[OS libraries] upgrade to newer versions?

nemo93

Disclaimer: apologize if that's not the right space to post this (or if it's not ok to ask for such thing). Feel free to close this one off in that case.

I wonder if a new SDL2 version will soon be merged into Retropie. Currently it is stuck to 2.0.10 (which I guess is a tailor-made release with custom patches etc). Current SDL2 stable is 2.0.22 (as of typing).

This might be an issue for some emulator(s) even if I understand other can break with a newer version. On the latter I saw your attempt to bring 2.0.20 thanks to this PR which seemed to cause issues indeed.

If there's a better place to discuss this please let me know.

Thanks again for all the support provided and for the amazing platform Retropie is for us to enjoy retrogaming!
Take care.

BuZz

@nemo93 throughout the updates we have been closely watching SDL. Testing and debugging issues. Unfortunately there's some problems we still need sorting. Eg. https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/issues/5399

nemo93

Hi, I didn't want to raise another topic for the below in order to keep things in one place. It's a little bit the same ask yet for gcc this time.

Another emu (DOSBox Staging) demands gcc 9 as a minimum to compile. Currently Retropie ships with 8.3which is no longer supported. I'll update Staging's Retropie script to stick to the (soon deprecated) 0.78.1 stable release. No big deal but I start to think I'm a jinx :-D

If you don't mind I'll keep reporting such issues to keep track. If you do have a better place to discuss this please let me know. Same if you do have any beta of an upcoming 5.0 Retropie I'd be happy to help test it.

Thanks again!

mitu

@nemo93 said in [SDL2] upgrade to a newer version?:

Another emu (DOSBox Staging) demands gcc 9 as a minimum to compile. Currently Retropie ships with 8.3which is no longer supported.

When was this change added ? Is it a direct requirement of dosbox-staging or some 3rd party dependency that's required ?

nemo93

@mitu a 3rd party lib does require gcc 9. The upcoming release (0.79) of Staging is imminent and I was about to run into an extensive testing session. I can't tell you when this lib was merged in though as it's been a while I haven't tested Staging.

An alternative would be to cross-compile 0.79 and provide only the binary in Retropie's menu. But I do love the ability to compile stuff from source :-)

mitu

@nemo93 said in [SDL2] upgrade to a newer version?:

a 3rd party lib does require gcc 9.

Ah, I see it. Though not declared in the build configuration, it has an assert in the actual code that breaks everything. Mumble, mumble.. that's why we can't have nice things.

We can probably select the branch based on the compiler major version, as we do for OpenMSX.

EDIT: or may we caught a lucky break.

nemo93

@mitu said in [SDL2] upgrade to a newer version?:

EDIT: or may we caught a lucky break.

Indeed you linked the PR we discussed about. It will be merged in soon meaning I'll be able to proceed with testing of Staging's upcoming release. It should be going fine yet count on me to report anything should I hit another roadblock.

As usual thanks a lot for your assistance and always swift replies. Truly appreciated.

nemo93

I decided to change the title to make it more relevant. I wasn't sure where to post the following yet as I was keen to share it in case this helps others.

We ran into a very painful issue while testing a recent build of DOSBox Staging. The sound was crackling like hell in almost every games tested and only pi4 platform was affected (pi3 was ok). Builds for macOS, x86, etc didn't have the issue either. After a long and rather difficult debugging session the culprit has been found (thanks to @kcgen!) > SpeexDSP's floating-point API is unreliable on current (32-bit) Buster. After compiling our own version everything went back to normal.