> > I'm not really sure what you expect from RA, it's just butchered up junk that > should > > be avoided. > > From an end-user perspective, RetroArch (and by association, libretro) is also - how > can I say this kindly - complete and utter dogshit. > > The concept of a unifying frontend for disparate emulators is great, and I'll > absolutely give it credit for that. It even looks nice and presents a largely-usable > UI. But the implementation is a fresh, fat, steamy dog egg lying in wait to be trod > upon. More on that below. > > > Unfortunately I guess on mobile you have no choice right now. > > Or on just about any low-end platform (RasPi, I'm looking at you). It's as though RA > is being seen as the ultimate answer to how to wrapper multiple emulators in such a > way that anyone barely registering a pulse can use them without having to think about > it, but with total disregard for the fact that adapting the emulators to work with > the frontend platform generally ends up hacking them into a craptacular mess that > contributes to sub-par user experiences with said emulators. > > What I see as the core of the problem is that RA (by way of libretro) promises > bitchin' UI and UX. And in many ways, it does deliver that. But having to graft > libretro into emulators that were never intended to use it in the first place leads > to the aforementioned craptacular messes and sub-par experiences. > > This is essentially what I don't like about RA: the idea that it *is* 'the solution'. > Thing is, when it comes to frontends, there are 32767 other solutions out there, > virtually none of which require making major source changes and building against > external libraries to integrate them with {insert emulator here}. It also obfuscates > large chunks of the emulator being used from the end user, which I feel is a > disservice to the people who worked on that emulator - you should know what it is > that you're using so that you know who to give credit to for the hard work that went > into it. > > If the libretro API was something that emulator authors sought to support natively, > fine. I have absolutely no problem with that; it's an option that *should* be > available. But forking source, grafting code into it that the architecture was never > meant to be able to handle in the first place, then presenting a crappy end product > to users and giving the excuse of, 'it's the other guy's fault, honest, my frontend > library works fine, go talk to them' is just pathetic. > > My gripes with emulation on the RasPi have been stated here to some extent, and I > still agree with them. But I don't see why - and particularly on low-end platforms - > performance should be traded for eye-candy convenience.
and despite all this it's becoming massively popular, even on Windows, which is what I thought would end up happening as soon as they got a more slick marketing team on-board, which appears to have happened.
I'd still consider it one of the biggest threats we've seen to proper emulation in a long time.
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