Upgrading emulators

[Sentry]

Hi there, I was just moving one of Coolpipes 200gb setups from LB ver 8.2 and I was wondering if there are any problems to downloading and installing emulators like Retroarch (et al) into and overwriting the directories that are pre-existing within Coolpipes build (or any build)? I have this on my 4tb WD External drive.

 

Thank you! ?

[Lordmonkus]

There is no simple yes or no answer here, it just depends.

Sometimes you can just simply overwrite old exes and files while other times you cannot. It depends on the emulator and whether or not there were any changes made that require a fresh install.

[neil9000]

Also to add, as you are using a pre built build that also uses Rocketlauncher you could break things by updating emulators. The rocketlauncher modules that interface with the emulators are usually for specific emulator versions and can/will break if you update to a non supported version.

[Sentry]

Thank you both for your input here. I am going to try to update what I can and see how things go ? Thanks again!

[Agent47]

1 hour ago, neil9000 said:

Also to add, as you are using a pre built build that also uses Rocketlauncher you could break things by updating emulators. The rocketlauncher modules that interface with the emulators are usually for specific emulator versions and can/will break if you update to a non supported version.

While true, it's pretty rare. For the most part you can use updated emulator versions just fine.

The modules break when emulators change command line syntax (which will break launching from any frontend) and when they change the window class/title or the UI lib completely.

The only major ones in recent memory were Dolphin (changed command line syntax and moved to qt), Demul (RL checks for a string in the title bar to detect when emulation actually starts to reduce the time you're staring at a black screen before the game displays), and WinVICE moved to gtk.

Even when modules break new modules are posted in the RL forum pretty quickly usually.