RetroArch Vs Standalone Emulators

[Tyson]

First of all, I think RetroArch is great.  Currently using crt hyllian shader for Snes, Nes, Genesis, TG16 and everything is looking great.  N64 i had some issues with the Mupen64plus, every time I apply a shader, i get a Black Screen.  As soon as I turn the shader off, it loads again, but looks horrible.

I loaded up project 64 standalone, and it looks fantastic out of the box. 

So my question is, what other emulators do you use over retroarch? (I think the autoconfig for controllers is wonderful if using multiple controllers for system specific, so I would like to stick with retroarch where I can.

(Anyone have any idea about the retroarch issue with n64 and the shader?  I'm using the latest stable build, 1.41.)

[fromlostdays]

I've noticed some shaders don't play in RetroArch, but for me personally, I'd just not use that shader. Compatibility wise for many systems it's just as good or better than the standalone counterparts. I use it for everything it will emulate. Even mame. Also, you can try the glupen64core.

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[Lordmonkus]

For N64 you are getting a black screen probably because you are upscaling the resolution and that messes with the shader. I would just suggest setting the resolution in the core settings to your monitors native resolution and be done with it. I think it looks about as good as you are going to get for an N64 game.

GLupeN64 is no longer a thing using that name, it is now back under the Mupen64plus core and the old Mupen64 core is under the ParaLLEi core. Use the Mupen64plus core now.

For other systems I use Retroarch where possible but for Dreamcast I use Demul, and PSP I use the stand alone build of PPSSPP. The stand alone emulators for these systems are better than the Retroarch cores.

Mame is a toss up between the RA core and stand alone when it comes to the latest versions. They are both very close in terms of quality with very minor differences separating them and neither has a definitive edge over the other. However if you are using an older version of a Mame core then the stand alone is a much better choice over the Retroarch core.

[AGEE1981]

I personally use stand alone emulators for all systems, not that I have anything aginst retroarch, I just never actually bothered to teach myself it as my emus were all setup as I desire before that was even a valid option. Does look very good (certainly from a controller standpoint, having to setup your controller just the once sounds real nice).

 

Guess it's one of those things, whatever is easiest for you personally and gets you the results you want is the ideal solution

Edited April 20, 2017 by AGEE1981

[mothergoose729]

The standalone emulators almost always offer more features and more robust customization than the retroarch cores. The main advantage of retroarch is the unified UI. Sometimes, the retroarch version of an emulator has additional features or tweaks that are not always readily available in the stand alone.

Having used retroarch for a long time though, I am finding that I generally prefer stand alone emulators. In particular, the way input is handled in retroarch is both a blessing and a curse. I find that stand alone emulators usually have more rigid button assignments (to a particular controller or xinput device index that is always player one, ect), that ultimately makes them more predictable than retroarch, which often guesses wrong or gets confused by the existance of other input devices (the dolphin bar flubbing things up being a great example).

It has been my experience, based on where I see the work going and what some of the devs say, that retroarch is really focused on ARM devices and to a lesser extent hacked consoles. Retroarch with a front end launcher is perfect for things like the rasberry pi's. For windows you have a lot more options. Using something like launchbox, I now prefer emulators that let me do more low level customization and tweaking than retroarch usually offers.


For my purposes, I use retroarch for atari 2600, atari 7800, NES, master system, SNES, genesis, playstation, sega saturn, MAME, Neo Geo (through MVS roms), gameboy handhelds, and PSP. I am planning on replacing half of those in the near future with standalone for various reasons, and I think eventually I might like to replace all of them with standalone emulator at some point. The majority of the emulators I use now are standalone, and customization, features, and automation are the main reason (in addition to retroarch not supporting all systems yet).

So retroarch is great for a lot of reasons, and especially good for people emulating 8bit and 16bit systems who don't want to fuss about very much. Power users like myself should definitely use standalones most of the time.

Edited April 21, 2017 by mothergoose729

[AGEE1981]

On 4/21/2017 at 7:50 PM, mothergoose729 said:

It has been my experience, based on where I see the work going and what some of the devs say, that retroarch is really focused on ARM devices and to a lesser extent hacked consoles. Retroarch with a front end launcher is perfect for things like the rasberry pi's. For windows you have a lot more options. Using something like launchbox, I now prefer emulators that let me do more low level customization and tweaking than retroarch usually offers.

 

This is pretty much how I feel, in the early days of Retroarch in particular they were primarily focussed on ARM. Obviously that may have changed now (although I would imagine features are still limited to keep compatibility with ARM)

Edited April 23, 2017 by AGEE1981

[Lordmonkus]

I'm not exactly sure how people think that stand alone emulators offer more customization over Retroarch though. With Retroarch you get get the "core specific" options on top of all the the other universal tweaks like Hard GPU Sync and Vsync options along with drivers, shaders and controller configurations which you can do on a per game basis. You really cannot get more customization than that.

[AGEE1981]

3 hours ago, lordmonkus said:

I'm not exactly sure how people think that stand alone emulators offer more customization over Retroarch though. With Retroarch you get get the "core specific" options on top of all the the other universal tweaks like Hard GPU Sync and Vsync options along with drivers, shaders and controller configurations which you can do on a per game basis. You really cannot get more customization than that.

Horses for courses

Edited April 23, 2017 by AGEE1981

[mothergoose729]

8 hours ago, lordmonkus said:

I'm not exactly sure how people think that stand alone emulators offer more customization over Retroarch though. With Retroarch you get get the "core specific" options on top of all the the other universal tweaks like Hard GPU Sync and Vsync options along with drivers, shaders and controller configurations which you can do on a per game basis. You really cannot get more customization than that.

Unified shaders, save states, and controller input are definitely one of the highlight features of retroarch. Retroarch has all great low level customizations with config files, so you can get around needing to change drivers or flip the screen around or whatever for particular games. Here is where I have found retroarch lacking:

MAME: Tons and tons of features missing. I won't list them all. 

DOSBOX: Retroarch has a DOSBOX cores, but frankly nobody should use it. That goes for all the PC emulators in retroarch.

N64: You have a choice between the parallelie core and the mupegen with glide64. You often need multiple plugin setups and configs to run a good spectrum of the n64 library. There are also problems with using a real n64 controller as input. 

VBA-M: A lot of the input link emulation stuff you might want to do for pokemon , or for hooking up to an emulated gamecube, don't work. 

Light Gun emulation: Retroarch only supports one mouse input device, and there are a lot of emulators that should support light gun emulation but don't in retroarch. In general, any input device that isn't the standard controller for that system probably won't work. For example, I don't think retroarch supports the analog controller for the master system. 

Cheat Files: Very spotty. For most cores they don't work.  

PPSSPP and Desume have some niche features not supported by the retroarch cores. PPSSPP in particular really benefits from some intense, low level customization on a per game basis. In general, for any emulator that is still be actively developed, the retroarch cores is usually one or two major releases behind, which can lead to you running into problems that have already been fixed in the stand alone. For example, mednafen's saturn support is all bleeding edge, with compatibility and accuracy getting better by the day. 

And I could go on. 

As I have gotten deeper and deeper into emulation, I have uncovered a lot of edge cases that retroarch doesn't account for. The majority of the work has been done to increase compatibility and features for standalone. Retroarch includes everything you really need to get games running (mostly), but it doesn't include everything that is out there. 

[Lordmonkus]

I never said that Retroarch was definitively better than stand alones in all cases, I merely stated that Retroarch in many cases have just as many options as their stand alone counterparts especially when you dig into the core specific options. There are 2 things outside of universal shaders and controller support that Retroarch has over their stand alone counterparts. Much better audio sync and input lag customization. You can lower the audio latency to suit your system and you can adjust V-Sync frame delay to reduce input latency which in some cases can be very noticeable.

I am most certainly not going to sit here and nitpick and compare each and every possible core and stand alone emulator. Like I have stated many times before in other discussions of this topic elsewhere. Retroarch and stand alones both have their pros and cons and comparing the pros and cons is a legitimate discussion for people to have but sit here and definitively say that stand alone emulators have more options and customization is patently false.

As you said, stand alone emulators may account for edge cases.  Only a small percentage of end users will ever notice and care about these though. Most people want a more universal system and Retroarch provides this. Setup one emulator and it applies to the bulk of their systems with a nice shader (if the user wants that), quickly accessible save states and cheats (for the cores that support it) and superior audio and input latency.

[mothergoose729]

6 minutes ago, lordmonkus said:

 

I am most certainly not going to sit here and nitpick and compare each and every possible core and stand alone emulator. Like I have stated many times before in other discussions of this topic elsewhere. Retroarch and stand alones both have their pros and cons and comparing the pros and cons is a legitimate discussion for people to have but sit here and definitively say that stand alone emulators have more options and customization is patently false.

 

That bit felt oddly personal. You don't have to nitpick the differences if you don't want to, but it is relevant and useful to the thread topic. 

You can definitely say that standalone emulators have more options and customization, because some of them do. I pointed out several examples. Retroarch brings features to every core that are not always available in the standalone, so that is true too. We can both be right.

I sometimes use different emulators for different games in launchbox. Retroarch is as good or sometimes better than standalone for a lot of systems in a lot of cases. Use retroarch where it makes sense and use standalone where it doesn't. 

[SentaiBrad]

Back to the original problem, which was a while ago now: Mupen64Plus can only use certain shaders, the ones under GLSL I believe. However, with Internal Scaling up and MSAA set to 4 or 8, it looks better than applying shaders.

Now to this new disagreement. Some standalone emulators have great options, then some don't allow you to change the resolution or put it in full screen, so most standalone emulators don't. You can not say some do, so all are great. Not even close. Hell, RetroArch is pretty great overall, but some of it's cores suck (like for PSP). However, what RetroArch does for most of it's cores is better than most standalone emulators out there. It has a common feature set, standardizes a few things, and made some tough, but good, decisions that improves emulation overall. Where RetroArch makes sense is pretty much every console on the list except DOS, PSP, DS, MAME and Dreamcast. All could change in the future, and new systems could be added to that list. Though, MAME (MESS) in RetroArch actually emulates just fine, and as good as standalone MAME, but because MAME is already a tad confusing, RA is a tad confusing, RA MAME is made worse. Their UX for that could do with some redesign to bring it in with the rest of it's design philosophy. PSP is out of date by 2 years, and DS is out of date as well. DOS I'm not quite sure whats going on. MAME has contributors, but the other don't as much.

There are standalone emulators that do very, and have a few key settings that are laid out in a slightly better way. I'm not even talking about a normal Windows UI design to the XMB Style Design RA has. Both are really well, and both work. Sony had a well laid out and good UX with PSP and PS3, so that UI certainly works. It's getting better, surely, but there is still more it could do, and I am sure it will do. There are more advanced, emulator specific options for some emulators, but even those are in RA in the Core Options. Not every core gets the same treatment, if there is any treatment to make, but still.

[Porl Hendy]

This post is interesting... So i have yet to set up mame properly yet, is retroarch easy to set up for mame? And do u get to disable the 1st screen before the game starts... The screen that says press left then right. Thanks 

[Lordmonkus]

Yes, it's actually very easy to setup. You don't need to setup a rompath like in the stand alone Mame.

Just import your roms like normal for Mame in Launchbox and then have Retroarch for the emulator with the command line -L "cores\mame_libretro.dll"

You can then use the core options to disable the nag screen and use the Tab key to setup controllers (if you want) just like in the stand alone.

[Porl Hendy]

Thank you @lordmonkus really helpful

[AGEE1981]

7 hours ago, mothergoose729 said:

That bit felt oddly personal. You don't have to nitpick the differences if you don't want to, but it is relevant and useful to the thread topic. 

You can definitely say that standalone emulators have more options and customization, because some of them do. I pointed out several examples. Retroarch brings features to every core that are not always available in the standalone, so that is true too. We can both be right.

I sometimes use different emulators for different games in launchbox. Retroarch is as good or sometimes better than standalone for a lot of systems in a lot of cases. Use retroarch where it makes sense and use standalone where it doesn't. 

Have to say I kind of agree with you here, that did seem like an ultra defensive "gotta defend my brand" reply on some levels . As I said before, horses for courses to quote an old saying.

Edited April 24, 2017 by AGEE1981

[Lordmonkus]

It's not being defensive, I was merely saying that making blanket statements and calling it fact is bad information for users.

If I said something along the lines of "Retroarch emulates everything better than stand alones" and then cherry picked specific cases where it actually is true while ignoring the ones that aren't that would be an incorrect statement and a disservice to people new to emulation looking for information to help them choose which is best for them.

And if I had to sit here and go through every single stand alone emulator and its Retroarch counterpart to compare each and every feature this thread would become a massive mess in a hurry.

I guess if me pointing out a flaw in someones point of view is me being defensive then so be it. I would rather be "defensive" as you put it and give people correct information rather than tell people things that are wrong.

[SentaiBrad]

Yea, making statements as a whole based on one or two examples for everything as a whole is a very bad idea. As for the list of stuff offered as bad for RetroArch, yea we agree. We tell people all the time about what cores not to use, and it's primarily PSP, DS, DOS and Dreamcast. That doesn't make the rest of the emulator bad, in fact, most of the rest of those cores are much better because of RetroArch then they ever were in Standalone form. Hell, the Sega core (Genesis GX? Not Pico), only exists on PC's in RetroArch. Otherwise, it's on consoles only, and it's fantastic. It's not really true that cores are behind, MAME is updated quite often now. PSP though on the other hand, is 2 years out of date, not 2 releases out of date. I tell people that constantly, and have people switch to PPSSPP. For N64, playing in Mupen64Plus is totally fine. I'm doing a stream/LP using that core, and my PS4 controller. Works much better than anything else standalone. The rest of that stuff, the stuff that has to do with RetroArch, they're improving. Cheat support shouldn't be considered make or break in my opinion, but they're certainly improvising it regardless. If no one wants to maintain the core, like PSP, then it doesn't happen. They just rolled out 3 new systems though, and they're working really well. What RetroArch is pulling off, to bring a multitude of features across many systems at once is astounding and no one else is attempting it. Mednafen tries to a smaller extent, but is in RA anyways. BizHawk is trying, tried, but... yea. What's the one on Mac? I forget the name, the multi emulator, but it's honestly a joke. So sure, RetroArch doesn't hit it out of the park with every core, and the ones it doesn't the standalone's are actually very competent. However, calling RA bad because a few cores are not maintained is a very dumb thing to do, and calling all standalone emulators better because those emulators for those systems are better is also just as foolish. It's a 2 way street, and everyone benefits in the end. RetroArch, because of what it's doing with its unified system, is doing some really awesome things. It goes far beyond video game system cores as well, and can be put on quite a lot of different platforms. It's flexibility and sheer powerful nature can not be ignored, and it's something most other emulators can't achieve.

[Lordmonkus]

To be fair, the original statement was "offer more features and more robust customization than the retroarch cores" which is where I disagreed but for the exact same reasons. It all depends on the emulator and core being compared.

[SentaiBrad]

Yea, I guess im losing the point of the disagreement then.