NordCFW
IT Specialist/Security Enthusiast
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Probably the highlight of this release – there is a new ‘Explore’ view for all playlists.
The Explore view takes advantage of the Libretro databases’ metadata history of content. It allows you to search / find content based on criteria such as:\
The metadata is currently a bit on the incomplete side, but you can expect us to add more and more metadata to the Libretro database as we go along. This is only the beginning.
Usecases
There are tons of ways you can use the Explore view to find what you want. Here are some of them:
Granular filtering
Here is a good example of the kind of powerful context-sensitive filtering that is possible with the Explore view.
Enhanced playlist search functionality
Before, RetroArch’s inbuilt ‘search’ function was woefully inadequate:
The Explore view takes advantage of the Libretro databases’ metadata history of content. It allows you to search / find content based on criteria such as:\
- Amount of players
- Developer
- Publisher
- System (game console/platform that the game released on)
- Origin (country of origin that the game was developed in)
- By Release Year
- By Genre
The metadata is currently a bit on the incomplete side, but you can expect us to add more and more metadata to the Libretro database as we go along. This is only the beginning.
Usecases
There are tons of ways you can use the Explore view to find what you want. Here are some of them:
Granular filtering
Here is a good example of the kind of powerful context-sensitive filtering that is possible with the Explore view.
- Type in ‘super’, will list all entries in your collection that has ‘super’ in the name. 219 entries are shown.
- We will now filter the entries by a specific developer to narrow down our search. We go to ‘Additional Filters’, and select a developer of choice. Now out of 219 entries, only 25 entries are still shown that matches this criteria (name has ‘super’ in the title, AND is from a specific developer)
- Let’s add another filter to narrow down the search even more. We go to ‘Additional Filters’ again, and this time we select ‘By Release Year’, ‘1993’. There’s now only 6 entries shown that matches this criteria (name has ‘super’ in the title, AND is from a specific developer, AND was released in the year 1993).
- Let’s add another filter. We go to ‘Additional Filters’, ‘Region’, ‘Europe’). Now only 3 entries are shown that matches this criteria (name has ‘super’ in the title, AND is from a specific developer, AND was released in the year 1993, AND was released in region ‘Europe’).
Enhanced playlist search functionality
Before, RetroArch’s inbuilt ‘search’ function was woefully inadequate:
- The user presses RetroPad ‘X’ (or keyboard ‘/’, or Material UI’s search icon), and enters a search term
- The navigation pointer jumps to the first match
- That’s it. There is no way to continue searching from that point, or to do much of anything, really. It’s mostly a non-feature…
The search functionality has now been enhanced as follows:- When viewing a playlist, the user presses RetroPad X (or /, etc.) as normal, and enters a search term
- This becomes a filter – all matching entries will be displayed
- The user can then perform another search to further refine the results. An arbitrary number of filters may be stacked in this fashion
- Pressing ‘cancel’ clears the last entered filter
- File I/O/Memory improvements
A significant amount of time has been spent reducing RetroArch’s memory footprint and reducing disk I/O overhead when doing menial operations such as loading a configuration file or a playlist inside RetroArch.
Changelog
There’s much more to this release than meets the eye. See the CHANGELOG below for a more detailed breakdown.
1.9.0
- 3DS: Fix sound crackling when paused
- ANDROID/VIBRATION: Fixes “Vibrate on Key Press” having no effect on Android devices, which occurred because only the off time/strength was defined in what should have been a pair of off/on values
- AUTOCONFIG: Ensure correct directory is used when saving autoconfig profiles
- BLUETOOTH: Add a Bluetooth driver (Lakka-only for now)
- CHEATS: Fix for wrong number of remaining cheat search matches on some machines
- CHEEVOS: Option to play sound on achievement unlock.
- CHEEVOS: Upgrade to rcheevos 9.1
- CHEEVOS: Restore display of unlocked achievements across hardcore modes
- CHEEVOS: Hash buffered data when available
- CHEEVOS: Fix ‘Auto Save State freezes RetroArch while Cheevos is enabled’
- CORE OPTIONS: Pressing OK (or clicking/tapping) on a ‘boolean toggle’ core option no longer opens a drop-down list. The value now toggles directly, just like boolean options everywhere else in the menu
- CORE OPTIONS: Toggling an option that changes the number of core options being displayed (i.e. things like `Show Advanced Audio/Video Settings) no longer resets the navigation pointer to the start of the list
- CORE OPTIONS: Before, RetroArch would identify core option values as being ‘boolean’ if they had labels matching the specific strings enabled or disabled. Most core devs would abide by this, but not always… As a result, we sometimes would end up with misidentified values, with all kinds of Enabled, Off, True, etc. strings littering the menu, in place of proper toggle switches. All boolean-type value labels are now detected, and replaced with standard ON/OFF strings.
- CLI: A new command line option –load-menu-on-error has been added
- CRT: On the fly CRT porch adjuments – these changes allow a user to adjust how the porch algorithm generates the 15khz/31khz output. Giving the ability to change over/under scan.
- CONFIG FILE: Optimise parsing of configuration files
- D3D9/D3D11: Fix core-initiated D3D9/D3D11 driver switches
- DRIVERS: Implemented protection to avoid setting critical drivers to nothing thus preventing the user from locking him/herself out of the program
- EMSCRIPTEN: Fix input code to ignore unknown keys
- FFMPEG CORE: Prevent seeking past the end of files (hang fix)
- FILE I/O: VFS and NBIO interfaces will now use 64-bit fseek/ftell where possible, should allow for reading/writing to files bigger than 2GB
- INPUT MAPPING/REMAPPING: Add input remap drop-down lists
- IOS: Fixed iOS 6 version
- IOS: Hide the home indicator as it obscures the content too frequently
- IOS/METAL: Metal video driver now works on RetroArch iOS
- IOS/METAL: Support getting video metrics to support proper touchscreen interactions
- LOCALIZATION: Updates for several languages (synchronized from Crowdin)
- MEMORY/LINUX/ANDROID: Fix reporting of free memory
- MEMORY/WINDOWS: Fix reporting of free memory
- MENU: Enlarged INT/UINT selection limit from 999 to 9999
- MENU: Fix cursor forced to first entry after displaying lists
- MENU: Make Notification Font option visible when Graphics Widgets are enabled
- MENU/RGUI: Add optional ‘toggle switch’ icons
- MENU/WIDGETS: Add optional widget-based ‘load content’ launch feedback animation
- MENU/WIDGETS: Make notification font size option visible when graphics widgets are enabled
- ODROID GO ADVANCE: Video driver – fix race condition with RGUI callback
- PLAYLISTS: Change playlists to use dynamic arrays. Instead of a fixed initial 12MB memory allocation (99999 * 128 byte (on 64bit arch)), use a dynamically growing array
- PLAYLISTS: Playlist base content directory paths – portable playlists
- PLAYLISTS/SEARCH: Enhanced playlist search functionality
- PLAYLISTS/DATABASE: Add ‘Explore’ view
- PLAYLISTS/DATABASE/EXPLORE: Show system icons in explore view
- PS2: Improve FPS Limiter
- RUNAHEAD: Prevent runahead from being disabled permanently when an error occurs
- SCANNER: Add more region codes for GameCube/Wii game detection
- SHADERS/SLANG: Increased Slang max Parameters, Textures & Passes
- VIDEO FILTERS/BLARGG: Make Blargg_snes filter customizable
- WINDOWS/RAWINPUT: Fix invalid calls to dinput_handle_message when input driver is not set to dinput
- X11: Add lightgun support
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