There seems to be a brewing controversy going on in the emulation scene involving Libretro. What's going on?

[delete12345]

I'm not someone who follows the Libretro/RetroArch emulation controversy, but it's happening recently now.

Here's an instance where the creator of Redream, a Sega Dreamcast emulator, is making a dig on Libretro core for Sega Dreamcast, Flycast:

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Judging from the comments, it seems like there's a bit of a "hostile contributor displacing behavior" going on in the project. But that was settled away with a private direct messaging session, so I thought the controversy is over pretty much.

And then another controversy brewed, that's happening in the same veins as this subtle dig mentioned above (Long Twitter thread):



Endrift is the author of mGBA, an open-source GBA emulator which is known to be cycle-accurate in the emulation scene. Recently, she found out RetroArch contained illegal references to an official Sony PS3 SDK.

After pointing this issue where the code is violating copyright laws, according to Endrift, the maintainer of RetroArch (TwinAphex?) banned not only the fork she is contributing for the mGBA core, but also all of the libretro forks.

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What's really going on right now? What's the current situation with libretro/RetroArch right now that Endrift is banned? I'm just curious and am an outsider, but I think I wanted to have a discussion about this.

Close if this discussion is already happening.

 

[BAW]

Bold move keeping the illegal PS3 code in there, Sony could go nuclear on their ass. Sounds like RetroArch needs new leadership.

 

[GamerJM]

It seems ridiculously stupid to do this just for a PS3 port of emulators. How many people are even using the PS3 as an emulation box?

 

[Pargon]

Unless I'm misunderstanding things, it sounds like TwinAphex went scorched earth on this to try and destroy any trace of the illegal code usage (including the code) since that could sink the entire project and open them up to a whole host of legal problems; with the intent of patching things up later after it had been dealt with.
I haven't been following the emulation scene that closely these days, but unfortunately from what I've seen, TwinAphex has managed to drive away nearly every emulator developer that has written their own Libretro cores for the project, and most rely on forked code from third-party contributors now - which often means that they are running older code.

The problem is that, from a user point of view, RetroArch and other Libretro front-ends are significantly better than any other stand-alone emulator project out there.
I cannot think of a single stand-alone emulator which actually understands how to properly handle audio and video sync in a way that prevents stuttering or audio distortion, or which properly supports variable refresh rate displays to run the emulator at exactly the original rate without those problems.
And none of them have good shader support.

 

[Zero-ELEC]

TwinAphex continues to be a dick.

 

[Awakened]

I haven't been following the emulation scene that closely these days, but unfortunately from what I've seen, TwinAphex has managed to drive away nearly every emulator developer that has written their own Libretro cores for the project, and most rely on forked code from third-party contributors now - which often means that they are running older code.

Click to shrink...

flyinghead (Flycast), bparker (frontend dev), Radius (frontend dev, did some core work too) and now endrift are the ones that come to mind that have left in the last year or so. Well, I'm assuming endrift won't work on the libretro target anymore, unless she wants to add one to her upstream repo. There are still a fair amount of upstream friendly projects, though some don't really interact with the main RetroArch devs. Like BlastEm, Duckstation, FB Neo and SameBoy. sour's Mesen and Mesen-S were fully maintained upstream too, but sour decided to stop working on his emulators for now. Also, I think one of the PCSX2 devs who has been working on x64 support has also been helping with the libretro port of that.

 

[Squirrel Killer]

<<Eh... I'm too causal of a user to really have an opinion on this...>>

 

[spineduke]

Bold move keeping the illegal PS3 code in there, Sony could go nuclear on their ass. Sounds like RetroArch needs new leadership.

Click to shrink...

It's been removed, it's in the op

 

[Awakened]

Can cross Duckstation off my previous list. Stenzek was running into problems implementing some bug fixes/feature requests I opened due to issues with the libretro API. And now with what happened with endrift he decided to stop working on libretro stuff. He said he'll at least make sure the core still builds though.

 

[DiipuSurotu]

<<Eh... I'm too causal of a user to really have an opinion on this...>>

Click to shrink...

Same, I read the OP twice and have no idea what's going on... Why are there so many controversies in the emulation scene :/

 

[Dio]

Twin seems like a prick. i adore Retroarch, but it really needs new leadership.

Can cross Duckstation off my previous list. Stenzek was running into problems implementing some bug fixes/feature requests I opened due to issues with the libretro API. And now with what happened with endrift he decided to stop working on libretro stuff. He said he'll at least make sure the core still builds though.

Click to shrink...

EDIT: ignore what i said. reread and understood you were referring to Stenzek.

 

[Anton]

It's because TwinAphex is a huge prick and he has slowly driven most people away from working with him or his platform

 

[sir_crocodile]

TwinAphex/Squarepusher/DanteAlighieri or whatever he calls himself has always been a toxic individual as best I can tell. Said some pretty nasty stuff years back which stopped me from every using retroarch. I'll see if I can dig it up.

Most emudevs dislike him now.

--edit

Found IRC logs where he called a dev a "bipolar retard". yeah.

byuu

[Twinaphex logs are two sections below – retroarchleaks] Thursday, 2017-01-26 03:28 < zeromus> cute_korean_girl, this channel is byuu hate HQ. if there is any one thing you can’t …

retroarchleaks.wordpress.com

 

[Seafoam Gaming]

I remember the libretro twitter getting pretty aggressive when talking about Digital Eclipse when they put out SF30th, basically giving some legitimate feedback on how things should be improved with some emulation aspects, but also throwing some lazy dev implications at them because things weren't emulated to the same degree as RA and they didn't include Hyper/Alpha 3 Upper/Alpha 2 Gold, despite how the devs of that compilation noted 1: they couldn't and 2: they were way trickier than the other games they ported in that compilation.

That twitter account, I noticed, likes to complain too much about other compilations and such not being "as good" as Retroarch (or accuse those that have good emulation of outright stealing RA, which to my knowledge, only the Retrocade was proven to actually do) which seems kiiiinda egotistical for my taste, tbh, so I quickly unfollowed it.

And of course, their harassment and ableist attacks on Byuu which were absolutely shameful considering Byuu has done godlike work in the emulation scene and is on the verge of retirement due to all that + other stresses from over the years from the community. That outright made me never want to touch RA in my life