Retroarch needs libbluray?

doktorseven · April 16, 2017, 1:24am

/home/user/.local/share/lutris/runners/retroarch/retroarch: error while loading shared libraries: libbluray.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Yes, I could install libbluray unnecessarily (I don’t have a BR player), but I’m wondering why you built retroarch with libbluray when your listed systems for libretro don’t have any BR-based systems…

Honestly, I wish you’d reconsider using the overly complicated libretro/retroarch over the very simple, system-specific individual emulators. When you try to squish in every conceivable emulator in a single program that has to manage all sorts of different configurations and hardware, it makes the emulator more difficult and less reliable to use than emulators specific to a single system or at least a range of similar systems. I shouldn’t have to install libbluray to play Playstation 1 games, for example.

strider · April 16, 2017, 9:39pm

This is a non-issue. If libbluray is needed then we’ll ship it in the Lutris runtime.

Depending on a library does not affect the quality of a software. Retroarch works, and very well. PCSX-R, Mupen64plus, DGen and Mednafen on the other hand are unmaintained crap and have serious issues.

We would consider keeping individual emulators if those actually worked but they don’t and Retroarch is vastly superior in every possible way. So Retroarch is here to stay.

doktorseven · April 23, 2017, 8:33pm

Wait, what?

“If libbluray is needed”?

Your own executable needs libbluray. The one Lutris downloads from your site. It is apparently needed. Unnecessarily, as I said since no system it supports by you requires bluray access. Yet you built the executable with the link to libbluray. IT WILL NOT RUN BECAUSE YOUR EXECUTABLE LINKS TO LIBBLURAY AND YOU DO NOT HAVE IT IN THE LUTRIS RUNTIME.

Mednafen is not “unmaintained crap”, by the way. A new release happens all the time. Just because your own “maintainers” half-assed try to build hacks of it and fail to do so correctly apparently doesn’t mean it’s not maintained. Meanwhile your wonderful godlike Retroarch is the one that falls behind and does not maintain and update its own code WHICH IS BASED ON OTHER EMULATORS, INCLUDING MEDNAFEN. Now what is “unmaintained crap”, Lutris?

This is why I cannot recommend your buggy little hack of a program to anyone. It’s this garbage right here that keeps me manually configuring everything using maintained, reliable emulators while ignoring fancy crap like Lutris and yes, libretro/RetroArch. The RetroArch devs have basically bamboozed the entire retro gaming community into believing their poorly done little pile of garbage is the best thing since sliced bread while being just a hack of other emulators and put together very poorly.

I’ve used emulation for a very long time, and RetroArch makes me fear for its future, and people like you that blindly support it for your own skewed, poorly done hacks makes me despair that everyone will give up making quality emulators and latch onto that pile of garbage RetroArch and essentially kill emulation.

Thanks a lot for nothing.

strider · April 24, 2017, 3:49am

You’re right when you say that no feature of Retroarch uses libbluray. I’ve built Retroarch on our Ubuntu 16.04 container since the usual 14.04 is too old to properly build it. As a side effect of this, I’ve had to include several (quite a lot actually) libraries related to FFmpeg into the runtime, directly imported from 16.04. libbluray is not a direct dependency of retroarch but some library I’ve imported in the runtime uses it so it’s a dependency of a dependency. I’m not going to rebuild libraries just to get rid of that. These kind of issues happen quite often, I have tested the runtime on several system, all of which must have libbluray installed so the issue got unnoticed. Usually, people report the problem, I fix the issue and we move on, this is the first time ever someone got all pissy about such a thing.

About Mednafen, yes the emulation itself is very good, it’s why it was chosen by Retroarch and Lutris as the best choice for emulating many systems. The problem isn’t with the emulation itself, it’s with the “shell” of the emulator. Mednafen has poor full screen handling, no support for alt-tab (both of those issues reside in the fact that they still haven’t updated to SDL2) and the sound support is even worse, it’s the only program I can think of where I have to restart PulseAudio in order to get any sound at all. Control rebinding is awful and it’s simply impossible to do when using an Azerty keyboard layout. Yes, I believe Retroarch did the right thing by keeping the good parts (the emulation) and dumping the rest (display, sound, input, …).

Note that we don’t introduce hacks in emulators except for very rare exceptions. All the runners are build with the scripts available here: https://github.com/lutris/buildbot/tree/master/runners
Exceptions are: O2EM which I provided 64bit support for, Osmose which is now maintained by Lutris since the original developer is nowhere to be found and PCSX-R which I tried to fix (poorly) and stopped caring about when we switched to Retroarch.
I do believe that libretro has changed the emulation world but in a good way. No more crazy dependencies, no more poor display handling or unrebindable controls. Everything is now cohesive and easy to maintain. At least, we now have proper Playstation emulators, before Retroarch, I was just embarrassed with what we provided.

Believing that Retroarch will bring down emulation quality is just crazy talk. Just have a look at Dolphin or PPSSPP and how solid they are. If anything, the quality of emulators went down way before Retroarch even existed. That’s just because people don’t care and stopped improving aging emulators, I mean, just look at the sad state of DOSBox, how can anyone say this is good?

Anyway, no one forces you to use Lutris, or Retroarch. You’ve not paid us money to develop the software and we don’t owe you anything. If you’re not happy about it, go find something else or go code your own gaming platform, which is what I did when I wasn’t satisfied with PlayOnLinux.

strider · April 24, 2017, 4:13am

btw, I’ve added libbluray to the runtime, not that you would care at all but it might be helpful for other users.

doktorseven · June 1, 2017, 5:29pm

we don’t owe you anything

And this is the kind of attitude that sinks projects. I’d love for you to put that exact quote on the front page of your site and see how many people you disgust. As someone that writes Free software himself, I know the importance of getting things right in the best way, and that I owe the Free software community everything. I share because I actually care about people and feel like I owe them my best effort, and I actually listen to complaints.

When you stubbornly ignore the best software in favor of hacked-together, buggy software to appease your own sense of what is good based on nothing more than the libretro dev’s attempt at taking over the entire emulation community and putting it under their own control, no one wins. But that doesn’t matter to you, because you don’t care. You owe no one anything.

And if more people knew that, your pathetic little project would fold overnight.

strider · June 2, 2017, 1:10am

In case you haven’t noticed, I have this kind of attitude only with you, just take a look around on the forums or on the Discord server, I listen and try to help as much as I can. Why them and not you? Because they’re not bossing me around while not providing anything of value. Luckily, I think I’ve encountered 3 persons who’ve I had trouble with in 8 year of existence for the project. That’s not bad at all, I’m able to deal with that.

Now let me go back to that not owing anything to anyone bit. It’s written right there in the Lutris source repository:

THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.

It may come to you as a surprise but this line of text is also present in pretty much every single Free Software license.
When I say that I don’t owe you anything, what I really mean is that NO Free Software author owes anything to any of their users (excluding things like Red Hat enterprise support of course but that’s beyond the current matter).

Now, if you took just 2 minutes to actually run Lutris today, you’d notice that Mednafen is still here. Along other emulators I do consider bad. I did remove PCSX-R in Lutris 0.4.10 in favor of Retroarch but PCSX was really broken for pretty much everyone. Note that if some emulators weren’t such a mess on Linux, there wouldn’t be such a need to libretro. I’ve already mentioned how broken Mednafen is on Linux, no need to repeat myself. I think people would rather have working emulators and so far, you’re pretty much the only one who complained about libretro (and about a library that was later added to the runtime, so your complaint isn’t even valid anymore). The rest is based on irrational fears about evil plans from the libretro team which is just plain nonsense.

Anyway, my pathetic little project is doing quite well and lots of people enjoy it!