Homebrew [Release] Unofficial Retroarch 3DS

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davhuit

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All I am saying is that releasing compiled cores that just crash and haven't be correctly tested serves no purpose but confusing people.

Also, considering the weakness of 3ds CPU, optimized cores (like ones Ith stuff written in ARM assembly or dynarecs) are necessary if you ever want to get acceptable speed.

Do what you want to do, really, but that's my opinion.


Not sure everyone will work fine, but here the systems which are sure to work fullspeed with sound on a 3DS :

Master System/Game Gear
GameBoy/Game Boy Color
NES
Nec PC-Engine
Genesis
SNES
Neogeo
Neogeo Pocket
Wonderswan

All those systems already have DS versions that work pretty fine (for example, Genesis emulator works pretty good, it only lack scaling, which would not be required for the majority of genesis games on 3DS as the 3DS resolution is enough to run Genesis games without any scaling), and as 3DS is more or less just a more powerful DS.

(Note : And of course, meanwhile waiting for 3DS versions, for people who doesn't know, you can use the DS versions of emulators on a 3DS with a DS flashcard).

Exception is the SNES which wasn't working at fullspeed with soud on DS, but we already know SNES can be done on 3DS, as BlargSnes already play lot of games at fullspeed with sound.

But yeah, I suppose it might take a few months before we see stable versions.
 
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Smoker1

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Seriously would love to see the Virtual Boy, Gen/MD, FBA/MAME/NeoGeo, GBA and N64 Cores.
Also, love how many times I saw ppl asking for .cia Files of these. LOL. I read through ALL 4 Pages of this Thread and saw it about 3-4 times. Seriously ppl read through. Unless there are over 8 Pages, you have no excuse for asking such a Question. Not to mention this is still VERY early in Development. Give it a Month or 2 for more work. Not to mention, of course everything will have .3dsx loading at first. Dont ask me why, I guess that is just the main thing for NinjaHax. For right now, they want to get things running smoothly and then go for the .3ds and .cia Versions.
Going off of what I read, yeah .cia is better because it has more permissions being Installed to the System Card(MicroSD on N3DS/SD on O3DS). So yeah, it would be nice. but that will take some work to do and right now, they are working on getting everything up and running and going from there. .3ds and .3dsx (for the most part with the 3dsx) will not have access to some permissions.
For example based on BlargSnes: http://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/BlargSnes#Supported_features
Basically look at the Differences between the O3DS/N3DS and the different loading methods. Keep in mind that this is from a older Version and it has not been Updated in a while.
 
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Jacobeian

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All those systems already have DS versions that work pretty fine

I agree, but keep in mind all those emulators were pretty much tuned for the NDS, this is not the case with Retroarch cores.

Retroarch itself might be ported and optimized for the 3DS but its emulators cores are likely not going to be. Why? Because this is how it works: it uses highly portable emulation cores that are supposed to be platform-agnostic and not rewritten for each new platform, only retroarch needs to be ported as it handles all the platform-specific stuff.

This is the strength of Retroarch but it's also its weakness when it comes to relatively weak platforms (not only the 3DS, you can look at the existing PSP port to see what it can currently do compared to existing optimized emulators).

That's the reason why you don't have yet another straight snes9x port being developped but something like Blargsnes instead, which is fully optimized for 3ds. That's also the reason why it's pointless to try to run genplusgx core on 3ds because, even if you got it to start a game, it's never going to run anything at decent speed unless you rewrite quite everything in ARM assembly.

Also, I don't think Jenesis DS sourcecode was ever released and don't believe Lordus is going to make a comeback in the 3DS scene after having worked with Nintendo so it's not going to be ported on 3DS.
Our best chance for Genesis right now is to use Picodrive as it has code optimized for ARM CPU. If someone can get it running in Retroarch for 3ds, this might give a good indication on what kind of speed we can expect.
 

dubbz82

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You missed my point. I am not complaining about the current state of emulation or the fact it is not running "fullspeed".
I think it's cool people are trying to port retroarch and attempting to get its cores working.

I am only saying that making "releases" of straight compiled cores is not worth until you got them actually working and do something, that is, not crashing each time you load them within retroarch GUI. It will only confuse people who will think that if something is released, even "unofficially", it has been tested and is somehow working, even if slow, which is not the case here.

The other thing I am saying is an advice to focus on light cores or those who already have ARM CPU-optimized parts because a lot of retroarch portable cores are not optimized for a specific platform, so there is no way you will EVER get them running at decent speed on 3DS weak CPU unless you rewrote them completely to use 3ds hardware. It's not a matter of the "scene" getting more "mature" or waiting for "official" release, it's just being realistic and understanding what 3ds can doand what it can't.

I get that, but on the flip side, personally i'd rather have something out there for people to tinker around with than knowing source code exists for it, and not knowing where current compatibility (or incompatibility as the case may be) is. I don't think anyone here is under the impression that it's in a very usable state at the moment, nor are they "confused", as the source code isn't very old for it yet. Waiting for an "official" release isn't always viable either, as it's possible that the developer may not ever "officially" build it (though this is semi uncommon, it does happen).
 

Smoker1

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Well I MSGed a few Devs around the Android Scene to see about them seeing if their Work might be doable on the N3DS. You never know until you try.
 
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Nuxx_exe

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Seriously would love to see the Virtual Boy, Gen/MD, FBA/MAME/NeoGeo, GBA and N64 Cores.

I 2nd the VB, Gen and GBA, but N64 would MAYBE be best on n3DS only, and MAME/FBA would probably only work best with older games like Donkey Kong (would be sweet) and Space Invaders
 

Smoker1

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Well, you never know. With how the RAM, CPU and GPU are which is better and more advanced than the PSP and the NDS, we could see MAME/FBA working with the later Build instead of the usual .35b or .38b and have .128 Rom Sets.
 

davhuit

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I agree, but keep in mind all those emulators were pretty much tuned for the NDS, this is not the case with Retroarch cores.

Retroarch itself might be ported and optimized for the 3DS but its emulators cores are likely not going to be. Why? Because this is how it works: it uses highly portable emulation cores that are supposed to be platform-agnostic and not rewritten for each new platform, only retroarch needs to be ported as it handles all the platform-specific stuff.

This is the strength of Retroarch but it's also its weakness when it comes to relatively weak platforms (not only the 3DS, you can look at the existing PSP port to see what it can currently do compared to existing optimized emulators).

That's the reason why you don't have yet another straight snes9x port being developped but something like Blargsnes instead, which is fully optimized for 3ds. That's also the reason why it's pointless to try to run genplusgx core on 3ds because, even if you got it to start a game, it's never going to run anything at decent speed unless you rewrite quite everything in ARM assembly.

Also, I don't think Jenesis DS sourcecode was ever released and don't believe Lordus is going to make a comeback in the 3DS scene after having worked with Nintendo so it's not going to be ported on 3DS.
Our best chance for Genesis right now is to use Picodrive as it has code optimized for ARM CPU. If someone can get it running in Retroarch for 3ds, this might give a good indication on what kind of speed we can expect.


They won't really have the choice, or their work on a 3DS port will just be a waste. But I never gave to much expectations about Retroarch, as you can see in the Nestopia thread ;) (I don't believe in such program for low-cpu systems, like you said). The list I did of systems are the one that could be emulated on a 3DS, not the ones RetroArch will emulate with sound/at fullspeed.

Even if Jenesis DS sourcode would have been available, it wouldn't be useful. Coders from DS emulators said the emulators have to be entirely rewritten from scratch to work on the 3DS (so, in that case, it's better to use a better opensource pc emulator as a base.

The best chance for Genesis is just to wish one coder will, one day, be interested into making an emulator for 3DS.
 

Aeruon

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How can I install this on Ironhax? I put the 3DSX-file into a folder in /3ds. To no avail. I tried with the first and last link.
 

Dragonbax196

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What problem with gPSP? RetroArch
:: content_playlist_push :: cannot push NULL or empty core info into the playlist
I have put my gba_bios.bin into sdmc:/retroarch/cores/system/
 

Jacobeian

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What problem with gPSP? RetroArch
:: content_playlist_push :: cannot push NULL or empty core info into the playlist
I have put my gba_bios.bin into sdmc:/retroarch/cores/system/


Couldn't get the genesis on working on ironhax HBL 2.1 just crashes on a red screen on my N3ds

Read the start of this thread.
The job done with these cores was just getting them to compile, nobody got them to do anything but crashing AFAIK.
 
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Smoker1

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So here is something. Over at the Red Dragon Virtual Boy Emu Thread, danielps says that the VB Core in the RetroArch works better.
"Wario Land doesn't work at the moment. The only commercial games that boot are Mario Tennis and Bound High, but they won't work in-game. It does run on RetroArch however, at about 50% speed on a N3DS with ninjhax 2.0, so you might want to build that instead.
I don't expect r3Ddragon to be playable until there's a way to get either the N3DS speedup on ninjhax 1.1b or dynamic recompilation on 2.0."
Would it be possible to Compile the VB Core and see how that is right now?
 
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SLiV3R

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Is this still under development? There's no github updates, no one from the team comments here. Or anywhere else.

The builds don't boot anything as far as I know.

So there are only rumours that Retroarch is good? Or is it possible to read more about this somewhere?


Edit:

This is on their website:

"Regarding RetroArch 3DS: it’s still very much a work-in-progress and I don’t think either me or aliaspider would feel comfortable to ship anything right now in terms of official release at this stage, and we need a lot of work done on the cores before we can render some of them playable on the slow 3DS (it’s even slower than the PSP it seems)."
 
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greyneon

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Just to comments those that said emulator run at full speed... That is wrong.

One example is snes to perfectly emulate snes without ANY bugs, glitches you name it. You will need atleast 3GHz to emulate it and all Games, due to timing issues as emulating singlecore hardware on a multicore hardware is hard and requires ALOT of power.

Here is an article by the creator of bsnes about why 3GHz is needed to perfectly emulate the snes without patchng certain areas just to be playable. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/...-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/
 
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