Retroarch 1.3.4 Warning

[Lordmonkus]

Just a word of warning to anyone using an older build of Retroarch and thinking of making the upgrade to 1.3.4. Do not overwrite your older working version. Make a new folder for 1.3.4 and play around with it before hand. I have been messing around with 1.3.4 now for the last couple of hours and it has some bugs in it that for me make it near unusable as it sits right now. I am not saying the build is a total mess, I am only saying be very careful with it. The CG_Shaders menu is broken, as well as CG_Shaders loading in general though it can be somewhat worked around. They changed where it stores the games save files by default so if you load a game expecting your save file to be there it may not be. I have my older version set to store the save files in the same folder as the game itself and this newer version wants to store them in the saves folder in the RA install folder. Have not figured out yet how to get it back to the way I want it. Still gonna work on things some more to see if I can sort out some of these issues.

[SentaiBrad]

I made a video on how to update RA, and the best practice I try to teach is that a new RA install goes to a new folder then you just carry over your existing information. I haven't found any bugs or errors yet either, so thank you for sharing what you've found.

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah I tried carrying over my old config and shader files but that caused some issues. I don't know if this is the problem or not but I think they made some fairly big changes in 1.3.4 and some of the files just don't carry over so easily. The shaders issue seems to be a known problem, http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5554 I managed to solve the save file problem by manually editing the retroarch.cfg file and making the following lines: savefile_directory = "default" savestate_directory = "default" This forces Retroarch to use the game roms location for the save files again. The same lines in the core specific config would have to be changed as well if a core config file was made before the default config was edited. I don't think that version 1.3.4 is riddled with bugs but I ran into a couple of big ones for me personally because of where I like my save files located and the fact I use a custom edited CD based shader. I think the GLSL shaders are fine. I kind of posted this as a reminder to people when they do want to update their emulators to do some testing first to make sure the new version is going to work the way they want and not destroy hours of configuring

[SentaiBrad]

Yea the heads up is surely appreciated.

[Lordmonkus]

I don't know if they made any changes on the audio side of things with 1.3.4 but it seems they made some improvements on the audio latency. I used to be able to only go as low as 32 ms on most systems and occasionally down to 24 ms, 16 was always a no go zone without getting massive sound distortion and crackling. But now it seems that 16 ms is doable and no distortion at all that I have come across yet, more testing needs to be done. Hopefully one day they will be able to implement a way to come close to matching GrooveyMame + Asio4all and its 0.1 ms audio latency. Makes me sad that CG shaders are so broken right now though. I cannot use my Royale-Kurozumi edit without making RA crash on start up. So for now in 1.3.4 I am using Hyllian-Multipass which looks pretty good.

[SentaiBrad]

Have you tried the latest nightly? They may have already fixed it.

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah I dumped the nightly exe in with the current 1.3.4 testing folder. I can load the shader while in Retroarch but if I try and load game through Launchbox with that shader a the active shader in the core config it just crashes RA. If I delete the config the game runs fine and I can load the shader while in RA again but again it will crash when I leave and try and load another game of using the same core.