MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Mess with the RetroArch + MAME 0.187 last night.

> 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.