RetroArch 1.7.6 released: PlayStation 2 port released with 4 cores, significant progress made on PlayStation 4/Xbox One ports, Ozone menu driver (Switch-esque) added and more!
Every now and again, RetroArch gets an official update and this time around, it’s pretty major and also brings about a lot of good news! Among the stuff that RetroArch 1.7.6 brings about, we find a port for the PlayStation 2 and Apple TV and a description of the work being done on the PlayStation 4 and XBOX One ports. Other than new ports, there’s also other stuff such as a Switch-esque menu system and more!
PlayStation 2 and Apple TV ports now available
For quite a while, fjtrujy has been working on a PS2 port of RetroArch and now, his work has matured enough to make it to the official release stage! This port can be installed on all hacked PS2’s and can be used with common hacking software like FreeMcBoot as the RetroArch cores are in ELF form.
As of right now, there are 4 cores available namely:
- QuickNES (NES emulator, duh)
- Works at full speed even with Vsync ON
- FCEUmm (NES emulator)
- Works at full speed but Vsync must be turned OFF for such performance
- Picodrive (a Mega Drive/Genesis, 32X and Master System emulator)
- This emulator works pretty well on the PSP which has the same CPU architecture as the PS2 (MIPS)
- Works at full speed but like FCEUmm, Vsync must be turned OFF for best performance
On a more modern note, RetroArch has also been ported to the Apple TV which means that it could now be turned into an emulation machine! This port supports the Apple TV 4 and 4K and uses a Switch-esque user interface for navigation. Among the cores available for the tvOS port, there are SNES9x, Nestopia, mGBA, Stella (Atari 2600), DOSBox and many others.
Installing this port is a bit tedious as you need to have a Macintosh computer with XCode installed to get it on your Apple TV but the RetroArch folks provide a pretty straightforward guide on how to install it. If you don’t have an Apple developer account, you’ll have to sign (reinstall) the application every week unless your Apple TV is jailbroken.
Progress being done on PlayStation 4 and XBOX One ports
Recently, there’s been a considerable amount of work on getting RetroArch to work on the PlayStation 4 and these efforts were greatly aided with OpenGL ES support being added to liborbis, which is a PS4 homebrew SDK. Now, this work has progressed quite a lot and the GL driver, XMB, MaterialUI and RGUI menu drivers are fully working.
Other than porting drivers to the PS4, a few cores have also been ported namely SameBoy and 2048. As of right now, this port isn’t publicly available but it should be made available when OLEF support gets added to liborbis. When it’s released, it’ll only support FW 4.55 and 5.05 so don’t update past those!
Switching focus to the Microsoft side of things, the XBOX One’s port of RetroArch is seeing considerable progress and some developer builds are already floating around online. The XBOX One port has been made possible through the UWP platform and makes use of a Direct3D 11 driver for GPU stuff. As of right now, both XMB and MaterialUI menu drivers are supported and various cores like PCSX ReARMed are available. Making use of the XBOX One port is a bit of a tedious process since you need to have a developer account ($20 OR through free through some special discount scheme) and you need to boot the console into Developer Mode every time you want to use it.
Other Things
As this article got pretty long with news about new ports, a short list will be provided detailing everything else that RetroArch 1.7.6 brings along:
- Ozone menu driver which provides a user interface similar to that found on the Nintendo Switch
- All ports that supports XMB and MaterialUI support this menu driver with the exception of Android
- The RGUI menu driver got some improvements like wallpaper support and a new theme preset configuration file format
- Improvements to the Desktop UI like a detailed file browser
- Discord matchmaking is now a thing
- Xperia Play input binding has been fixed and much more!
Conclusion
To grab RetroArch 1.7.6, check out this link and download the files for the platform of your choice. As of right now, the PlayStation 4 and XBOX One ports aren’t officially available but the latter can be downloaded by following the in-line link given above. If you encounter any issues, report them to the RetroArch GitHub.
Now, you might as well go update RetroArch on your hacked devices and enjoy the new Switch-esque menu system 😉
lets play some retro games a u r o z e t t.
Now liborbis SDK is in the works with opengl ? … are there plans for a ps4dpm thats a ps4 device package manager that installs ur SDK and libs ??
on the otherhand in emulation Q’s … great work on the RetroArch native and ps2 disc0 on ps4 … is FreeMcBoot comming to a ps4 ?
so the Q is will there be ps2 or ps4 native ports for various emulators like on my tegra android … the titles intresting would be …
counterstrike and counterstrike go … shieldtv tegrazone moonlight steam-link dolphin Mupen64PlusFZ AMD-link steam Nintendo-switch-online and ofc retroarch ??? xDD
keep up the good work xD
for people who want the latest builds for xbox one check out my mediafire page at bit.ly/xb1home
*im sorry for the advertising but i just wanted to let yall know where to find the latest versions
thank you
The vita version sucks ***. Ever since its conception, its never been able to run GBA games, SNES is spotty and wonderswan is pretty bad, too. Such a shame.
why you changed site style ? 🙁
do we almost have a webinterfaced webgl cxbx open source emulator for first xbox ?
or do i get a core ?
This RetroArch PS2 progress is really cool! Looking forward to comparing them to existing emulators on the thing!