Emulation Advice

[kittygotwet]

I'm wanting to put a load of old games on my laptop but I haven't got a clue how to do it,I've installed retroarch but havent got a clue where to go from there.

Can someone give me some advice please and feel free to dumb it down as I'm completely useless when it comes to stuff like this 

[Ninja Doctor]

1. What system are you using? Assume windows 10/11!

2. What systems do you want to emulate?

3. Do you want enhancements?

[kittygotwet]

It's an Acer Aspire 5 laptop,brand new at christmas so I assume the latest version of windows,I'd like to emulate pretty much all Nintendo/Sega consoles and Ps2 if I can,dont really know what you mean by enhancements ? 

[Moodmon]

Retroarch can take a bit of tinkering if you are new.  For up to 16 bit/arcade stuff easiest way is to find a wrapper/package.  I’m a big fan of Retrobat.

 

https://www.retrobat.org/

 

Emulation Station based (so Retroarch backend) and it does most of the hard stuff for you.  Though it can handle stuff up to N64/DC you probably want to look into stand-alone emulators above that.  Better performance and features.  Duckstation is your go to for PS1, I’m sure others have Saturn/PS2 etc. recommendations.

[kittygotwet]

16 hours ago, Moodmon said:

Retroarch can take a bit of tinkering if you are new.  For up to 16 bit/arcade stuff easiest way is to find a wrapper/package.  I’m a big fan of Retrobat.

 

https://www.retrobat.org/

 

Emulation Station based (so Retroarch backend) and it does most of the hard stuff for you.  Though it can handle stuff up to N64/DC you probably want to look into stand-alone emulators above that.  Better performance and features.  Duckstation is your go to for PS1, I’m sure others have Saturn/PS2 etc. recommendations.

Cheers for the info mate,I'll be giving it a go tonight 

[bplus]

Something not made clear is retro arch is all configurable through the gui.

 

All you need to do go to retro main menu, online updater, download cores (cores are retro arch name for emulators).

 

Down load the cores for systems you want to emulate .

 

Assuming you have a pile of roms in a folder somewhere, go to import content and navigate to folder that contains Roms. It will scan that folder.

 

As long as you've got cores downloaded, retro arch will create playlists for you automatically, they appear on left hand side with appropriate icon for each system.

 

For some fecking reason no one tells you this step about getting cores first and then importing roms. Instead everyone talks about editing playlist files manually.

 

If you are using an Xbox pad it will probably detect automatically and you are good to go.

[Ninja Doctor]

Retro arch is unnecessarily complicated. It’s obviously been coded by people who love Linux too much. 

[AK Bell]

Another option would be some something like Batocera. It's basically a linux you stick on a flash drive, SD card or something and boot your PC from that. 

 

Since it's an all in one thing, it's usually all pretty much sorted out for you by default and you just need to stick games on it.