McSoftServe: The April Fools' RetroArch Core for the Taylor C713

McSoftServe is an experimental libretro core for RetroArch that targets the Taylor C713 soft-serve ice cream machine, a device popularized by a well-known American fast food chain. According to its official documentation, it provides an accurate user experience without requiring firmware dumps.

Background: an April Fools' experiment

The official documentation describes McSoftServe as an experimental libretro core released as an April Fools' Day joke in 2024. It is authored by Jesse Talavera and distributed under the MIT license.

What the core is

Rather than emulating a game console, McSoftServe presents a simulated experience built around the Taylor C713 soft-serve machine. The documentation frames it as an experimental core rather than a production emulation target, and it is described as an April Fools' release rather than a supported daily-use core.

Starting the core without content

The core can be started without content in RetroArch. The documentation does not describe a ROM or BIOS dependency; instead it states that the experience is provided without the need for firmware dumps. That means there is no documented content file to load before the core will run.

Documented feature support

The official documentation lists saves, save states, rewind, core options, RetroArch cheats, controls and subsystems as unsupported. It also states explicitly that the core has no core options.

Feature support at a glance

What to expect when something is unsupported

Because saves, save states, rewind and cheats are documented as unavailable, there is no documented in-core recovery path for reloading progress or undoing actions. The documentation provides no options to enable these features, so plan around the absence of save and state support rather than expecting to toggle them on.

Controls are also listed as unsupported, so the documentation gives no button mapping or input procedure to follow. Treat the core as a documentation-described experiment rather than a setup that can be configured through standard RetroArch input options.