retroarch wiki page

@TravMurav, your photos of running retroarch on bq-paella are quite impressive:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/BQ_Aquaris_X5_(bq-paella)#Pictures

The other day I tried retroarch, but the default menu didn't react to touch events (I've read it works through XWayland in Phosh?) and I didn't get very far. Since you apparently figured out how to use it in Phosh, and how to set up that cool looking gameboy skin, it would be terrific if you could create a retroarch wiki page that explains the steps.

I'm also curious about the .desktop entries you have in your launcher, did you create them manually or can they be created automatically?

From there, we could look into streamlining it more, so users just need to install the retroarch package and everything works out of the box.

added help wanted wiki-article labels

It was not me who maintains paella and made this picture but @lazzardo :)

By Nikita Travkin on 2021-04-05T11:36:41

@ollieparanoid hi!

The status of RetroArch is the following:

I noticed that it was not true that RetroArch touch input doesn't work, it simply isn't scaled. This is true for both the menu and the games overlay.

I tested this with a little hack before working on a patch to upstream and this was confirmed. Also, you can test it yourself by setting display scale to 1 and run RetroArch with menu driver set to glui (the "mobile" gui) or running a game with input overlays.

I opened a pull request to RetroArch to add the possibility to set the scaling factor to apply to the touch, in order for being able to apply the same factor of the display.

You can find the pull request here https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/pull/12213

I made a WIP wiki page to keep track of the progress here too https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/User:Lazzardo/RetroArch, I know it can be improved :-)

I think it would be great also to have an updated package for RetroArch in order to apply the pull request patch, I'm not sure on which are the steps to follow in this case however, any suggestion is really appreciated! :-)

Regarding the .desktop entries I made them myself, I'm not sure if RetroArch has the ability to create them.

By Jonathan Albrieux on 2021-04-06T07:08:36

Pull request was merged now in RetroArch, I'll try to setup a package starting from the one in Alpine repository with the updated version and the patch for touch scale.

By Jonathan Albrieux on 2021-04-06T11:41:14

@TravMurav: ah sorry for the mix-up, thanks for tagging @lazzardo!

@lazzardo: great work with figuring out the touch issue and making the PR!

I think it would be great also to have an updated package for RetroArch in order to apply the pull request patch, I'm not sure on which are the steps to follow in this case however, any suggestion is really appreciated! :-)

You could create a merge request towards alpine, to upgrade retroarch to the latest version and apply your patch on top of it. Since the patch is already merged upstream, this should get accepted in alpine:

https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/tree/master/community/retroarch

Regarding touch-input related options like input_touch_scale = "2" needed in the retoarch config for devices that have phosh scaling set to 2 too: we could put this in a device specific config, just like we have a device-specific phosh config right now (see pmaports.git device-pine64-pinephone/APKBUILD). With replaces="retroarch" in the subpackage, it would be possible to override the config file directly (or is there a /etc/retroarch.d/* like mechanism? that would be better since we then don't need to duplicate the whole config file per device.).

Thanks for starting the wiki page! Would you like to update it and put it to https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/RetroArch once the alpine package is updated and has your patch?

By Oliver Smith on 2021-04-09T02:08:13

Thank you @ollieparanoid !

You could create a merge request towards alpine, to upgrade retroarch to the latest version and apply your patch on top of it. Since the patch is already merged upstream, this should get accepted in alpine

I've just checked and it seems the version was updated yesterday, I'll submit a merge request for the touch patch.

Regarding touch-input related options like input_touch_scale = "2" needed in the retoarch config for devices that have phosh scaling set to 2 too: we could put this in a device specific config, just like we have a device-specific phosh config right now (see pmaports.git device-pine64-pinephone/APKBUILD). With replaces="retroarch" in the subpackage, it would be possible to override the config file directly (or is there a /etc/retroarch.d/* like mechanism? that would be better since we then don't need to duplicate the whole config file per device.).

Thank you, I'll check into this!

Thanks for starting the wiki page! Would you like to update it and put it to https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/RetroArch once the alpine package is updated and has your patch?

Sure I'll update it :-)

By Jonathan Albrieux on 2021-04-09T07:19:13

For the sake of tracking progress on the issue, here is the merge request to Alpine aports repo https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/merge_requests/20315

By Jonathan Albrieux on 2021-04-09T13:18:14

@ollieparanoid merge request was merged this morning, as you requested I moved the wiki page to https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/RetroArch

By Jonathan Albrieux on 2021-04-15T08:02:12

Excellent work with getting the patch into alpine, and with updating the wiki page. The tables with all important information and screenshot should make it pretty easy to set this up for other people. Thank you very much, @lazzardo!

Closing this, since we now have a great wiki page

By Oliver Smith on 2021-04-15T22:45:23

closed