pcsxr slated for removal

[pandoraxero]

The following has come to my attention while doing my weekly review of 'emerge -NDupv world'

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- games-emulation/pcsxr-1.9.94_p20190306-r1::gentoo (masked by: package.mask)
/var/db/repos/gentoo/profiles/package.mask:
# Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> (2023-05-13)
# Unmaintained.  Does not build anymore.  No activity upstream
# since 2019, the build system is messy and fixing the issues would take
# a lot of effort.
# Removal on 2023-06-12.  Bug #791034.

With the relevant line in /var/db/repos/gentoo/profiles/package.mask pointing to games-emulation/pcsxr in general.
My use case depends on having as many game emulators as possible.
If I'm to be entirely honest, I saw this one coming about a hundred miles away. In spite of its reported use in the PlayStation Classic Mini, this particular emulator has been unmaintained for quite a while.

My question is this: is there a plan in the pipeline to replace this with another PlayStation emulator?
The Wikipedia article for PCSX-Reloaded makes mention of a project called "PCSX-Redux", so I used my search engine and found the Git repo for PCSX-Redux which appears to be in active development, but the aforementioned article mentions that it is "A newer fork with a fraction of the features of PCSX-Reloaded", so I question this project's ability to replace PCSX-Reloaded.

[pandoraxero]

reviewing my footage for the pcsxr install I did in January, it appears the major build issue has to do with harfbuzz. specifically, the source appears to be looking for harfbuzz headers in '/usr/include/', instead of '/usr/include/harfbuzz/'
the hack I applied was to set up symlinks to the harfbuzz headers in '/usr/include/'

[Ionen]

games-emulation/mednafen, or cores based on it (e.g. for retroarch) been the typical choice for more accurate ps1 emulation for a long time (not that I've kept up with the latest advancements) -- I used pcsxr nearly two decades ago but that feel like thing of the past to me

There's also games-emulation/mednaffe serving as a mednafen frontend to be easier to use.

Alternatively, there's games-emulation/mednafen-jg and its frontend games-emulation/jgrf that were recently added to the tree may be more interesting, but I haven't tried yet to comment. Personally tend to use retroarch but it's not in the tree (available in overlays), and haven't been feeling like reviewing the whole thing to bring it to ::gentoo myself unfortunately

[pandoraxero]

games-emulation/mednafen, or cores based on it (e.g. for retroarch) been the typical choice for more accurate ps1 emulation for a long time (not that I've kept up with the latest advancements) -- I used pcsxr nearly two decades ago but that feel like thing of the past to me

There's also games-emulation/mednaffe serving as a mednafen frontend to be easier to use.

Alternatively, there's games-emulation/mednafen-jg and its frontend games-emulation/jgrf that were recently added to the tree may be more interesting, but I haven't tried yet to comment. Personally tend to use retroarch but it's not in the tree (available in overlays), and haven't been feeling like reviewing the whole thing to bring it to ::gentoo myself unfortunately

Good to know. Thank you. I'll have to look into that. From the Wikipedia Article on it, it looks like it could replace a number of legacy emulators I have. Maybe I'm just too used to the proverbial "Old Guard" being the best. I'll have to see about getting that going on the Windows rigs I have as well - it seems to me like there's no truly viable PlayStation-Specific emulators out there... which is unfortunate

[krumpf]

I didn't try it, so dunno what it's worth, but maybe you could try duckstation. There's an ebuild available in Guru overlay.

[gorg86]

I didn't try it, so dunno what it's worth, but maybe you could try duckstation. There's an ebuild available in Guru overlay.

I used duckstation a while ago, and it is way better than PCSXR, especially with geometry correction and the widescreen hack. I would not go back.
PCSX2 supports booting PS1 games, too now but it's not as good as duckstation imo.

[pandoraxero]

mednafen

duckstation

duckstation

Two votes for duckstation, one for mednafen. I suppose despite it not being in the official gentoo repo, I should give duckstation a try as well.
Even in my somewhat drunken state, I managed to get mednafen and mednaffe installed last night.
I've had the guru overlay installed for quite some time - owing to a bit of nostalgic curiosity surrounding dev-lang/fbc::guru
So getting duckstation in should be easy enough. I'll test both - see which works best for me.

also:

retroarch [...] (available in overlays)

Like say, I'm not opposed to using overlays, but which ones should I look at for that?

[krumpf]

Please note all 3 apps require PS bios files to run. OpenEmu BIOS Pack is your friend.

If you want a pure PS stand alone emulator, then duckstation is the way to go.

Mednafen + mednaffe will give you a multi machine emulator with the most common consoles.

Retroarch (available only in vortex overlay according to https://gpo.zugaina.org/) is supposed to be the "ultimate" multi machine emulator, the libretro
project unifies many emulator cores under one UI. One cool thing is you can have different cores installed for one machine, e.g. for PS1 you can have beetle core, mednafen one, and pcsx one.
So a game that would run badly on 1 core may run better on another. You can get some cores from the overlay (the libretro-corename ebuilds) or, easier method imo, once the retroarch base
is installed, launch it and find the "download cores" menu (retroarch will provide a list of binary cores to download). Warning : retroarch got a lot of menus and options.

[sdauth]

PCSXR was a bit more lax with some files (translation patches ), hence why I installed it years ago. These days, I only use mednafen (or mednafen core with retroarch) as it is the most accurate. Too bad it still doesn't handle CHD files. (only reason I have retroarch installed)
I didn't know about duckstation though so I'll try that very soon

[sdauth]

ebuild using latest rolling release : https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation/ ... tag/latest

qt6 is now required if you wish to enable it. (still masked though) Don't know if it works because I'm on stable gentoo and still using qt5.

extras/linux-desktop-files & extras/icons are missing in src, I don't know how to fix that so to avoid installing issue, I added some comment. If you know how to fix it, please let us know! Thanks guru for the original ebuild.
Otherwise, it builds fine. I'm currently trying it

duckstation-20230128.ebuild

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# Copyright 1999-2023 Gentoo Authors
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2

EAPI=8

inherit xdg cmake desktop

if [[ "${PV}" = 9999 ]] ; then
  inherit git-r3
  EGIT_REPO_URI="https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation.git"
  EGIT_CHECKOUT_DIR="${WORKDIR}/${PN}"
  EGIT_SUBMODULES=()
else
  COMMIT="c6a57273d1dc60215c59df585d57ce62faf18f69" # 2023/01/28
  SRC_URI="https://github.com/stenzek/${PN}/archive/${COMMIT}.tar.gz -> ${P}.tar.gz"
  KEYWORDS="~amd64 ~x86"
  S="${WORKDIR}/${PN}-${COMMIT}"
fi

DESCRIPTION="Fast Sony PlayStation (PSX) emulator"
HOMEPAGE="https://github.com/stenzek/duckstation"
LICENSE="GPL-3"
SLOT="0"
IUSE="discord +egl +evdev fbdev +gamepad gbm +nogui qt6 retroachievements wayland X"

# Either or both frontends must be built
REQUIRED_USE="
  ?? ( fbdev gbm )
  gbm? ( egl )
  wayland? ( egl )
"

BDEPEND="
  virtual/pkgconfig
  wayland? ( kde-frameworks/extra-cmake-modules )
"
DEPEND="
  evdev? ( dev-libs/libevdev )
  gamepad? ( media-libs/libsdl2 )
  gbm? ( x11-libs/libdrm )
  qt6? (
    dev-qt/qtcore
    dev-qt/qtgui
    dev-qt/qtnetwork
  )
  retroachievements? ( net-misc/curl[curl_ssl_gnutls] )
  X? (
    x11-libs/libX11
    x11-libs/libXrandr
  )
"
RDEPEND="${DEPEND}"

src_configure() {
  local mycmakeargs=(
    -DBUILD_NOGUI_FRONTEND=$(usex nogui)
    -DBUILD_QT_FRONTEND=$(usex qt6)
    -DENABLE_CHEEVOS=$(usex retroachievements)
    –DENABLE_DISCORD_PRESENCE=$(usex discord)
    -DUSE_DRMKMS=$(usex gbm)
    -DUSE_EGL=$(usex egl)
    -DUSE_EVDEV=$(usex evdev)
    -DUSE_FBDEV=$(usex fbdev)
    -DUSE_SDL2=$(usex gamepad)
    -DUSE_WAYLAND=$(usex wayland)
    -DUSE_X11=$(usex X)
    -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF
  )
  cmake_src_configure
}

src_install() {
  dodoc README.md

  # Binary and resources files must be in same directory – installing in /opt
  insinto /opt/${PN}
#  doins -r "${BUILD_DIR}"/bin/{database,inputprofiles,resources,shaders,translations}
  doins -r "${BUILD_DIR}"/bin/resources

  if use nogui; then
#    for i in {16,32,48,64,128,256}; do
#      newicon -s ${i} extras/icons/icon-${i}px.png duckstation-nogui.png
#    done
#    domenu extras/linux-desktop-files/duckstation-nogui.desktop

    doins "${BUILD_DIR}"/bin/duckstation-nogui
    dosym ../../opt/${PN}/duckstation-nogui usr/bin/duckstation-nogui
    fperms +x /opt/${PN}/duckstation-nogui
  fi

  if use qt6; then
#    for i in {16,32,48,64,128,256}; do
#      newicon -s ${i} extras/icons/icon-${i}px.png duckstation-qt.png
#  done
#    domenu extras/linux-desktop-files/duckstation-qt.desktop

    doins "${BUILD_DIR}"/bin/duckstation-qt
    dosym ../../opt/${PN}/duckstation-qt usr/bin/duckstation-qt
    fperms +x /opt/${PN}/duckstation-qt
  fi
}

[pandoraxero]

Mednafen seems to be working quite well. And if it emulates the other systems half as well as I hope, I might be able to 'emerge -C' a few other legacy emulators I still have.
I'd like to thank everyone for the suggestions.

---EDIT---
I'm going to be seeing if its SNES, Genesis/MegaDrive, GameBoy, and GBA emulation is any good. Out of all the systems it supports, those are the only ones Mednafen supports which I legally own games for... along with PlayStation.

[bell]

I use duckstation and stored the latest qt5 version in my overlay: https://github.com/bell07/gentoo-bell07 ... 708.ebuild
I prefer to wait till qt6 is unmasked in portage, at least testing.

[ritzmax72]

mednaffe is fine but I never got ps5 controller to work.
ps5/ps4 controller work on all other emulators but not in mednaffe.
The errors I get:

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WARNING: Failed to open event device "/dev/input/event18": Permission denied --- !!!!! BASE JOYSTICK FUNCTIONALITY WILL BE AVAILABLE, BUT FORCE-FEEDBACK(E.G. RUMBLE) WILL BE UNAVAILABLE, AND THE CALCULATED JOYSTICK ID WILL BE DIFFERENT. !!!!!

Also no sound with mednafen/mednaffe