Tell Me About the Life of lr-Cores/RetroPie (lr-Higan)

hooperre

libretro‏ @libretro 23h23 hours ago
Themaister is working on a Higan libretro core! Our hope is that this will improve ties between the two projects and let bygones be bygones.

In order to improve my understanding about how this works... What are the necessary steps for this to be incorporated into RetroPie when it goes live? Is it as simple of just including the Raspbian build/Start Up Script/RetroPie Menu? Or are there some specific steps outside of that when the core is officially adopted to RetroArch? What is the life of a RetroPie emulator/lr-Core?

Emulator Built >>> lr-Core Made >>> ???

herb_fargus

@hooperre

Core is coded in the libretro repositories, a module is created to compile the core. Not too much to it.

I wouldn't hold your breath for performance on the pi with higan. Higan is designed for accuracy not speed. Which means you'll need a pretty beefy laptop to get it running accurately at decent framerates

hooperre

@herb_fargus Thanks for your response. RetroPie has been my first step into Linux/Python so like I've said before, thank you so much. I really appreciate giving me a platform to learn different things. I've since made a few RPi security web cams for my place and I'm enrolled in an online Python class. :)

Downside is I have some pretty newbie questions haha. Is the module just a packaged code with an apt-get command within the RetroPie menu? Is there more to it than that?

dankcushions

@hooperre you can see examples of modules here: https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/tree/master/scriptmodules/libretrocores

apt-get is only for stuff packaged in debian's arm repository, which none of the libretro stuff is.

hooperre

@dankcushions Awesome thanks!

hooperre

If y'all don't mind another noob question...

How do I know when the latest binary update was compiled on github? I'm assuming updating from 'source' would be whatever is live on GitHub? And the 'binary' would be when the last merge request was filled? Am I right on this?

Ie:
Latest commit b9765ec 9 hours ago @richard42 richard42 committed on GitHub Merge pull request #360 from bsmiles32/pif … (From mupen64plus github)

dankcushions

@hooperre said in Tell Me About the Life of lr-Cores/RetroPie (lr-Higan):

If y'all don't mind another noob question...

How do I know when the latest binary update was compiled on github? I'm assuming updating from 'source' would be whatever is live on GitHub? And the 'binary' would be when the last merge request was filled? Am I right on this?

Ie:
Latest commit b9765ec 9 hours ago @richard42 richard42 committed on GitHub Merge pull request #360 from bsmiles32/pif … (From mupen64plus github)

not quite.

source takes the latest source code from the master (typically) branch on github (ie, your link), and then uses your pi to compile it there and then.

binary instead downloads a precompiled version from retropie's servers. you can't really tell how how old this version is, but i believe typically they are rebuilt for every retropie release. retropie's binary versions are nothing to with github - they are built by retropie (buzz).

hooperre

@dankcushions Sweet. Thanks for clarifying that.

barbudreadmon

I don't think even the "fast" version of higan will run at full speed on anything below an intel core i3 @ 3Ghz. Higan is basically a more resources-hungry version of bsnes, bsnes-fast barely run above half speed on a pentium N3710 @ 2.56Ghz (which is supposed to be a lot faster than a pi3)

Edit : my bad, there is actually no "fast" version of higan, so don't expect it to run smoothly on a mere core i3 @ 3Ghz

hooperre

@barbudreadmon Thanks for the info. Yeah, I know very little re: Higan, but had just burning questions regarding how cores are implemented. Just get excited every time I see a new RetroArch core go up.