Overview

RetroArch for Fedora.

Why? Because I own an old X-Arcade (dual, serial + USB adapter, not a recent Tankstick), and it has been gathering dust for years since I never had any plug-n-play MAME setup ready. I gave RetroPie a go, and it seemed great up until I starting wondering what was causing Street Fighter II to be slow and unplayable... and read that the Raspberry Pie was just too slow (Nov 2014).

I have a powerful-ish x86_64 HTPC with an i3 processor and Intel HD4000 GPU which can run demanding MAME games just fine, but I couldn't find a RetroPie equivalent for x86_64. I had a quick look at RetroArch launchers for XBMC since some can work from OpenELEC, but all seemed quite hack-ish and very young. I tried trying GroovyArcade (ArchLinux based MAME LiveCD), but couldn't get it to work properly. It seems to be arcade monitor oriented, with lots of complexity in the video output area... I just want to scale the output on any LCD display and be done with it.

Looking around some more, I didn't find any better launcher alternatives than Emulation Station (used in RetroPie), so I stuck with that and created a nice Fedora 20 rpm package. Scraping issues initially, but good enough nevertheless.

From there, Emulation Station can trivially launch emulators, such as upstream mame and snes9x. Unfortunately, if you want a 100% keyboard-less experience, you need all emulators to support binding gamepad/joystick events to exit, and that's not possible with most of them.

This is where Libretro and RetroArch come into play : Libretro cores of mame and snes9x exist, and the RetroArch launcher/wrapper is the one managing most of the I/O, and includes configuration options to bind a modifier and an exit button. So on my USB connected Super Nintendo pad, I can now press Select and Start simultaneously to exit a game and return to Emulation Station. Yay!

I've created Fedora 20 rpm packages of RetroArch and some libretro cores (initially only the ones I'm interested in, it's trivial to build the others).

Next I would like to create a minimal Live Fedora image which would boot into Emulation Station fullscreen automatically. Think RetroPie for powerful PCs in order to be able to play X-Men vs. Street Fighter :-)

Published here are all of the spec files and patches for the rpm packages, and later maybe the kickstart file(s) for the live image.

Pull requests welcome!

Raw Notes

~/.emulationstation/es_systems.cfg
retroarch -L /usr/libexec/libretro/snes9x.so
retroarch --features
retroarch --menu
rm -rf ~/.config/retroarch

TODO

• Look at what useful things RetroPie does and include them : https://github.com/petrockblog/RetroPie-Setup

• Include more cores, ArchLinux PKGBUILD files are useful to know how to build (which Makefile to use, etc.) : https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/li/libretro-scummvm-git/PKGBUILD

• Find out which subprojects are useful and package them too :

• libretro/common-shaders.git

• libretro/common-overlays.git

• libretro/retroarch-assets.git (included in retroarch itself)

• libretro/retroarch-joypad-autoconfig.git (done, very useful!)

• Disable default input_toggle_fast_forward = "space" !!

• Find out how to hide neogeo.zip and qsound.zip