Questions about unstable 4.1 version

[gmgman]

first of all, thanks for making recalbox, I like this much more than retropie, because it doesn't need so much configuration. I've discovered recalbox just at the end of last year when 4.0 came out and I wonder how long does it usually take the devs to release a new stable version? I'm asking this because I know it took very long according to what I read, but some blog post (from 6th February) says that in the futrue updates will be more frequent? I would really like to update to 4.1 but I refrain from doing it because I think that you can't update from 4.1 unstable to 4.1 stable (?) and as I use a 1TB external hard drive for all my roms and movies with recalbox, I'm also affraid that my stuff (directory structures, config files, etc.) on the hard drive will become incompatible with the next stable version and I really don't want to move all the stuff to my computer again, and back to the hard drive once the stable version is installed on it. Maybe I'm wrong here and if I am, I will gladly update to 4.1 unstable.

[Substring]

Hi !

As the "4.1 unstable" name states, it is a version made for public testing. Despite it shouldn't have any impact on your hard drive and that it works rather well overall, we still recommend people to fool around with 4.1 on a different SD card unless they know Recalbox as well as us.

As for ETA, learn the golden rule : never ask an ETA
Recalbox is done on our free time, and sometimes we like to spend our free time on things other than Recalbox

Let me give you a little insight of why :

• as you said, Recalbox is more "plug'n'play" than Retropie, which makes it easier to use. And, making it that easy to use takes time (quite often emulators configuration files are not much documented, we have to write code to generate those configuration files, and it's very time consuming)
• Retropie is based on raspbian (so they hardly care about OS related stuff), Recalbox is based on Buildroot (which is some kind of linux from scratch for embedded systems). So we also have to handle most of the system, this takes time
• Raspbian has apt, not Recalbox, so adding any software means most of times adding a package definition to compile that software during the Recalbox building process, and this takes REALLY MUCH time !

So, yes, the development speed may look slow, it's much more complex than adding something to Retropie, we are very few to work on it, and it all depends on the free time of 2/3 people

[gmgman]

@Substring thanks for the answers! I didn't want to sound rude on the ETA question, I know the dev team is small and that you guys do this on your spare time, and it's amazing what you have done so far - I will never go back to retropie again (which is also great, but recalbox is exactly what I wanted retropie to be).

Great to hear, that updating to 4.1 unstable will not affect the hard drive, I will try this as soon as possible. I don't want to use another SD card since I don't have one atm, and as said all my stuff is on the hard drive anyways, so if anything goes wrong I can just wipe the SD card and write a new (stable) recalbox Image onto it and things should be okay again, right?

I'm so looking forward to the new features!

[azvarel]

@gmgman If you have HDD space you can do what I did, I renamed the recalbox folder to recalbox_402 and did the upgrade to 4.1 just the SD. (In version 4.1 the system creates the recalbox folder on the HDD when you set it to use external), and did my due tests before migrating my entire HDD.

It's like @Substring said, test before see if you meet the needs and if you understand.
But the system is not so unstable.

[gmgman]

@azvarel that's a pretty good idea, thanks for the hint (should have come up with this myself lol). I'm planning to update to 4.1 on the SD card first, then plug the hd on the pi.

[Substring]

@gmgman why are you in such a hurry for 4.1 ?

[azvarel]

@gmgman

Gives a read on this topic, from exactly this point you will see what I have tested, and may have something similar to take as a base.

and forget to run PSP in rpi3, who invented this was a patient Ha-Ha-Ha

Contribute to the compatibility list
https://forum.recalbox.com/topic/4740/recalbox-compatibility-lists

[gmgman]

@Substring I'm actually not really in a hurry. I was just curious, and the new features look great. I'm not after the PSP emulation if you thought about this.
I just tried updateing, worked fine except that my xbox360 wireless controllers were messed up (d-pad not working at all, start select buttons also not working, instead I have to push down the analog sticks left or right to move left or right, select and start are on LT and RT, up and down are LB and RB, A,B,Y,X buttons work as intended tho), so I thought maybe the update messed up, wiped my sd, reformatted, downloaded image from here https://archive.recalbox.com/updates/v1.0/unstable/ (rpi3 one), put on SD. same s**t. my iBuffalo SNES controller was not working properly as well. wiped SD card again, wrote the image onece. more. now snes controller works, xbox360 still messed up. think I will switch back to 4.02 and see if all is fine then...

[Substring]

@gmgman you just have to reconfigure your pad as the x360 driver was totally changed. The feature to automatically remap upon upgrade to 4.1 is not yet released

[gmgman]

@Substring haha lol, ok i will try that. made me wonder since I never had issues with controllers on recalbox.