Retroarch flawed Cores on Android

[kotaro]

I'm making this post to level up awareness to problems I've been facing with retroarch mobile version (Android)
Since I've bought a Bluetooth controller I've been trying to emulate a ton of games. While being successful with 8-16bit and PS1 games in general on RA, I've been facing several issues with Two specific cores that are available for RA Android on the Core donwload list, these being the Saturn (Yabasanshiro) and the Dreamcast (Flycast )

As you can see. I've faced these type of problems with some ISOs in Yabasanshiro I even tried changing the graphical driver from Vulkan to OpenGL with none of these measures solving the problem.

The same is happening to the Flycast core with the game Jet Set Radio specifically, with video glitches. I really gave up on Emulating Saturn on retroarch and opted for a standalone emulator (Saturn.emu) and it just worked flawlessly!

I'm currently playing Record of lodoss war with the Flycast within RA and it's working fine without annoying visual glitches idk if I'll find in the future but yeah it's kind of upsetting. To play concerned with the possibility of facing the same visual glitches on it.

 

[qw90700]

Fun fact:

Saturn has 2 32-bit CPUs (yes/no, it's not a dual core CPU, there are 2 separate CPUs) that has the work in "perfect" synchronization but SEGA didn't do anything about it and left the task to video game developers that annoyed the hell of developers so I imagine its emulator especially on phones may have a hard time lol.

Dreamcast has a 128-bit ass SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) FPU (Floating-Point Unit) that yet again I can imagine phones may have a hard time trying to run its emulator lol.

So to play these games you need a phone that has a CPU like Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 because you need good single-core and multi-core CPU has a significant speed boost for this task. And then you need a GPU like Adreno 650 since I even used a specific CPU name as an example for my point, to support modern API like Vulkan for "more work, lower performance need, more speed" tasks.

But that's not all!!! Emulators needs significantly more RAM!!! So these emulators may require at least 6 GB RAM in total of what the system overall needs.

As for Retroarch, dude they develop cores and put there like it's some hot shit when they don't even work properly. I really have no idea of what they smoking lol. I get frontend logic but when it doesn't work properly better don't add it lol.

 

[Rocket2049]

does retroarch not have beetle or mednafen cores? i don't use retroarch all that much even on my android phone i just have seperate emulators for stuff, never tried saturn or dreamcast though. had bad experiences running PSP and 3ds on retroarch, PPSSPP and Citra work just fine with no issues on my galaxy s25

 

[Orclease]

Don't forget to check for a compatibly list for the emulator (if available). Not all games run 100% perfect, and according to the Yabuse wiki Golden Axe the duel is playable but has minor graphic glitches. I use these lists all the time when checking compatibility for my Anbernic Android emulator devices and the windows version lists are pretty close to the Android compatibility.

Yabuse Compatibility List

 

[Kamako]

...As you can see. I've faced these type of problems with some ISOs in Yabasanshiro I even tried changing the graphical driver from Vulkan to OpenGL with none of these measures solving the problem.

I'm not sure what the fix is, but have you tried submitting a bug report to the core devs? You could probably just copy and paste most of what you've already wrote and then just add the rom and core versions etc.

Out of curiosity, have you used the core updater to ensure you're using the most recent versions? I had to update mine the other day in order to re-enable Retro Achievements.