The release of the RetroArch 1.15 project has been published, which develops an overlay for emulating various game consoles, allowing classic games to run through a simple unified graphical interface. It supports emulators for consoles such as Atari 2600/7800/Jaguar/Lynx, Game Boy, Mega Drive, NES, Nintendo 64/DS, PCEngine, PSP, Sega 32X/CD, SuperNES, etc. Gamepads from existing gaming consoles, including Playstation 3, Dualshock 3, 8bitdo, Xbox 1, and Xbox 360, as well as general-purpose gamepads like Logitech F710 can be used. The emulator supports advanced features like multiplayer gaming, save states, enhanced image quality for old games using shaders, rewinding gameplay, hot-plugging game controllers, and video streaming.
Among the changes:
- Significant improvements have been made for the macOS platform, for instance, support for the MFi protocol for gamepads has been added; simultaneous support for both OpenGL and Metal graphics APIs in one build has been provided; a driver for the Vulkan API supporting HDR has been added; and a glcore driver for video output using OpenGL 3.2 has been implemented. The RetroArch build for macOS is available on Steam.
- The shader system has implemented the ability to cascade additions and overlays of shader presets (different shader presets can be mixed and saved as new presets). For example, to create visual effects, it is possible to combine CRT and VHS shaders.
- An alternative method for calculating rendered frames called 'preemptive frames' has been proposed, differing from the previously available 'runahead' method by achieving higher performance through rewriting the history before the current frame only when the controller state changes. In a test running the game Donkey Kong Country 2 in the Snes9x 2010 emulator using the new method, performance increased from 1963 to 2400 frames per second.
- In the builds for the Android platform, the input_android_physical_keyboard setting and a menu item for forcing the device to function as a keyboard instead of a gamepad have been added.
- Support for the Wayland protocol has been enhanced, with support for pointer-constraints and relative-pointer protocol extensions added.
- The menu has been revamped.
- Support for the Vulkan graphics API has been improved.
Source: opennet.ru
