RetroArch is a frontend for emulators, game engines and media players which is powered by the libretro API that provides an abstraction layer to connect other applications (so called “cores”) to RetroArch.
EasyRPG Player is now supporting libretro including all features you know from our other ports, which means you can decide if you want to use any RetroArch specific features not (yet) provided by our standalone version.
We will continue maintaining and improving our standalone version. See libretro support as a bonus feature. We don’t see RetroArch as a competitor, you can decide which version you prefer :).
For stability and maintenance reasons the release schedule will be, when 0.6.1 is released, linked to our official schedule which means the core is always updated after a new official release is announced in the blog.
Features
Notable features compared to the normal version:
- Gamepad button remapping
- Better file browser
- Touch UI on any platform
- Shaders
- Simple install of WildMidi instruments via the built-in content downloader
- Everything else RetroArch offers ;) (when applicable, EasyRPG Player is not an emulator)
Download & Platform support
We don’t provide our own builds for it, instead use the core updater of RetroArch or download it from the libretro buildbot.
The core is available for the following platforms/architectures:
- Windows (32 and 64bit)
- Linux (64bit, ARM hardfloat and ARM Neon)
- macOS
- Android (only ARM, not for x86 due to build issues but your smartphone/tablet is usually ARM-based)
- iOS (the only platform we don’t really support yet, due to lack of a touch UI)
- SNES Classic & co. (Maintained by ModMyClassic)
A port for Vita and Switch is possible but due to lack of hardware for testing these are currently unsupported. Use our standalone ports instead. The 3DS is out of scope because of hardware limitations (our official port which is optimized for the 3DS already runs badly). Support for Wii and WiiU is not planned because these platforms are using big-endian byte ordering and compiling some libraries to these platforms really causes a headache. You can use our official Wii port instead. The same applies to emscripten, the web version requires many modifications to run properly, please use our own version of the web player instead.
Controls
Except for some functionality that is already provided by RetroArch (Reset, Fast Forward, Screenshot and FPS toggle) the keyboard mapping is the same as in the standalone EasyRPG Player.
RetroPad:
- A: Confirm
- B: Cancel
- Y: Shift
- Start: Confirm
- Select: Reset game
- X, R1-3, L1-3: RPG Maker games can use more buttons than the RetroPad has. You can map these 7 buttons in the core options.
Core options
- Remapping of RetroPad X, R1-3 and L1-3.
- You can decide whether the keyboard (normal EasyRPG Player button mapping), the RetroPad or both are used. Due to possible button mapping conflicts you can disable one of them here.
- Debug/TestPlay mode can be toggled. This allows you to walk through walls by holding left CTRL or opening the debug menu with F10 (you can map them to the RetroPad)
For developers
To build it locally you can clone our repository and build it with CMake:
git submodule update --init cmake . -DPLAYER_TARGET_PLATFORM=libretro -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON|OFF
Use ON or OFF depending on if your platform uses shared libraries for libretro, when you target your Desktop system, use ON.
This will use your platform libraries instead of “baking in” the dependencies, which is usually what you want. To compile dependencies (when cross-compiling) take a look at our buildscripts repository.
If you don’t want to use your system libraries or manually built libraries for whatever reason you can use the Makefile to invoke the “automagical voodoo-build” in the libretro-easyrpg fork. This is designed for the libretro buildbot and otherwise unsupported!
Why not compile for Linux 32 bits?
Each additional platform is an additional maintenance burden.
Almost nobody is using 32bit Linux anymore, many distributions even dropped the 32bit version (they only offer 32bit multilibs as part of there 64bit distributions).
Note that this is about x86 32bit, for ARM there are still 32bit builds.
Which version for raspberry pi zero?
In Retroarch, I load the easyrpg core, then i select the directory of the game via the Load Content menu option.
Then I navigate to the game directory (Duesterburg), and click “OK”
Then Retroarch fails to load the game and takes me to the parent directory.
The same directories work with standalone Easyrpg.
As usual the developers forgot to tell people how to use their product. Then fail to give any meaningful user-feedback on encountering a failure mode.
This happens when the core directory is set wrong (either through GUI or the config). In my case I had a typo that the tired eyes overlooked.
Retroarch could do better with feedback if it presented the error that core directory path does not exist.
Of course the pbcak could have done better in this instance as well.
Otherwise EasyRPG is running great, except for crashing whenever retroarch loses window focus. I’ll file an issue.