Tips for RetroArch 1.10.0

pjft

@chaoseffect can you elaborate more on specific emulators and games tested?

ChaosEffect

@pjft I would need to go back to RA 1.10 when I have an opportunity so that I can give more detail and try to figure out if there's just a problem on my end. It would be helpful if someone else with Sinden guns could try and see if they get similar results.

I briefly tried out:

Lethal Enforcers (lr-mame2003-plus, lr-genesis-plus-gx)
Terminator 2 (lr-mame2003-plus)
The House of the Dead 2 (lr-flycast [version currently in the RetroPie-setup script])

I can't remember now which one(s) I tried in lr-fbneo. I used these games because I did no calibration on them previously. Lethal Enforcers arcade actually doesn't even have a way to calibrate. The issue I experienced was that my line-of-sight alignment became worse the further away I moved the sight from screen center.

For example, dead center of the screen seemed okay. If I moved slightly to the right, the cursor would be further right than it should be. If I moved further to the right, the cursor would be separated even further from my sight. The cursor would reach the edge of the screen long before my line of sight would.

The build of RA 1.9.14 that I had been using before the upgrade (and to which I downgraded after testing 1.10) does not exhibit this issue for me at all.

pjft

@chaoseffect thanks. I have the guns, and I helped a bit in the past with gun support on RetroArch and in some of the emulators.

I’m still on an older version - 1.8.Something I'm not mistaken or early 1.9. The reason I ask is that on Mame2003 and plus that has always happened, unless something major happened recently. They did not have lightgun support, so the lightgun registered as a mouse and that's what caused that behavior.

Fbneo and flycast do, though, so that's more worrying indeed. I tend to play Lethal Enforcers on Fbneo precisely because of that. If you could give it a shot - no pun intended - and re-test the flycast games that would indeed be helpful. I am currently traveling for work so I have no way to look into it but if that's the case I'd be interested in checking it out. Do you confirm that on flycast, new RetroArch, it's still set up light a lightgun, they might have changed some of the controller indexes or something.

Thanks. I look forward to hearing from you.

Clyde

@pjft said in Tips for RetroArch 1.10.0:

If you could give it a shot - no pun intended

Nevertheless, you made my day. 😄

pjft

@clyde I aim to please :D

ChaosEffect

@pjft 😆 The hits keep coming.

There have been some improvements to lightgun support since RA 1.8. RA 1.9.14 seems to be the sweet spot for me so far. I do not have any sort of scaling issue with lightgun support at all with RA 1.9.14. Some games may present that issue at first but just require a calibration in their service/test menus (for arcade games). However, many games required no calibration on my part and just work.

Note that lr-mame2003-plus and lr-fbneo recently received a ton of updates related to lightgun accuracy and offscreen reloading.

Anecdotal discussions with friends indicate that RA 1.8 has difficulty with some of the reload updates due to how the cursor behaves when the gun moves away from the screen.

In all versions of RA, the cursor tends to dance around when the gun is pointed away from the screen, but only in RA 1.9.something+ (I'm not sure the exact version) does it seem to stick to the border when doing so. RA 1.8 sometimes allows the cursor to re-enter the main game area in these instances, which messes up the ability to "fire off screen."

lr-fbneo in particular now uses a very clever way to get around some of these issues: whenever the cursor hits the edge of the screen, it sticks to the very top-left corner of the screen.

pjft

@chaoseffect Thanks, that's useful to know. I'll look into it then when I come back.

sleve_mcdichael

If you use cheevos, and suddenly all your games are showing "0 of {n} achievements unlocked" on start-up, it looks like they've enabled "hardcore mode" by default now. Edit your global retroarch.cfg and uncomment the line cheevos_hardcore_mode_enable = false to go back to "normal" mode and show the correct count on start-up.

Does anybody know how I can "un-get" the single hardcore achievement that I unlocked before figuring this out?

mitu

@sleve_mcdichael said in Tips for RetroArch 1.10.0:

Does anybody know how I can "un-get" the single hardcore achievement that I unlocked before figuring this out?

You can reset it from the website, open the achievement and use the Reset Progress link.

ChaosEffect

Has anyone else tinkered with RA 1.10.0 and a Sinden lightgun?

Everything appears normal with a regular mouse.

I get the issue with tracking on the X axis I mentioned above if I use a Sinden gun. Nothing has changed on the Sinden side, and this issue appears to affect all of the libretro cores I tested. The mouse cursor reaches the left/right side of the screen long before the gun is physically pointing there. I tried again today just to double check that I didn't screw up the installation somehow, but I still experience it.

I reverted back to a build of RA 1.9.14 that I had been using. 1.9.14 doesn't exhibit the issue. It would be great if others could check to see if they get the same issue. Checking around for commits that caused the issue would turn out to be wasted effort if I just messed something up on my end. 😊

ChaosEffect

I want to follow up on this. My posts give the impression that there is an issue with RA 1.10.0, but the truth is quite the opposite!

The change in the behavior of lightgun support appears to stem from this:

https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/pull/13258

If I'm reading this correctly, this is the summary:

Pre-1.10.0: lightgun coordinates were scaled to the visible game area, which resulted in some lightgun-like devices being confused by various aspect ratios. I did not experience issues with this because I used a border sized to each game's aspect ratio with my Sinden Lightguns.

1.10.0+: lightgun coordinates cover the whole monitor screen and treat the visible game area as part of that entire screen. I think that this is a very positive change. The issue I experienced with the odd scaling was due to me not adjusting the Sinden border to cover the entire boundary of my 16:9 TV screen. After doing that, all manners of game aspect ratios work very well!

I hope that this clears up any confusion that I may have caused!

Floob

@ChaosEffect
Is this what you were seeing?

ChaosEffect

@Floob Hello,

Yes, that's the same issue. Two more benefits have become apparent to me since I posted my message:

These newer versions of RA have the option to display any overlays behind the RA quick menu
Since the border is on the very outside edge of the screen, bezel brightness no longer affects the Sinden camera's tracking abilities.

pjft

@Floob does the same happen if you use the 16:9 Sinden border?

To be clear, I think that the PSX emulation had specific aiming issues related to the emulator - I recall Andy mentioning he'd like to add a "sensitivity" option at some point - but it was in the early days, so I don't recall much more.

ChaosEffect

@pjft lr-pcsx-rearmed does have ratio and offset settings. You can indeed force more proper alignment for the problem games, but I think the root problem may be caused by overscan / unused areas of the screen. Duckstation has an option to crop lines from the screen and then re-scale the lightgun coordinates over the remaining visible area. That appears to correct any issues. A more automated way of getting better alignment would be great, but it's outside of my current knowledge to be able to help.

Check out the issue I posted plus the corresponding Beetle PSX issue linked in my second comment there.

https://github.com/libretro/pcsx_rearmed/issues/655

A workaround I did was to stretch the image by a factor equal to the ratio adjustment on each axis, recenter it, and then cover up the extraneous parts with a bezel while using the wide Sinden border. This essentially serves the same purpose as the Duckstation setting. You undo any vertical ratio you changed because the stretched portion goes outside of the border, but you keep the horizontal ratio change because that portion of the image still lies within the border.

Floob

@pjft No, it seems fine with the 16:9 border. Thats in the video as well.
Is that what you mean?

pjft

@Floob apologies, I missed it. Yes, that's what I meant.

ChaosEffect

It turns out there is an issue with the Y-axis lightgun tracking in RetroArch 1.10.0.

The changes in the pull request I linked above have a small error in the code for the Y axis (see more details in the latest comments there).

I tested the correction in RetroPie's fork of RetroArch and can confirm that it works. The Y axis tracks correctly regardless of the aspect ratio of the game.

@mitu I am not sure how often RetroPie's RetroArch will sync with upstream RetroArch. This is more of a typo correction than a new feature, but it makes the lightgun input operate as intended.

mitu

@ChaosEffect said in Tips for RetroArch 1.10.0:

@mitu I am not sure how often RetroPie's RetroArch will sync with upstream RetroArch. This is more of a typo correction than a new feature, but it makes the lightgun input operate as intended.

Thanks for the heads up. We don't update too often and we base the update on RetroArch's point releases, I guess it's one more reason to consider the next release for inclusion :).