Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup on RetroArch: Source-Based Setup Guide

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a free roguelike game of exploration and treasure-hunting in dungeons filled with dangerous and unfriendly monsters in a quest for the mystifyingly fabulous Orb of Zot. It runs in RetroArch through a libretro core, and this guide follows the official libretro core documentation for preparing and loading content.

Core background

The Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup core was authored by the DCSS Team and is licensed under GPLv2+. Its library name is Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup.

Prerequisite: a game data directory

Before loading anything, create an empty directory to hold the game data. This directory becomes the root that the core reads from, so keep the copied content and the generated configuration file at that level.

Setup steps

• 1. Create an empty directory to hold game data.
• 2. Copy the contents of the crawl-ref/source/dat directory from the libretro crawl-ref repository into the root of the game directory.
• 3. Create a file named game.crawlrc in the root of the game directory.
• 4. Load game.crawlrc with the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup core in RetroArch.

The expected outcome of these steps is that the core loads the game.crawlrc file you placed at the root of the prepared directory. The documentation describes no further configuration beyond this sequence.

Supported content extension

Content loaded by the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup core uses the .crawlrc file extension.

Where saves go

The core saves to and loads from a saves/ directory inside the loaded content's directory.

Geometry and timing

The core reports a provided FPS of 60 and a sample rate of 44100 Hz. Its base width is 1024 and base height is 768; the max width and max height are also 1024 and 768.

Input devices

The core accepts a joypad, a pointer, and a keyboard via the keyboard callback.

For a joypad, the documented User 1 mapping assigns Enter to the RetroPad B button and the directionals to the RetroPad D-pad up, down, left and right. With a pointer, cursor position maps to pointer position and pointer presses map to clicks.

Feature limitations

Among frontend-level settings, the core is documented as supporting saves, controls and remapping. It is documented as not supporting restart, screenshots, save states, rewind, netplay, core options, memory monitoring for achievements, RetroArch cheats, native cheats, multi-mouse, rumble, sensors, camera, location, subsystem, softpatching, disk control, username, language, crop overscan or LEDs.

If loading fails

The documentation does not describe troubleshooting steps or known failure modes, so check the four preparation steps in order: an empty game data directory exists, the dat content was copied into its root, game.crawlrc exists in that same root, and that file was selected when loading the core. Anything beyond these checks is not covered by the source.

Reference links

The official documentation points to the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup website, the upstream crawl/crawl repository, the libretro core info file, the libretro crawl-ref repository, and the libretro-meta issue tracker for reporting core issues.

1. Create an empty directory to hold game data.
2. Copy the crawl-ref/source/dat contents into the root of that directory.
3. Create a file named game.crawlrc in the root of the game directory.
4. Load game.crawlrc with the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup core.