2020 in Review

meleu By meleu.

Intro

Let’s check what was done to move the RetroAchievements project forward over this last crazy year. Grouped by the different fronts where the project evolves.

I’d like to say thanks to all the guys involved here. Please stay safe and let’s make 2021 another great year for RA.

Emulation

New Supported Consoles

  • MSX
  • 3DO
  • PC-FX
  • Vectrex
  • Magnavox Odyssey 2

By the way, if you’re wondering “why the heck RetroAchievements programmers add support to some random consoles no one cares about?!”, I explained why that happens in an episode of the RAPodcast. Here’s a link directly to the part where I talk about it.

RetroArch

Over the last year Jamiras had made a lot of contributions in the RetroArch front. I’m gonna list some of most notable contributions (when the author is not mentioned, it means Jamiras):

  • Added Rich Presence support (yeah, we didn’t have RP in RetroArch before).
  • Display measured progress on locked achievements in Achievements List.
  • Option to start a session with all achievements active (by meleu).
  • Report an error message when failing to unlock an achievement in the server.
  • Added option to play custom sound on achievement unlock
  • Show “unsupported core” when viewing Achievement List from an unsupported core
  • And several other bug fixes and small improvements.

RALibretro

  • Nintendo 64 support - by Jamiras
  • OpenGL Hardware rendering - by gde
  • Keyboard support (useful/mandatory for MSX) - by gde
  • And several other bug fixes and small improvements - by Jamiras

Achievement Creation Tools

New achievement logic features, all implemented by Jamiras:

Also the extremely useful Memory Inspector’s continuous filtering

Website

2020 was another year where we didn’t see the version 2 of the website. Yeah, the pandemics is affecting everyone’s life, even more the life of those who are parents. And that’s the case for the people responsible for the RAv2.

Regardless, we still got some improvements on the current version of the website, mainly made by MrOwnership.

Listing some of most notable improvements (when the author is not mentioned, it means MrOwnership):

  • Users can request sets for games with no achievements (it was actually in the end of 2019)
  • Ticket filtering improvements.
  • Allow users to hide site awards.
  • New individual achievement creators stats page with a lot of interesting details.
  • Global Leaderboard page with a lot of filtering options.
  • Added “Latest Masters” tab on the game’s page.
  • Added option to reset progress, individually in achievement’s page and the whole set in the game’s page - by meleu
  • Other bug fixes by MrOwnership, luchaos, gde, juherr and meleu

Community

  • A great improvement in the community part happened after we published the RetroAchievements Manifesto. Where we put clearly who we are, what we do and what we value. It also makes very clear that disrespectful interactions in this community is not tolerated.

  • RANews started. By meleu (website), StingX2 (gathering content), televandalist (creating the covers) and several contributions from many other community members.

  • RAPodcast started. By Draco655, Shootzy, Bendyhuman (now retired) and KingS1zzle.

  • Thoreau started his YouTube channel with valuable content for RA fans in the brazilian/portuguese-speaking community. There are achievement creation tutorials, interviews with brazilian achievement creators and more.

  • wilhitewarrior hosted the Devember event. It was a thunderous success, closing/solving a big amount of tickets. It was so freaking cool that it deserved a dedicated page in this very edition of RANews.

  • BahamutVoid had the idea and KingS1zzle proposed that community members with computer graphics skills could volunteer to improve the imagery of the achievement sets. We created a process for it in our discord server and now the overall quality of the game icons and achievement badges is constantly being improved, as you can see in the Art Updates section of EACH. RANEWS. ISSUE. BEING. RELEASED.

  • KickMeElmo linked a ridiculous amount of MSU-1 ROMs for those who enjoy it. And he also keeps a big repository with many MSU-1 patches. If you’re wondering what MSU-1 is, it’s essentially a software that simulates the existence of a CD attachment for the SNES. As a sample, check what it’s capable to do with the soundtrack of Mega Man X in this video.

  • StingX2 started The Unwanted event, focused on playing and fixing underplayed sets. Which surely is helping to improve the overall quality of the RetroAchievements project.

  • televandalist, besides creating sets, doing reviews, rescores and tons of other RA-chores and having a burnout, also created a process where new achievement creators, aka jr-devs, can get a badge when they meet the requirements needed to be a “full dev”.

Random Facts

  • During 2020 we released over 800 new achievement sets!!! This is mindblowing! It’s like more than two new achievement sets being released EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

  • We reached the mark of 3 thousand achievement sets released, and the 3000th set is Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II (NES), created by hardt.

  • About 40 new achievement creators, aka jr-devs, graduated.

Previous Years

If you’re a true hardcore RA-fan, maybe you would be interested the previous “year in review” forum posts: