retroarch is shit

libretro considered on thin ice

There is only one good libretro frontend, and it’s a MacOS exclusive.

PLEASE, I BEG OF YOU DEAR READER, SUPPORT THE WORK OF ACTUAL EMULATION DEVELOPERS AND NOT THESE SCUM. I have long found the incessant shilling of RetroArch incomprehensible.

quotes

“retroarch is a cancer to the emulation scene” - sunaookami on hacker news
RetroArch is parasitic. It wouldn’t exist without the actual emulators. However, the RetroArch cores often provide a worse experience, giving an unfairly bad impression. They accept a lot of money for poorly repackaging other people’s work.“ - u/cuavas, MAME developer

interface

“Eh? What was that, Sony?”

Couch-and-TV interface as the primary way to use an app people get on Steam or GitHub is ridiculous. I suppose the same developer would implement keyboard-and-mouse interface in a car stereo. Though there is a desktop mode, it is less than an afterthought for the developers. Desktop menu cannot be used at all without running the shitty fake Playstation menu in the background.

Horrible XMB implementation. Want to go back? How about go to hell? Back to the desktop for you, buddy.

Press 〇 to accept? In this economy?

~~Nevermind that the majority of PC users are using XBox controllers.~~ That was a lie, they are using keyboards. I first beat Super Mario 64 with arrow keys on an Asus Eee PC.

what’s the point?

Libretro “cores,” i.e. the vital organs of your favorite emulators removed from their vivisected bodies to be fed into the RetroArch meat grinder, are often slower inside RetroArch than when used as normal.

Using RetroArch between different platforms has the added fun of not knowing whether you should install cores through your package manager or through the interface, with no real explanation to go off of. Emulation scene doesn’t care about Linux or *BSD people anyways.

Changing your controls should be trivial, but this is not the opinion of the RetroArch developers; God forbid they give you a window with a layout and some boxes like everybody else.

Perhaps its niche is in custom Raspberry Pi boot images that your friend’s dad will play with on the family TV for a week or two before his wife makes him plug the Roku back in.

morality

RetroArch developers are paid to enshittify existing software that, generally, was written by people who did so without compensation. I would compare this practice to Apple’s use of open source software, or Intel’s use of MINIX in their “management engine.”

The project’s reputation among other software developers doesn’t help either. They are known to not play nice with other projects. They generally seem to evade the blame whenever a falling out occurs, but I find it hard to believe that a project who regularly has major drama with other projects is not itself a cause of drama.