[hatari-devel] Any interest in accepting RetroArch libretro core patches?

[Jamie Bainbridge <jamie.bainbridge@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

You may be aware of an emulator project called RetroArch at
http://www.libretro.com/

RetroArch is an framework which takes existing emulators, librarises
them into "cores", and executes the core through an existing generic
display/sound/input frontend. The result for end users is that they
configure the frontend once and all their emulators just work. It's
really great!

Hatari has been a libretro core since 1.8.0 with a shallow fork at
https://github.com/libretro/hatari created by one of the main
RetroArch developers

You can see the 20-or-so patches required to add RetroArch support.
They are mostly self-contained in the libretro/ directory, though
there are a few display/sound/input changes through the code which are
separated with "#ifdef __LIBRETRO__". These patches appear to apply
cleanly over the Hatari 1.9.0 source.

I am writing to ask if you would like to add these libretro patches
directly into Hatari?

This would allow your source tree to just automatically be built as a
RetroArch core. The default is to build as Hatari currently does,
__LIBRETRO__ must be explicitly defined during build for the
preprocessor to create the RetroArch core, so hopefully you consider
this a non-invasive change to accept.

I ask this because I would like to update RetroArch's Hatari to v1.9.0
and to future versions as well, but this requires converting hg to
git, then either rewriting upstream git history with a rebase of
1.8-to-1.9 and rebase of libretro changes and force push, or a lot of
manual tedious merge conflict work to apply 1.9 directly over the
current tree.

It would make a RetroArch Hatari core a lot easier if your upstream
repo supported it already.

Jamie