The GTK Libretro frontend framework.

Libretro is a plugin format design to implement video game console emulators, video games and similar multimedia software. Such plugins are called Libretro cores.

RetroGTK is a framework easing the use of Libretro cores in conjunction with GTK.

It encourages the cores to be installed in a well defined centralized place — namely the libretro subdirectory of your lib directory — and it recommends them to come with Libretro core descriptors.

Writing a Libretro application with RetroGTK can be as simple as the following Vala code:

int main (string[] args) {
    Gtk.init (ref args);

    var core = new Retro.Core ("/path/to/your/core_libretro.so");
    core.set_medias ({ "file:https:///uri/of/you/game.file" });
    try {
        core.boot();
    }
    catch (Error e) {
        critical (e.message);

        return 1;
    }

    var view = new Retro.CoreView ();
    view.set_as_default_controller (core);
    view.set_core (core);
    view.show ();

    var loop = new Retro.MainLoop (core);
    loop.start ();

    var win = new Gtk.Window ();
    win.destroy.connect (Gtk.main_quit);
    win.add (view);
    win.present ();

    Gtk.main ();

    return 0;
}

RetroGTK depends on the following libraries at compile time and at run time:

• gobject-2.0
• glib-2.0
• gio-2.0
• gmodule-2.0
• gtk+-3.0
• cairo
• libpulse
• libpulse-simple

To configure the compilation, do: meson build

You can specify the installation prefix by doing: meson build --prefix /my/prefix

Then compile: ninja -C build

ninja -C build install

The Libretro API extracted from RetroArch 1.7.2 can be found in libretro/libretro.h. libretro/implemented.h is a version of this file containing only the parts that have been implemented in RetroGTK.

To know what is yet to be implemented, run the following command: diff libretro/implemented.h libretro/libretro.h

Parts which have been partially implemented can be found by looking for the UNIMPLEMENTED keyword in the code base, typically found in comments or macros. To do so, run the following command: git grep UNIMPLEMENTED