RetroArch
RetroArch is a modular, command-line driven, multi-system emulator that is designed to be fast, lightweight, and portable. Some of its features can be found on few other emulators, such as real-time rewinding and game-aware shading based on the libretro API.
Contents
Installation
RetroArch — Stable version.
RetroArch (git) — Development version.
RetroArch-Phoenix (git) — GTK+ front-end, development version.
- https://github.com/Themaister/RetroArch-Phoenix || retroarch-phoenix-gitAUR[broken link: archived in aur-mirror], or retroarch-phoenix-qt-gitAUR[broken link: archived in aur-mirror] (qt build)
Usage
RetroArch uses separate libraries, called emulator cores or emulator implementations, available from both the AUR and the libretro github repository.
Each package from the AUR will install a library to /usr/lib/libretro/
. The syntax to choose one when executing retroarch is:
$ retroarch -L /usr/lib/libretro/libretro-(emulation core).so ~/path/to/foo
A default emulation core can be defined in retroarch.cfg
, obviating the need to specify it on every run.
Example:
/etc/retroarch.cfg or ~/.retroarch.cfg
libretro_path = "/usr/lib/libretro/libretro-foo.so"
Configuration
RetroArch provides a very well commented skeleton configuration file located at /etc/retroarch.cfg
.
It supports split configuration files using the #include "foo.cfg"
directive within the main configuration file, retroarch.cfg
. This can be overridden using the --appendconfig /path/to/config
parameter and is beneficial if different keybinds, video configurations or audio settings are required for the various implementations.
Troubleshooting
Input devices do not operate
It is likely to encounter problems if running on a CLI or a display server other than Xorg, because /dev/input nodes are limited to root-only access. This is solved by manually adding a rule in /etc/udev/rules.d/99-evdev.rules
, with KERNEL=="event*", NAME="input/%k", MODE="666"
as its contents. Reload udev rules by running:
# udevadm control --reload-rules
If rebooting the system or replugging the devices are not options, permissions may be forced using:
# chmod 666 /dev/input/event*
Poor video performance
If poor video performance is met, RetroArch may be run on a separate thread by setting video_threaded = true
in ~/.config/retroarch/retroarch.cfg
.
This is, however, a solution that should be not be used if tweaking RetroArch's video resolution/refresh rate fixes the problem, as it makes perfect V-Sync impossible, and slightly increases latency.