Miniretro: testing emulators at scale

submited by

Style Pass

2021-08-17 19:00:06

Last year I got involved in libretro/Retroarch development after buying an Odroid Go Advance. During this time I’ve been working mainly on gpsp and porting it to new devices and such.

One of the main issues about working in software is testing, and as you can probably imagine there’s no tests in most emulators. Partly due to bad practices and because it’s hard to write tests for them. That’s why I came up with miniretro. It is a libretro frontend designed for headless operation, so that it can be used for end-to-end/integration testing. The frontend runs a core and a rom with fake inputs and grabs the output.

Some of there emulators (like gpsp) feature a dynamic recompiler (aka dynarec), which have platform specific (CPU, OS and/or device specific) backends targeted at them. These can translate original console instructions into your device’s instruction set (for speed). Since this is device specific, it’s hard to write, debug and test. One needs a toolchain for the platform and a physical device to test it. Or at least that’s the theory!

With miniretro it gets easier to test other platforms like for instance ARM and MIPS devices. Since it is simple (almost no dependencies) and just a Linux binary, we can use Qemu userspace emulation to run our tests! This way there’s not need for a physical device, nor manual testing.