fee.
Another new feature is the Playstation multidisc support. Just put all the files in one folder and RetroBoxTV will offer a “change disk” option.
The “last played” game list was stored in the device, now it has been moved to the user account. That will help multi-device users find their latest played games anywhere.
For AA accounts using TV devices I added some new lists to the front page, this lists will help you find games that other people consider that are worth playing. The new lists are: Trending this week, Most popular and Most favorited. We show each game in one list only, so you will get up to 75 recomemndations from those lists.
And the last one. To stop ES Explorer causing issues with RetroBoxTV, there will be a warning message if RetroBoxTV detects that you left ES Explorer running.
