RetroAchievements
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I discovered RetroAchievements while looking around in the menus of RetroArch one day. There is a section at the bottom of the Settings menu to sign into the site and with my curiosity piqued I made and account and started earning achievements.
A summary of my profile stats can be found on the homepage and a more detailed profile can be found below.
Profile
Set Development
After a few months, I decided I wanted to contribute to the site so I joined the Jr. Developer program. Learning how to create achievements using the toolkit built into the RALibretro emulator was great, I had never really worked with memory addresses before. From my second set onwards I used a scripting language called RAScript and a program called RATools which is developed by Jamiras, the same person who maintains the primary library that allows emulators to integrate with the site.
The tool kit for developing achievements currently only runs on Windows or via Wine on Linux. I haven’t had much luck getting it running via Wine on macOS so I do my development inside a Windows 11 virtual machine via Parallels. It works fine for 2D games and some early 3D games like Playstation 1 and simpler Playstation Portable games but heavy stuff like PCSX2 (Playstation 2) and Dolphin (GameCube/Nintendo Wii) struggle due to GPU limitations for virtualized operating systems, maybe one day Apple will see fit to allow GPU passthrough to VMs.
I eventually graduated from the Jr Developer program with my Pop Breaker set. The community manager, Nepiki, made a forum post detailing my time in the program here.
Below is a list of the my sets along with the consoles they are on.