Retro-GTK Has An Exciting Future Ahead With Many Improvements For Libretro Gaming

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Retro-GTK Has An Exciting Future Ahead With Many Improvements For Libretro Gaming

GNOME developer Adrien Plazas has written a blog post about some of the big work items he's engaged in for retro-gtk, the GNOME user-interface for running various libretro cores / game emulators...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Retro-GTK-Improvements-Ahead

[Cape]

Wait, is this gnome-gaming? Or a separate project?

[e_tank]

Retro-GTK is separate but related project to Gnome-Games, it's a library created primarily for and used in Gnome-Games. Retro-GTK is a libretro frontend capable of running libretro cores, which is shared object code that adheres to the libretro API, which is a fancy but more correct way of saying it runs multimedia applications that exist as .so's on *nix or .dll's on windows. This may sound pointlessly complicated, but it's actually quite powerful and beneficial to end users.

You can think of a libretro frontend as a virtual game console and a libretro core file as a virtual game cartridge, you only have to setup the virtual console to your particular machine once and then can plug in play different games with it. With this setup game and emulator devs primarily only have to worry about writing their core game and emulator logic, knowing as long as they follow the API and certain coding conventions their game will most likely run as is on any platform they target that has a libretro frontend available.