If you’ve been paying attention to RetroArch over the last few months, the 4th of July announcement probably left you dying to know when v1.2 would be ready for PlayStation devices. The entire team and everyone involved in RetroArch development have been working diligently to try and get this release ready across all platforms as swiftly as they can with as few bugs as possible. In a recent update on July 15th Squarepusher acknowledged the 1.2 announcement jumped the gun a little bit but allowed for a wider public testing on some platforms such as PC and Android that received the builds first.
Since the original announcement, new builds have been released for many additional platforms. On July 19th, 1.2.2 was officially released for PSP and Squarepusher gave an open invitation to capable PSP developers interested in assisting with future development, ports, & builds. (Downloads and contact information are at the end of the complete front-page article.)
Given all the new releases and builds, the one big platform we still haven’t seen a RetroArch 1.2 release for is the PlayStation 3. With good reason; It’s just not ready yet. Opensource software is something I’ve touched on in the past, and I understand that many folks have trouble grasping the concept. The reality is that the Libretro team is a relatively small group of hobbyist hackers. The majority of the code is written by a handful of people. Anyone may contribute, but few actually do. These people have real jobs and real lives, just like the rest of us; They work on RetroArch when they can and they use their own money to purchase most of the hardware they develop for.
On that note the team has recently decided to accept donations to cover server and hardware costs. If you enjoy RetroArch and you would like to donate, you should be able to by next week. I recognize that in our community we have a lot of hobbyist PS3 hackers and a small portion of them may be capable of actually contributing something useful to the development of RetroArch. If you legitimately can contribute your own knowledge, time, and resources I encourage you to go take a peek at the code on Github and stop by their forums or IRC channel, because the extra help is likely to be more valuable to the project than monetary donations.
With all of that out of the way, the reason most of you are reading this is because of the title. A few days ago an individual going by Ezio_PS decided to build the latest code from git and release unofficial “beta” PS3 builds on the RetroArch Forums. I considered making a git build a while ago, but decided against it in favor of a potential Official Release that still hasn’t happened yet. In fact when I heard about this unofficial build on Sunday, I was conflicted about posting this article that I’ve had sitting around for a few months but after some discussion I was persuaded to publish it.
I just want to reiterate that this isn’t an official release and it’s buggy, but I do recognize that some folks may want to give it a spin. Among some of the issues one obvious thing that’s missing is the XMB GUI even though the GLUI is functional.
