Somewhat related to window/full screen issues, I’ve been playing with a current MAME build I made and noticed that turning integer scaling off when stretching to full screen for a more demanding game like Darius (which uses three screens side by side) gives a performance improvement. I’m not very familiar with retroarch settings but it might be worth trying that if it’s available.
Since these builds take so long to complete, I’ve posted some compiled binaries here, if anyone else wants to experiment with these. I’ve got a working (current) MAME for libretro/retroarch as well as the standalone MAME binary. (The Retroarch version seems slightly faster to me, but only by ~5-10fps on games like Darius and Space Lords.)
At some point I will post threads for each of them, but I want to do more testing first. Both MAME builds are quite functional and work great depending on how demanding the game might be. Dolphin is more of a novelty and while it works I’ve not found anything running at playable speed. Flycast works great and seems like it has the potential for many playable games (though 3D stuff has noticeable slowdowns, which leads me to believe my build doesn’t use proper hardware acceleration.) PPSSPP runs at a good speed but there are graphical rendering glitches that make some games unplayable or cause issues. I’m not sure if that’s a problem with PPSSPP Linux builds or if it’s something specific to the DevTerm and perhaps I should have used different build options. Stella works great, and I’m not sure if the standalone version is any different performance-wise to the libretto core, though the standalone likely has more tweakable options. The VICE libretro core is standalone and not from “super” (which either wasn’t included or didn’t build), but this one works fine.
I haven’t tested many of the cores from the libretro super build yet. I’m thinking for any that work (well) I’ll post them to my repo here. I did try the Jaguar core from super and it was terribly slow running Tempest 2000 (which is one of the few games I might want to run on it anyway!) My long term plan is to try building from the standalone core repos in cases where the super version performs poorly, just to see if there’s an improvement. Also, there’s a ton of stuff included in the super repo that never actually gets built either because it tries and fails, or it isn’t even included in the build process. I’d like to either build those cores separately from that repo, or from a standalone repo (if one exists). But that seems like more of a bonus goal, since I’m guessing most of those cores cover systems that will already be working well enough in a different core, or they are more esoteric systems that few people (including myself) will care about. That said, I’m always curious to see unusual things being emulated. For instance, there’s a Palm emulator called Mu in the super core that built, but I haven’t tried yet. Not exactly practical without a touchscreen, but still might be cool to see running in the DevTerm. 