Why use emulators when theres RetroArch?

[abispac]

So iwas lurking around at the compatible emulator topic, and saw someone saying that he tried retroarch and it was nice and it didnt looked back, so i did gave it a try to, so i got a say.... Why use emulators ,when you can just use RetroArch? I mean, i just downloaded the thing, installed it, download a couple of cores, set my keys, set my video to d3d and use switchres, even has an option to use regular or super resolutions, and voala, everything works out of the box, no messing with complicated video settings. More easy than that, is just not posible. So In your opinion, why use emulators instead of retroarch... Ill wait for the comments.

[pbj]

I hate the menu system in Retroarch.  Very poor organization and it’s difficult to actually quit a game.

[abispac]

I hate the menu system in Retroarch.  Very poor organization and it’s difficult to actually quit a game.

Well , i simply installed retroarch, installed cores, set the video settings and that was all in the retroarch side. Then i set up rocketlauncher to use that for every system, and i dont even have to mess with retroarch anymore. and all games launch at native 15khz resolutions just fine. I didint even needed to tell retroarch where the roms folder was or anything like that. and to exit the games i just have to double esc, and thats all. I love it.

[MK3FANATIC]

yes I use retroarch for several systems, BUT my order of priority is;

groovymame > mame > standalone emulator > retroarch

I get the impression that accuracy, fluidity and input lag are always better in the other options than in retroarch.

[Substring]

Well, that's quite an arguable topic with much to say, whatever one may think about the general libretro thing ...

1. RA, as a frontend, can be pretty despicable
2. Some purists would say RA solves emulation problems on the cores, but never submit their changes upstream. When you believe in the open source etiquette, that is an important argument
3. a number of cores work rather well, and RA has a number of interesting features
4. (in my absolutely subjective opinion since I, among a few others, contributed to that) Making RA cross the switchres step was a decisive move. Just to make it simple : drop your switchres.ini in the retroarch.exe folder, set 2 or 3 options in the retroarch.cfg, and voilà (not voala ). The move to SR was, to me, a giant leap to the ease of configuration, really. People probably don't all understand what SR has brought to CRT modeswitching and emulators, but it's is a major improvement, really. And the easyness you've described to setup RA for CRT is one onf the proofs of how the work that was done made RA CRT configuration much simplier, and the general ecosystem of SR-compatible emulators
5. any emulator has pros and cons ... mame, emu4crt, retroarch ... Just have fun the way you like

[abispac]

Well, that's quite an arguable topic with much to say, whatever one may think about the general libretro thing ...

1. RA, as a frontend, can be pretty despicable
2. Some purists would say RA solves emulation problems on the cores, but never submit their changes upstream. When you believe in the open source etiquette, that is an important argument
3. a number of cores work rather well, and RA has a number of interesting features
4. (in my absolutely subjective opinion since I, among a few others, contributed to that) Making RA cross the switchres step was a decisive move. Just to make it simple : drop your switchres.ini in the retroarch.exe folder, set 2 or 3 options in the retroarch.cfg, and voilà (not voala ). The move to SR was, to me, a giant leap to the ease of configuration, really. People probably don't all understand what SR has brought to CRT modeswitching and emulators, but it's is a major improvement, really. And the easyness you've described to setup RA for CRT is one onf the proofs of how the work that was done made RA CRT configuration much simplier, and the general ecosystem of SR-compatible emulators
5. any emulator has pros and cons ... mame, emu4crt, retroarch ... Just have fun the way you like

I dont use Retroarch as the front  end, i use hyperspin with rocketlauncher, and just use retroarch to play the games, so i really never see retroarch besides the loading black band that has the game information.  So yes, i know everything has its pros and cons, but believe me, ive been building arcades  for friends and relatives for over 20 years now, and todays, could not be any easyer with emudrivers, amd cards, groovymame for arcade stuff, and no retroarch for all the consoles. I mean, even with though that mame has consoles support, one thing i hate about mame, is that it wont play games that6 dont have the correct name, or the name that mame has for such game, contrary to retroarch, that with all the cores, it can play any game based on the game name, not caring if is correct or not. (Not sure if i explain myself on this one) Anyway, i think MAME should have followed the same way as retroarch. BUt i guess both projects are great. Anyway, thanks to anyone involved  on making this happen. All the talented coders, veterans and younglins. THANKS.  Pardon my bad grammar. English is now my third lenguage.

[psakhis]

@Abispac, RA is "official" libretro frontend, if you understand libretro as a framework.

AttractMode, EmulationStation, HyperSpin, BigBlue, etc. are general frontends.

[schmerzkaufen]

The only viable reason for me is their shaders system. It's really nice!
What annoys me is they don't always use the best emulators for cores.
And their lag mitigation guidelines are a sin to accuracy and - depending on settings - to fair play as well.
They have ruined the understanding and perception of a whole generation on that topic, and it sucks.

For arcades in particular the right choice is definitely Groovy, it's following MAME and its combined input/video/audio lag methods are lossless.
Now, that said the MiSter lovers will come and nag that their solution is even better, ultimately yes, mainly because they have dedicated developers working and focusing on particular systems and games, besting MAME drivers (while mamedev is driven by the great unknown random of FOSS that can do miracles tomorrow or leave issues unattended for decades)
One could argue MiSter's a bit costly for the individual and limited in reach because of the lack of pure processing power (like cv1k ? yup GM on what's today a cheap PC is still the best for that)

And while mentioning shaders is a bit off-topic; on the non-CRT side, while GM only has HLSL, at the very least for a while now it has been able to perform all its features including the real smooth refresh rates and lag reduction(s) even without installing Emudrivers if you own an AMD card, and without any more hassle than a one-time visit to ingame menu sliders, since it saves settings including the OC ones as a bonus.
Zero messing with obscure manual modes configuration there in this case.
Of course CRT still demands some work but in regards to difficulty of general use the criticism on Groovy is from ppl who haven't tried it a long time, the auto configuartion for AMD cards, the saving sliders for frame_delay and OC, make it massively more convenient and easier than it's ever been before.

Regarding ethics, I won't say much there im no dev, but from an external POV it seemed to me that several emus and related works were simply abandoned by their authors because retroarch stole all the light and attention, whether concerned ppl liked it or not. For that reason some potentially better things might never come to be, I don't like the thought.
NB: also I hated that they encouraged the use of old builds as cores and along the sharing of old roms sets, that's dumb as hell and i cannot think of anything more anti-development progress than that. Even as a end user anyone who uses more than two braincells can see why that's bad for everyone and a finger to developers.

Last word; I've mostly stopped discussing emulation with people when seeing that basically everywhere I went RA users were there celebrating the greatness of it...using old-AF builds and roms, with on top of it lossy - and in cases borderline cheating - lag reduction, to make it worse.
It's not just some devs that have lost faith because of RA.

[psakhis]

I agree with some @schmerzkaufen comments.

For example, if Mednafen has master pcengine core, why not use it instead of libretro fork core? A fork always can be outdated, isn't official... A quick response can be RA has other must have features, but for me with emu4crt i'm ok.

Totally different if libretro core is considered a master core, there are libretro cores that advances only on libretro, for example genesis plus gx.

In fact, there are many mame libretro cores, but groovymame is the best out there... (for pc crt users, ofc)

[donluca]

Anyway, i think MAME should have followed the same way as retroarch.

Thank God it didn't.

[abispac]

Anyway, i think MAME should have followed the same way as retroarch.

Thank God it didn't.

I meant only in thw way that i could run games without the name being exactly as its database or whatever it uses.
It would make life alot easyer.

[Substring]

Arcade is the same everywhere : the rom name must match.

For consoles on mame, you have the -cart that allows you to pass any rom name. BUT: the roms hash must match (if I'm not mistaken, can someone confirm ?)

[Calamity]

For consoles on mame, you have the -cart that allows you to pass any rom name. BUT: the roms hash must match (if I'm not mistaken, can someone confirm ?)

The -cart option allows loading any file, no hash is checked.

Hashes are checked in "software list" mode: mame megadriv sonic -> "sonic" is searched in the "megadriv" xml software list along with "sonic.zip" in the "megadriv" rom path, the zip contents are checked against the hash of the rom that's considered as the correct dump.

[Calamity]

4. (in my absolutely subjective opinion since I, among a few others, contributed to that) Making RA cross the switchres step was a decisive move.

I have to agree specially with this point. Thanks of course to Alphanu and Substring that intermediated to make this happen. But yes, probably RA's populist focus was positive for this.

[abispac]

Arcade is the same everywhere : the rom name must match.

For consoles on mame, you have the -cart that allows you to pass any rom name. BUT: the roms hash must match (if I'm not mistaken, can someone confirm ?)

Holly ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---, you just thught me something awsome today, i can ---smurfing--- believe ive been doing this for 20 more years witing for mame to be able to load any game besides the name and i can really do that with the help of rocketlauncher. Now i can build my cocktail cab with split screen and have mame for the console games, its super awsome, thanks alot.

[Trnzaddict]

yes I use retroarch for several systems, BUT my order of priority is;

groovymame > mame > standalone emulator > retroarch

I get the impression that accuracy, fluidity and input lag are always better in the other options than in retroarch.

?

Do you know much about RA? It can deliver lower input latency than even the real hardware via run ahead.

I don’t know what other emulators you’re using (Groovymame aside) that you think have less input latency than you can achieve with RA. Seriously.

[schmerzkaufen]

Groovy can remove most of the lag that shouldn't be there in the 'chain' in ideal conditions, trying to get as close to the real hardware's own delay.
It manages that by attending to input, video, and sound lag all at the same time seamlessly, without altering the legit delay within the game.

RA does things the other - wrong - way around when using run-ahead, eliminating the very portion of delay one shouldn't touch if there's even an ounce of care for proper emulation accuracy, and fair play.

The only excuses I can find to the use of run-ahead is when a player engages online play with lots of delay or uses a quite laggy display.
In practice all I've seen is people abusing that feature without a care in the world and even filing scoring records under conditions that can be considered an advantage even before the actual pcb's run in a cab.
Not that I care much about scoring and speedrunning 'sports' myself, but what is there to brag about victories with run-ahead pedal to the metal ?
You know, there's those streaming idiots who get congratuled beating old high scores with sync off and on top of that running enough frames ahead to blow away the conditions the original scores were achieved with. Thanks RA ?

Damn, IIRC there's even an howto page set up on libretro to explain ppl how many frames they should run ahead per game or system, great way to make sure as many as possible do the wrong thing. The "new normal" I guess ?
No thanks, I take Groovy's lossless/noncheat method over it anytime, sure it's hardware demanding but so is run-ahead.

Calamity will say that anyway VRR is becoming mainstream-enough to recommend over those, so not really worth fighting on the topic anymore...sure, we can sort of move on from these features at relatively low cost and enjoy what's actually the best.
But I'll never forgive RA for the damage it's done to more valuable emulation all these years, along with encouraging ppl to use old builds and roms, their indeed populist discourse messed up a generation's understandiong and practices on the topic of lag/delay.

Groovy all along deserved way more praises for its achievements, I guess that didn't happen because it couldn't shake away its reputation of austere, obscure, hard-to-use build (the latter criticism to be fair was true up until relatively recently)
Even when bits of Groovy's developed features were ported to mainline MAME, ppl mostly didn't realize that these 1) came from Groovy 2) were more adavnced in Groovy proper and that since 2012, unbeknowst to even a large portion of niche players from arcade communities for a long time, and persistently so, like I couldn't believe how misunderstood the -lowlatency feature was day-one and forever since.

Calamity says he laughs it off, but for me that'll always leave a slightly bitter aftertaste, even if I know Groovy's the real winner and virtuous build, can't forget it's the uglier one that dominated the era in people's hearts (edit: and it's not even an emulator ffs, just read this thread's title it's heresy period. WHY. USE. EMULATORS. when there's retoarch? Why eh? )
Damn most ppl don't even care about standalone emulators, I'd bet the bulk user base's average isn't old enough to remember before RA, for them it's just RA cores this, RA does everything best that, and its users support the monopoly like zombies 'spreading the gospel' everywhere they go.

If there's one area where RA has been overwhelmingly better than Groovy, it's communication, skillfully advertising itself and overshadowing legit great achievements and people of the scene.

[abispac]

Calamity says he laughs it off, but for me that'll always leave a slightly bitter aftertaste, even if I know Groovy's the real winner and virtuous build, can't forget it's the uglier one that dominated the era in people's hearts (edit: and it's not even an emulator ffs, just read this thread's title it's heresy period. WHY. USE. EMULATORS. when there's retoarch? Why eh? )
Damn most ppl don't even care about standalone emulators, I'd bet the bulk user base's average isn't old enough to remember before RA, for them it's just RA cores this, RA does everything best that, and its users support the monopoly like zombies 'spreading the gospel' everywhere they go.

If there's one area where RA has been overwhelmingly better than Groovy, it's communication, skillfully advertising itself and overshadowing legit great achievements and people of the scene.

Ill  honest, i dont understand half of what you just say, but, the tittle of my  post was meant to be something ealse, i dont praise RA, but i found it cool to be able to play most console games within a simple setup trhu hyperspin and rocketlauncher. At the moment i was having problems setting up nes and snes games, as zsnesw couldnt detect some resolutions, and snes9x not having an esc option to exit the gmae, also ubernes, wich is my favorite for lcd, had some problems i dont remember right now. And RA took those problems away, making it easy to set up. Now i know there are some emus that have more acuracy and better setting for lcd, than for crt, so i found RA againg cool to set up with crt. Talking about latency or lag, i do notice it in some emus more than other, and since i have not finished my setup on this project, i cant really have an opinion on that right now, but i do know that some relly really make the game almos umplayable as they have so much input lag, ill have to see how RA would work on that matter. Hope RA would find a way to fix any input lag probles the correct way.
Now i found it cool that mame can also load games independet of the game name as long as you have the correct rom. So i might be end up using groovymame for nes and snes,, allthough ill have to find out if the emulation is better than RA cores, as i get a mesage that the emulation is not perfect on every game i load.

[Trnzaddict]

Groovy can remove most of the lag that shouldn't be there in the 'chain' in ideal conditions, trying to get as close to the real hardware's own delay.
It manages that by attending to input, video, and sound lag all at the same time seamlessly, without altering the legit delay within the game.

RA does things the other - wrong - way around when using run-ahead, eliminating the very portion of delay one shouldn't touch if there's even an ounce of care for proper emulation accuracy, and fair play.

The only excuses I can find to the use of run-ahead is when a player engages online play with lots of delay or uses a quite laggy display.
In practice all I've seen is people abusing that feature without a care in the world and even filing scoring records under conditions that can be considered an advantage even before the actual pcb's run in a cab.
Not that I care much about scoring and speedrunning 'sports' myself, but what is there to brag about victories with run-ahead pedal to the metal ?
You know, there's those streaming idiots who get congratuled beating old high scores with sync off and on top of that running enough frames ahead to blow away the conditions the original scores were achieved with. Thanks RA ?

Damn, IIRC there's even an howto page set up on libretro to explain ppl how many frames they should run ahead per game or system, great way to make sure as many as possible do the wrong thing. The "new normal" I guess ?
No thanks, I take Groovy's lossless/noncheat method over it anytime, sure it's hardware demanding but so is run-ahead.

Calamity will say that anyway VRR is becoming mainstream-enough to recommend over those, so not really worth fighting on the topic anymore...sure, we can sort of move on from these features at relatively low cost and enjoy what's actually the best.
But I'll never forgive RA for the damage it's done to more valuable emulation all these years, along with encouraging ppl to use old builds and roms, their indeed populist discourse messed up a generation's understandiong and practices on the topic of lag/delay.

Groovy all along deserved way more praises for its achievements, I guess that didn't happen because it couldn't shake away its reputation of austere, obscure, hard-to-use build (the latter criticism to be fair was true up until relatively recently)
Even when bits of Groovy's developed features were ported to mainline MAME, ppl mostly didn't realize that these 1) came from Groovy 2) were more adavnced in Groovy proper and that since 2012, unbeknowst to even a large portion of niche players from arcade communities for a long time, and persistently so, like I couldn't believe how misunderstood the -lowlatency feature was day-one and forever since.

Calamity says he laughs it off, but for me that'll always leave a slightly bitter aftertaste, even if I know Groovy's the real winner and virtuous build, can't forget it's the uglier one that dominated the era in people's hearts (edit: and it's not even an emulator ffs, just read this thread's title it's heresy period. WHY. USE. EMULATORS. when there's retoarch? Why eh? )
Damn most ppl don't even care about standalone emulators, I'd bet the bulk user base's average isn't old enough to remember before RA, for them it's just RA cores this, RA does everything best that, and its users support the monopoly like zombies 'spreading the gospel' everywhere they go.

If there's one area where RA has been overwhelmingly better than Groovy, it's communication, skillfully advertising itself and overshadowing legit great achievements and people of the scene.

Meh, I don’t care if input lag reduction is done right or wrong.

I care more about pressing a button and saying “Wow, just as responsive if not better than my genesis in my den”

Somebody saying that stand alone emulators other than GM offer better input latency than RA is capable of is absolutely mind boggling to me - sorry.

[abispac]

Groovy can remove most of the lag that shouldn't be there in the 'chain' in ideal conditions, trying to get as close to the real hardware's own delay.
It manages that by attending to input, video, and sound lag all at the same time seamlessly, without altering the legit delay within the game.

RA does things the other - wrong - way around when using run-ahead, eliminating the very portion of delay one shouldn't touch if there's even an ounce of care for proper emulation accuracy, and fair play.

The only excuses I can find to the use of run-ahead is when a player engages online play with lots of delay or uses a quite laggy display.
In practice all I've seen is people abusing that feature without a care in the world and even filing scoring records under conditions that can be considered an advantage even before the actual pcb's run in a cab.
Not that I care much about scoring and speedrunning 'sports' myself, but what is there to brag about victories with run-ahead pedal to the metal ?
You know, there's those streaming idiots who get congratuled beating old high scores with sync off and on top of that running enough frames ahead to blow away the conditions the original scores were achieved with. Thanks RA ?

Damn, IIRC there's even an howto page set up on libretro to explain ppl how many frames they should run ahead per game or system, great way to make sure as many as possible do the wrong thing. The "new normal" I guess ?
No thanks, I take Groovy's lossless/noncheat method over it anytime, sure it's hardware demanding but so is run-ahead.

Calamity will say that anyway VRR is becoming mainstream-enough to recommend over those, so not really worth fighting on the topic anymore...sure, we can sort of move on from these features at relatively low cost and enjoy what's actually the best.
But I'll never forgive RA for the damage it's done to more valuable emulation all these years, along with encouraging ppl to use old builds and roms, their indeed populist discourse messed up a generation's understandiong and practices on the topic of lag/delay.

Groovy all along deserved way more praises for its achievements, I guess that didn't happen because it couldn't shake away its reputation of austere, obscure, hard-to-use build (the latter criticism to be fair was true up until relatively recently)
Even when bits of Groovy's developed features were ported to mainline MAME, ppl mostly didn't realize that these 1) came from Groovy 2) were more adavnced in Groovy proper and that since 2012, unbeknowst to even a large portion of niche players from arcade communities for a long time, and persistently so, like I couldn't believe how misunderstood the -lowlatency feature was day-one and forever since.

Calamity says he laughs it off, but for me that'll always leave a slightly bitter aftertaste, even if I know Groovy's the real winner and virtuous build, can't forget it's the uglier one that dominated the era in people's hearts (edit: and it's not even an emulator ffs, just read this thread's title it's heresy period. WHY. USE. EMULATORS. when there's retoarch? Why eh? )
Damn most ppl don't even care about standalone emulators, I'd bet the bulk user base's average isn't old enough to remember before RA, for them it's just RA cores this, RA does everything best that, and its users support the monopoly like zombies 'spreading the gospel' everywhere they go.

If there's one area where RA has been overwhelmingly better than Groovy, it's communication, skillfully advertising itself and overshadowing legit great achievements and people of the scene.

Meh, I don’t care if input lag reduction is done right or wrong.

I care more about pressing a button and saying “Wow, just as responsive if not better than my genesis in my den”

Somebody saying that stand alone emulators other than GM offer better input latency than RA is capable of is absolutely mind boggling to me - sorry.

I actually also agree with this, as long as it works, i dont care how its done.

[schmerzkaufen]

Meh, I don’t care if input lag reduction is done right or wrong.

I care more about pressing a button and saying “Wow, just as responsive if not better than my genesis in my den”

Yeah that's the problem. It's wrong af and inaccurate, and you don't care, RA's users and heralds, because they don't see understand the problems with it, are a different culture than MAME and Groovy.

It's mindboggling to me that ppl don't care about anything related to accuracy yet praise the quality of a software like RA, which encourages people to use obsolete builds and lossy, incaccurate lag reduction that allows to cheat reality by making games more responsive than the originals.

Somebody saying that stand alone emulators other than GM offer better input latency than RA is capable of is absolutely mind boggling to me - sorry.

I defend Groovy's lag reduction and not randomly 'stand alone emulators' lag reduction on that topic (how many standalones feature lag reduction anyway?). My focus is on what Groovy's best for which is arcades emulation thanks to it's indeed overall more correct video/input/sound lag reduction vs. RA's run-ahead.
Groovy's method gets rid of all the unwanted lag generated by suboptimal sync, input and hardware, not the legit one that's part of the game.



EDIT: something I read once that made me raise an eyebrow, is ppl praising MiSteR over MAME after having basically used RA with many years-old cores and romsets found on archives.org Right, so they praised fresh development vs. very outdated. Well, Captain Obvious and friends ?
"well than sounds logical but why don't you use the up-to-date MAME core for compare?" "it doesnt work with my roms" "savestates dont wonrk with it" etc etc

Other example: RA user dragging Groovy through the mud while they were using again an old-af build; all issues and much more were actually fixed in the at the time current build, but their excuse for not using it ? the up-to-date Groovy build didn't match the old romsets they owned.

Or the heroes who 'beat' a number of longstanding high scores with technically 2 to sometimes maybe 3 frames faster response than even the pcb in a cab, thanks to RA. Yay, what heroes...

I think people just see and hear what they wanna see if that's convenient to them and ---fudgesicle--- reason.
I remember ppl on shmups debating the issue of RA allowing lower lag then the original and the legitimacy of the high scores achieved with that, in short the party defending RA first acted innocent, then admitted they knew it's lower than the real, and proceeded to basically say 'why should it matter, it's better this way', calling the original game's lag 'arbitrary' then making up narratives to try and make defendants of accuracy look like the bad guys.
Alternative thruth is clearly the winner broken logic of this century.

Obsolete emulator builds and lossy-cheaty lag reduction ? harmful to the legit emu dev scene ? smoke and mirrors ? demographics who don't care ? yup that's RA.
Argueably, to make it worse MAME deliberately and stubbornly maintained and even strengthened its position on a policy that didn't please and at times gave finger to the end users base, and they lost massive demographics to RA. And Groovy achieved/finalized its major user-friendly features updates only recently, while that 'war' is technically already over and ppl are now looking up affordable VRR and MiSteR.
But that doesn't absolve RA at all.

[Calamity]

Why buy eslewhere when there's Amazon?

[schmerzkaufen]

Indeed. And yet, that'd a be valid if we were talking exact same 'products', but with the popularity of cores based off antediluvian builds, and lossy-cheaty lag reduction, it's not a direct comparison.

It's more like they're arguing that Wish.com is the better choice.

EDIT: maybe Wish is too harsh so let's say aliexpress. 

[Zebidee]

I actually agree with all of you.

But appreciate Schmerz more, for explaining exactly why Groovymame is better. And Calamity again, for caring about what's real.

Yet also appreciate how some people just want to play games. Like, you can play Galaga on a smart phone, or maybe a pregnancy tester (not quite real, but who cares?).

Was thinking, maybe there is some weird logic to running Genesis games on cores based off antediluvian builds?

Unfortunately I don't get amazon.com here.

[schmerzkaufen]

I'm not the best person to explain but seriously there's ppl here and other places who in about the past 20 years have scienced the fck out the matter of delay, identifying all possible sources in a lag chain and strive to produce worthy* solutions against it, yet what do people rush on like starved lemmings ?

In place of the right stuff the overwhelmingly popular 'quick and dirty solutions' are disabling all manners of sync at the cost of tearing (inherited from old PC gaming beliefs but completely unnecessary today even when you don't own VRR), and a imitation of an old run-ahead technique that was meant to compensate for high ping at the expense of messing up the game's timing accuracy proper. Oh and hacking into game buffers (shmupmame).

And as for emulation proper, devs and contributors over 20 years in attending to core emulation of tons of systems, still updating and fixing today as we talk ? does it matter ?
 nope, ppl go for the build versions of 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago calling them 'better'.
Go figure. Ah yes, remind us who's responsible for that trend already ?

PS: as for MD idk why ppl bring it to the discussion all the time, right now I am arguing about the worth of what we have for arcades emulation and lag mitigation, expanding to everything else is tempting but that would be a lot of work so I'm limiting my ranting to that. Thought it was necessary to state it again.


* Worthy solutions: practical while not betraying the original emulated game/system's accuracy. meaning valid for the sake of preservation, and not allowing stealth cheating (lower lag than actual real game breaking timings, plus undetectable feature = cheating). frame_delay is valid, VRR is valid, running proper cores off FPGA is valid, but hacking into game's code to disable inner buffers like ShmupMAME did, or running frames ahead like RA and derivates permits, aren't valid solutions. disabling vsync isn't invalid per-se, just completely outdated and un unnecessary pain now.
Guess what? all I've seen these past 10 years or so is that the latter three have been the overwhelming most popular. Sometimes I understand devs that come to hate end users (not always but still ) Makes you understand why it was so easy for slimy populists to channel the attention of the bulk towards their snake oil sale.
Anyway for the sake of redundancy this war is already over, im beating a dead horse, a niche of smart ppl will keep using Groovy with or without CRT, or look into VRR and MiSteR.

[donluca]

I actually also agree with this, as long as it works, i dont care how its done.

I actually have to thank you for making this precise statement because right here we have, in one sentence, all that has gone wrong during the early days of emulation where no one cared about how it was done "as long as it worked".

What happened then is that people started discovering that there were things that weren't working right and two groups emerged: the "I don't care because everything else works" and the "ok, this might affect other parts of the emulation so we have to stop and investigate further".

One of those group eventually went on to sacrifice accuracy for convenience and are now part of the various cheapo emulation devices using Final Burn and other old, unsupported emulators which have thousands of game because they are "good enough" and they "can't tell the difference", the other group is now on the FPGA boat (MiSTer, Analogue, etc.)

The issue with the "as long as it works it's ok" is that when something doesn't work, a ugly hack gets made which eventually may break something else and this goes on and on until the code is such a mess as to be unmaintainable anymore and people stop developing (and some start from scratch).

Saying "I don't care how it's done because it works" is a very poor statement long term, it's like patching a leaking tube with a piece of insulation tape.
Yeah, it works, but for how long will it hold?
What are the long term consequences?
And when it breaks, what are you going to do?

It's better to do things right straight away (and trust me, even if you put all your efforts into it you'll never get it right, it will take years of research, development and testing, to get to a point where you can confidently say "ok, it is done") and invest more time and sacrifice performance and usability (which can always be added at a later time), rather than get out something which "works for now".

I hope we'll not get back to the dark ages of emulation for the sake of convenience.

[schmerzkaufen]

Groovy does have an emulation hack feature (OC) but since there's maybe only like 3 people on Earth including me who actually use it there's hardly any danger that it'll do any harm either on the short or long term 
I expected it to be popular with the shmuppers, RA stole the spotlight again with an old mame core and a feral supporter impossible to reason with. if RA and its minions even overshadow builds better for hacking, there's really not a single area left protected againts its influence.

IMO the dark ages of emulation never ended, rather we're still in the middle of a 'golden dark age', because I think there's a clear majority of users who for already a long time have experienced emulation only through RA, while more sound devs and users have been living in thinning niche communitites with almost no influence, no voice left.

Well no, sorry, again MiSTeR is the exception, it's rather well known and popular for the good reasons, I think.
And Groovy's pretty well rounded and healthy after all, MAME's not dead even if it's in a bubble.
There is still hope. 

[Trnzaddict]

Meh, I don’t care if input lag reduction is done right or wrong.

I care more about pressing a button and saying “Wow, just as responsive if not better than my genesis in my den”

Yeah that's the problem. It's wrong af and inaccurate, and you don't care, RA's users and heralds, because they don't see understand the problems with it, are a different culture than MAME and Groovy.

It's mindboggling to me that ppl don't care about anything related to accuracy yet praise the quality of a software like RA, which encourages people to use obsolete builds and lossy, incaccurate lag reduction that allows to cheat reality by making games more responsive than the originals.

Somebody saying that stand alone emulators other than GM offer better input latency than RA is capable of is absolutely mind boggling to me - sorry.

I defend Groovy's lag reduction and not randomly 'stand alone emulators' lag reduction on that topic (how many standalones feature lag reduction anyway?). My focus is on what Groovy's best for which is arcades emulation thanks to it's indeed overall more correct video/input/sound lag reduction vs. RA's run-ahead.
Groovy's method gets rid of all the unwanted lag generated by suboptimal sync, input and hardware, not the legit one that's part of the game.



EDIT: something I read once that made me raise an eyebrow, is ppl praising MiSteR over MAME after having basically used RA with many years-old cores and romsets found on archives.org Right, so they praised fresh development vs. very outdated. Well, Captain Obvious and friends ?
"well than sounds logical but why don't you use the up-to-date MAME core for compare?" "it doesnt work with my roms" "savestates dont wonrk with it" etc etc

Other example: RA user dragging Groovy through the mud while they were using again an old-af build; all issues and much more were actually fixed in the at the time current build, but their excuse for not using it ? the up-to-date Groovy build didn't match the old romsets they owned.

Or the heroes who 'beat' a number of longstanding high scores with technically 2 to sometimes maybe 3 frames faster response than even the pcb in a cab, thanks to RA. Yay, what heroes...

I think people just see and hear what they wanna see if that's convenient to them and ---fudgesicle--- reason.
I remember ppl on shmups debating the issue of RA allowing lower lag then the original and the legitimacy of the high scores achieved with that, in short the party defending RA first acted innocent, then admitted they knew it's lower than the real, and proceeded to basically say 'why should it matter, it's better this way', calling the original game's lag 'arbitrary' then making up narratives to try and make defendants of accuracy look like the bad guys.
Alternative thruth is clearly the winner broken logic of this century.

Obsolete emulator builds and lossy-cheaty lag reduction ? harmful to the legit emu dev scene ? smoke and mirrors ? demographics who don't care ? yup that's RA.
Argueably, to make it worse MAME deliberately and stubbornly maintained and even strengthened its position on a policy that didn't please and at times gave finger to the end users base, and they lost massive demographics to RA. And Groovy achieved/finalized its major user-friendly features updates only recently, while that 'war' is technically already over and ppl are now looking up affordable VRR and MiSteR.
But that doesn't absolve RA at all.

I’m not denying RA promoted the use of older MAME builds and what not. That is not what my comment was about at all. I’m talking INPUT LATENCY compared to stand alone’s besides GM.

I was simply asking a question to MK3FANATIC as to how one draws the conclusion that stand alone emulators have less input latency than what RA is capable of.

I’m not interested in all the other caveats RA has. You’re writing book responses back about how botched RA is. I’m not arguing over what software is more accurate as a whole. 

[schmerzkaufen]

I’m not denying RA promoted the use of older MAME builds and what not. That is not what my comment was about at all. I’m talking INPUT LATENCY compared to stand alone’s besides GM.

I was simply asking a question to MK3FANATIC as to how one draws the conclusion that stand alone emulators have less input latency than what RA is capable of.

I’m not interested in all the other caveats RA has. You’re writing book responses back about how botched RA is. I’m not arguing over what software is more accurate as a whole.

Well excuse my bad eyes but it's me you quoted...and unless I hallucinated and copied a cake recipe you pretty much stated what I quoted, and I've answered on-topic.
it's lenghty sure, and yes I've enlarged the topic, but even putting aside the extras; have you ever heard of Brandolini's law ?

It's easy for people to just drop something controversial (to use a polite term) say "I don't care" with that - goto donluca's post no need to repeat - then when they get comprehensive replies from people who don't agree - which here on GroovyMAME forum was bound to come - just say "no need for a wall of text" when it happens.

I mean...idk what kind of reactions ppl expect after coming and dropping bombs like that here of all places, and on an topic that's obviously not a casual one.  :
It's no discord...


Predictive note: Wait for it gents, next post I'll definitely have the role of the villain. This is the usual process.

If that can help some feeling more comfortable, I can say good things about RA, again its shaders system is absolutely great, and after all we're not forced to use run-ahead, though unlike what we did for Groovy we haven't measured the effects of hard gpu sync and RA's own implementation of frame_delay, together I suppose these features can offer pretty decent results without breaking accuracy. Dunno what the audio lag reduction is worth compared to Portaudio also. And well one can still use an up-to-date MAME core if those are still maintained at libretro.

I would tell more but that would be too long. Maybe in another volume. 

[abispac]

Why buy eslewhere when there's Amazon?

I got the point, im not a fan of RA, i jus thought it was cool it makes things easyer to set up.

Donluca

Well you also have to realize the world is vast and has alot of humans in it. Some are perfecionist, some are not. Some enjoy the games as long as they work, some look for the perfection. Thats why we now have FPGA lover stating that fpga is more acurate, and till this day, my simple mind fails to  understand, how a simple underpowered board would work better than mame that now runs on some most of the powerfull computers and gpus that world offers. Yet they claim  its a lot better, im still trying to get my hands on a mister board to test wheter robotron really works better on fpga than in mame. Maybe one day.

To everyone ealse: This post was meant for me to see what the pros and cons of using RA instead of emulators. Theres no doubt that groovymame is far superior  to use on crt's, but to my simple mind, all other emulators where not created with crts in mind, so setting up multiple consoles within RA and having them using the RA 15khz function,  was way easyer than setting up a bunch of emus. Hey i dont even like RA, im using rocketlauncher with hyperspin , RA is just some kind of man in the middle.
I never though that RA is doing things wrong, and has some developer hate for that, an you are right  mr

schmerzkaufen

using the latest developed software out there would always be better than using the old stuff. Over the years many many talented developers have worked together to make this as perfect as it can. So we should honor those talented guys by testing out what they have done.

So my final word on this matter, as an end user. 

I really hope RA would fix theyr input lag method they way it should be implemented.
Theres public for both things, perfectly working  and as log as it works, (heck, i saw a guy playing pacman on a strech out horizontal image and he was happy with it). So i guess if you having fun with it, then keep going.
I really thank everyone in the world, involved in all of this, from the hardware donors, to developers and even hackers that break protections, ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- , i remembered back in the day when everyone was exited about cps3.
I hope ill get to test fpga vs mame to see if the fuss is true.
Since most console emulators  are abandoned  , then RA its a good alternative to load them up on crts monitors, together with rocket launcher and hyperspin , as RA has a much ugly interface.

Thanks Calamity , and everyone else that comented here, feel free to keep going, maybe ill learn something new.

[donluca]

Well you also have to realize the world is vast and has alot of humans in it.

This is the tragedy of modern society which dictates not only how the market works, but also other unrelated stuff which follows the same rules.

Just like electricity, humans will always follow the path of least resistance.
Give them two options, a very easy with a mediocre result and a hard one with excellent result and most of people will always choose the easy one.

Doing things properly require a lot of effort, which demands more "in return", which immediately turns off most people.
So, say, a FPGA developer is looking at a user base of 1000 people whereas Retroarch is looking at possibly 10 times that, if not more.
That alone makes it way more appealing for developers to choose Retroarch rather than FPGA: less work, bigger user base, happier number of users who will benefit from your work.
It's an inescapable cycle.

So what can we do about this?
The only thing we can do is educate people and teach them the differences so that they can make a better choice for themselves, whatever that will be.

MiSTer is not better than a powerful PC with good emulators: it simply has more dedicated people who are decapping real chips and studying them very thoroughly so the result is exceptional. It's as simple as that.

The good thing is that all the cores and documentation are open source and freely available, so hopefully there will be someone at some point who's going to backport all the good work on MiSTer back in MAME and other emulators and, at that point, there will be no almost no differences: MiSTer will have the edge on ease of use, almost instant startup, small, cheaper, vastly lower power consumption and lower input lag.

And that's going to be that.
For someone MiSTer might be more appealing already for the reasons stated above, a bit like how RaspberryPi gained a lot of traction in the retrogaming community, disregarding the more accurate emulation.

Anyway, I'm happy you're going to get a MiSTer and try it out, I'll look forward your thoughts.

[MK3FANATIC]

Do you know much about RA? It can deliver lower input latency than even the real hardware via run ahead.

I don’t know what other emulators you’re using (Groovymame aside) that you think have less input latency than you can achieve with RA. Seriously.

Yes I know about the latency features of retroarch. And it was not a conclusion, just my perception and preference. Some emulators I prefer to use standalone instead of retroarch; are PPSSPP, Flycast and Dolphin, not only specifically for input lag, in my setup I feel that the performance in general is better on them than on their respective retroarch cores.

I'm sorry, for the playful way I wrote it (...>...>) it may have given the impression that I consider RA a bad option and that it's always the last choice, but that's not it, quite the contrary, I use it for some systems (where mame still doesn't work) as a first option and it does a great job, especially after adding switchres 2.

[abispac]

Anyway, I'm happy you're going to get a MiSTer and try it out, I'll look forward your thoughts.

is gonna take a wild, 200+ dollars is alot of money.

[dmckean]

The good thing is that all the cores and documentation are open source and freely available, so hopefully there will be someone at some point who's going to backport all the good work on MiSTer back in MAME and other emulators and, at that point, there will be no almost no differences.

The MiSTer developers are already getting most of this info from the documentation that was used to write current software emulators. The developers of software emulators just don't consider it worth the effort to implement. It's a ton easier to implement in FPGA because everything can be executed in parallel just like actual hardware. Taking this same approach in software is going to result in something that runs at .2 frames per second.

FPGA modules are going to start showing up in mainstream CPUs in the next several years though. That will change everything.

[psakhis]

FPGA modules are going to start showing up in mainstream CPUs in the next several years though. That will change everything.

FPGA's are very expensive...for example we don't see a dreamcast implemented on it.

[dmckean]

FPGA modules are going to start showing up in mainstream CPUs in the next several years though. That will change everything.

FPGA's are very expensive...for example we don't see a dreamcast implemented on it.

They're expensive now because they're made for niche uses but they won't be forever when they start showing up on mainstream CPUs. AMD didn't spend all that money on Xilinx for nothing.

The reason we don't see Dreamcast implemented on FPGA is the massive amount of man hours it would take to create such a thing. You would probably need a team for 20 people working full time for two years. Probably double that for PS2. 

[psakhis]

FPGA existed long before de10 nano, and always at exorbitant prices

[abispac]

FPGA is expencive now, but i believe in the future, it will be just as emulators, someone will figure out a way to implement a front end, and special normal price cpus will be cheaper. I hope so LOL but to be honest i dont really care, 200 bucks seems a fair price for original alike hardware. What we really need, is a company that would start fabricating crt arcade monitors againg, as they gonna die sometime, even with people using rgb mods on tvs, tvs also going to die sometime, not soon , but sometime.

[Recapnation]

Donluca and 'Kaufen's replies are plain arcade-centric whereas the original poster was asking about console emulators, I'd say. Trying to address the question -- years ago, and I bet things haven't changed much in this regard, RA was indeed better than some of the original emulators it "borrows" regarding latency due to how these implement video and audio synchonization or just to how they're coded to generate every frame, the most notable example being BSNES/Higan, which is known for being basically the only accurate SFC/SNES emulator (even over Mister), so it's a case that matters. Never paid enough attention, but it'd be interesting if they (RA) implemented it with the PPSSPP core as this emulator's terrible in this regard, though last I heard, it was not really possible without a major rewrite.

Notice that this is previous to the run-ahead cr~p, which one should indeed ignore if one gives a damn f~ck about the original games, as 'Kaufen so neatly pointed. So it's not about removing any of the original lag, which indeed should be there if only because the games were built around it -- sadly, knowing exactly what's the original latency in every instance is never easy, but that's another subject altogether.

Also, RA just makes usable many of those stand-alone emulators on a 15-kHz CRT, which expect a desktop res. of 800 * 600 or above.

RA wouldn't actually matter if it weren't because MAME's console emulation is generally so unfinished, though, even if we're talking just about 8- and 16-bit machines. For those, a Mister device sounds like a better option than RA in a near future (glitches and discrepancies still being reported as of now even for the most popular cores, I'm afraid), if only because all the meaningful developments in this area are being made there these days, though they indeed often used the best PC emulators as their base, as mentioned. Additionally, Mister improves the emulation of not few arcade games over MAME's. And in some cases, those are improvements which cannot be ported to MAME. So if you care (much) about some essential pieces like pre-CPS3 Capcom's, a Mister device is more than recommended, as they'll always run better there than under Groovy MAME.

For 32-bit systems and beyond I'd never use emulation, just to give my entire opinion, in case it matters.

Not that I care much about scoring and speedrunning 'sports' myself, but what is there to brag about victories with run-ahead pedal to the metal ?

I remember ppl on shmups debating the issue of RA allowing lower lag then the original and the legitimacy of the high scores achieved with that, in short the party defending RA first acted innocent, then admitted they knew it's lower than the real, and proceeded to basically say 'why should it matter, it's better this way', calling the original game's lag 'arbitrary' then making up narratives to try and make defendants of accuracy look like the bad guys.

It just adds to the exogenous autofire, non-proper controllers, credit-feeding/save states for practicing, You-Tube abuse and so on. There have been so many arbitrary "new normals" now that competition always was anything but meaningful. RA generally stinks, but it's not the one to blame over this.

Yet also appreciate how some people just want to play games. Like, you can play Galaga on a smart phone, or maybe a pregnancy tester (not quite real, but who cares?).

That would not actually be Galaga, though?

[Zebidee]

Yet also appreciate how some people just want to play games. Like, you can play Galaga on a smart phone, or maybe a pregnancy tester (not quite real, but who cares?).

That would not actually be Galaga, though?

Exactly the point of my teasing rhetorical question 

If the emulation is not authentic, does not allow you to play the game as it was originally, then it is not really the same game.

Everyone will have a slightly different take on whether this is important or not. So long as people are having fun, I guess.