Emulation News: Dolphin is now running on the XBOX ONE via libretro with some games playable, Raspberry Pi 4 showing significant improvements in emulators (PPSSPP) over RPi 3B+ and Super Mario Maker 2 running well in Yuzu!
Recently, the emulation scene got a tad more exciting with releases and news being published more frequently. This time, we’ll be looking at Dolphin running on the XBOX ONE, Raspberry Pi 4 performance in PPSSPP and Yuzu’s recent progress with Super Mario Maker 2.
Dolphin running on the XBOX ONE and the Raspberry Pi 4 showing huge significant gains in emulation
Compared to portable consoles, home consoles don’t get much love in the homebrew/hacking department and the XBOX ONE is probably the current generation console that has it the worst.
However, the folks behind RetroArch decided to give Microsoft’s current console some love and ported a UWP version of their emulator front-end to it which must be run in the console’s Developer Mode.
Now, this port of RetroArch seems to have gained a libretro core as Reddit user and RetroArch developer “DanteAlighieri64” shared a video which demonstrates Super Mario Sunshine (GameCube) being emulated on the XBOX ONE with pretty good performance. As of right now, not much is known about the Dolphin libretro core for the XBOX ONE although a Reddit user said it’ll be released on Sunday so perhaps, you’ll be able to emulate some GC/Wii games soon on the latest XBOX!
On the other hand, with the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B already being out for a little over a week, some performance figures have emerged. Among these performances figures, we find the following compared to the RPi 3B+:
- Significant improvements in PSP emulation performance with God Of War: Ghost Of Sparta running at around full speed on the RPi4 with a frame skip of 1
- This is pretty good considering the RPi 3B+ ran it at around 50% speed with the same settings
- A video demonstrating this can be viewed here
- Some Nintendo 64 games, such as Super Smash Bros, are now reaching 60FPS compared to 40-50FPS although demanding titles like 007 GoldenEye remain unplayable
- The SameBoy emulator (GB/GBC/SGB) is working better with games such as Shantae now running at 60FPS compared to mid-40FPS
- Mesen, a NES emulator, is emulating games much better now
- A compatibility/testing list for the above 3 points can be accessed here
- Some Dreamcast games, such as Aero Wings 2 Airstrike, run pretty well although there doesn’t seem to be much information on this yet
Currently, some emulators are not optimised for the Raspberry Pi 4 and are not compiled with Open GL ES 3.0 support (which the RPi 4 introduces) so in the future, better performance may be extracted from some emulators. However, it’s pretty unlikely that the RPi 4 will ever be able to emulate newer consoles like the PlayStation 2 or GameCube with good speed in most games so don’t get your hopes up too high!
Super Mario Maker 2 mostly playable in Yuzu emulator although you have to donate to play it now…
The Yuzu emulator (Nintendo Switch) has been around for a while now and the developers behind it are hard at work implementing Switch services/functions and making more games playable whilst improving performance and adding features to the emulator.
In order to further aid their development, they created a Patreon earlier this year in which they publish more advanced builds of the emulator from time to time and this time, they released a pretty significant one.
July 2nd’s Patreon build comes with numerous important changes from the current canary build including:
- LR Assignment Mode
- The implementation of 2 important HID commands
- Fixes to event handling, audio and the GPU
- Conditional rendering and a new shader scanner along with some other stuff including the OSS Mii Model, Boost Mode and Filesystem Access Logging
- The ability to run Super Mario Maker 2 very well provided you have adequate hardware albeit with one bug which doesn’t allow you to save levels due to an issue with the Switch’s software keyboard
- These features will eventually be made available to the upstream branch of Yuzu for everybody to enjoy for free
To support the emulator on Patreon and get access to their donator-only builds, you may head over to this link for more information.
Conclusion
If you want to read more about recent emulation developments, you may be interested in Mikage (a WIP 3DS emulator designed specifically for Android), Play! (PS2) getting a RetoArch core, RetroPie 4.5 being released, the work being done on the RetroArch Disc Project which lets you run original games off a CD rather than an ISO file off your hard-drive for a more authentic emulation experience. Currently, Sega/Mega CD, PS1, 3DO and Sega Saturn games are supported and a release will be out very soon
if this somehow manages to not need dev mode, i might actually turn my Xbox One S to something more than just a YouTube/Kodi machine. afaik there was some UWP libretro port than ran in dev mode but didn’t get much attention. can’t wait for a full RetroArch experience on Xbox One tho!
HUH WAIT WHAT?
WE WERE JUST BARELY RUNNING N64 BEFORE? Finally my Xbone isn’t a paperweight.
Nice to see Xbox One getting some love. Hope it gets some exploit at some point and time.