Arcan 0.2.1

[demeth]

Stopped slacking and finally managed to put together the 0.2.1 branch of my multi-emu frontend, Arcan.

Main new features:
    • Integrated specialized display-modes (Vector, CRT, NTSC etc.)
    • Video recording (VP8/WebM/...)
    • Built-in Layout Editor ("Custom-View mode")

But there's a ton of other stuff hidden in there as well (changelog, wiki etc. at http://arcanfe.wordpress.com)

Demovideo of new features at:


And I suspect the more interesting bits for cab-/htpc- builders etc. start @ 3:15 or so.

[rockyrocket]

Thank you for this!.
Cant believe more people are not excited by this as the vector emulation looks great.

[matsadona]

I am indeed excited about this, and the vector emulation is one of the major reasons for that.
However I am waiting for a stable windows build, since I’m a total noob when it comes to Linux. Don’t have the time to learn either, even though there are probably many benefits from doing that…

But I agree, this forum usually praises things like this, but it has been ver quit around Arcan. Can’t really tell why.

[demeth]

Well, I've heard that the dev is sort-of an elitist arrogant recluse, that might have something to do with it  -- outside of a few forum posts, there's not exactly much marketing effort going on so there's that. Have a couple of suspicions as to why there's not more buzz, ranging from the general idea being somewhat foreign to people ("is it an emulator"? .. yes.. "is it a front-end?" .. yes .. "what which one is it?" ... you decide) to the somewhat difficult first-setup, oh well.

As for the vector side on Windows, there is a libretro core based on an older version of mame around the corner ( https://github.com/libretro/mame078-libretro ) that just need some more tweaks before it should be enough to get internal launch with vector on windows, assuming you can find old-enough romsets ;P

The current windows build should be about as stable as I can make it without more user-input, I have a handful of pretty active testers that have logged a few hundred hours of active use on it at least (as of tonight, it seems like live streaming to twitch.tv and some other 0.2.2 features started working...), but considering there's pretty much a game engine hidden inside, well, there's so much hardware/driver variation to account for that it's pretty discerning, GPU issues alone when you start juggling 5-7 pass FBO/PBO juggling with runtime- shader gen (which is pretty much what the vector stuff comes down to with CRT added ontop) is enough to make the less patient ones give up ;-P