What is Libretro?

Libretro is a simple but powerful development interface that allows for the easy creation of emulators, games and multimedia applications that can plug straight into any libretro-compatible frontend. This development interface is open to others so that they can run these pluggable emulator and game cores also in their own programs or devices.

With libretro, you can make cross-platform applications that can use rich features such as OpenGL, cross-platform camera support, location support, and more in the future.

What is RetroArch?

RetroArch is the official reference frontend for the libretro API.

What is it most commonly used for ?

RetroArch is most popularly known for being a program with which you can play many emulators and games, which have all been customized and tailor-ported to the libretro API.

It is designed to be fast, lightweight, and portable. It tries to be on the cutting edge of technology in terms of technolog supported as well as trying to be as backwards compatible as possible, a paradoxical goal if any. It has features few other dedicated games / emulators have, such as:

Our mission, our philosophy – non-compromising in being open and libre

Our mission is your mission. Your best interests are our best interests.

It’s in the best interests of RetroArch as the reference frontend to remain a no-strings attached enduser project. Therefore, we draw a strict line on the following issues:

• RetroArch as the reference frontend to libretro will always remain free. Free as in libre, AND free as in beer.
• We don’t believe in spying on you and/or viewing you as a commodity to be exploited and tracked. Therefore, if you use a version of RetroArch that has ads in it, it does not come from us.
• Monetary donations will not be accepted.
  • The ONLY exception to this rule is gifts in the form of hardware needed for the project. These are at least objectively valid and non-corruptible ways of helping the project since it is hardware we need for testing and porting purposes. If you are one such general soul who feels like helping out in this regard, contact us at libretro@gmail.com.
• We will never engage in deliberate and shady ‘rebranding’of existing open source projects to make it appear as if the ‘work/port’ is somehow distinct from the main source and as if it is its own entity.
• We will never try to tempt you to buy into Kickstarter schemes.
• Unsolicited e-mails regarding monetization middleware will be ignored.
• We provide all the means to any and all devs to make their own builds/packages from source – unlike others everything we do is immediately committed to Github so whatever you can fetch from source on our Github repositories is exactly the current state of development. Unlike others, everything we commit can be guaranteed to be built by others.

Note – these stances are final. We feel very strongly in them.