First off, I’d like to take the time out to wish everyone a joyous Merry Christmas and a happy new year! I hope you all had the time to celebrate your desires, values and affections with your loved ones. For those who of you haven’t received any presents, fear not for Libretro has got you covered with RetroArch v1.7.0 😉

There has been many changes in the following release, but the few that peaked my interest (as a proud PlayStation scene member) are the following changes:

– PS3: HTTP requests / downloads should now work.
– PS3: Core Updater now works.
– PS3: Improved font rendering, enable STB Unicode font renderer.

– PSP: Make it work with Vita’s Adrenaline.
– PSP: Fix audio sync.
– PSP: Fix content loading, port should be functional again.
– PSP: Use 64MB when available.

– VITA: Improve packaging, installation times.

You read that right, we can now basically emulate an emulator that emulates a bunch of other devices using Adrenaline! One might wonder how this may be beneficial considering we already have a RetroArch port for VITA. Well, let’s face it, emulation isn’t exactly pitch perfect on the VITA. There are some things that I personally found running better on the PSP, specifically the tempgba core. I felt that the audio playback is slightly smoother than PS Vita version. This could however be just from my experience, but I personally felt that it was better to play GBA games on the PSP rather than VITA. I can’t speak for the other cores, but I did notice the PSP included a fmsx core (portable MSX emulator) whereas the VITA did not.

This release has also bought a lot of focus to the PS3 version as briefly motioned earlier. Thanks to clienthax from the rpcs3 team who helped the retroArch team with fixing and improving the Core Updater, netplay and asset downloader. Fun fact: You can also run the PS3 version through rpcs3!

GPSP core running on RetroArch PS VITA/VITA TV

Other major improvements include:

• Bliss-Box 4-Play integration (a universal game pad adapter)
• Badges for achievements (badge images are now displayed in the list of achievements in RetroArch)
• Improved lightgun support
• Windows 95/Windows 98 (non-SE) support (Now supports even more old/ancient computers :P)
• and much more!

There’s too many changes to list all at once here, so I’ll leave the rest of the details to those interested.

Download Retroarch 1.7.0

Retroarch can be downloaded for multiple platforms on the official download page here.

It is also worth mentioning that if you do have any feature requests or an idea that may enhance user experience you can make use of their bounty system to encourage contributions from outside of the normal libretro/RetroArch/Lakka team.