Author Topic: Arcade Emulators RetroArch  (Read 315 times)

MauryG5

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Arcade Emulators RetroArch
« on: May 31, 2026, 05:39:43 am »
Good morning everyone, I've been wanting to improve the performance of old arcade games on Power for a while, but as was clear by now, there are some limitations with MAME due to the fact that there is no version optimized for Power, obviously, so as soon as you get to games like Street Fighter 3 from 1998/99, everything starts to slow down, unfortunately. Speaking with Gemini, I discovered that with Retroarch, it was possible to get much better performance because it doesn't work like MAME, which emulates every single cycle of the old CPUs and therefore puts a lot of work on the CPU. Having no optimization, it starts to crash, but it manages the emulation differently and more optimally. At that point, we took the sources and rebuilt Retroarch for Power, and to my great surprise, I installed SF3 and now the game runs great compared to MAME. So in the next few days I'll try other old arcade games that ran poorly on MAME to see how they perform on Retroarch, but I have to say I'm very satisfied with the result achieved.

It wasn't easy to find all the sources directly because GitHub seems to have put usernames and passwords on certain sources. After building the main RetroArch, we also had to rebuild the part that loads the actual arcade emulator because when we went to look for the cores, they said they were unavailable.

power9mm

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Re: Arcade Emulators RetroArch
« Reply #1 on: June 01, 2026, 10:23:10 am »
What about final burn alpha? That’s the emulator that was used for ggpo

MauryG5

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Re: Arcade Emulators RetroArch
« Reply #2 on: Today at 04:21:17 am »
Hi, what currently works in RetroArch is FinalBurnArcade. With that, you can use Mame ROMs, which perform much better than our own Mame due to the usual lack of optimization on Power. I can't tell you what the Alpha version is, I don't know it. I tried installing the Naomi/Dreamcast FlyCast emulator; I mentioned it in another post a while ago with Classic. We managed to compile and install it, but it wouldn't run because of the part of the C++ code related to vector instructions, which are obviously only available for X86 and ARM. We had to tell the code to ignore that part, but unfortunately, I tried to run games like Capcom VS SNK 2, but unfortunately, it wouldn't run. We tried bypassing that part in every way, but it didn't work. The part in VSX/Altivec isn't there and would have to be written from scratch for Power. Yesterday I also started Super Model, a Sega Model 3 emulator, but unfortunately there are several problems there too. In that case, the story is paradoxical considering that the original card ran with PPC and therefore it should have been a walk in the park for Power, but unfortunately the usual parts written on X86 to optimize the code create a big problem for us because we necessarily have to go through those and obviously Power doesn't understand anything and we would need the JIT. Sega Rally 2 started, the audio is perfect but unfortunately there are obvious graphical glitches and it's not good in general.