Emulation central - recommendations in 1st post

[Lutte]

I never understood the people whining about retroarch. You set the gamepad controls, default folders and use the browser to launch your roms and off you go. It's not fucking rocket science.

But then I'm not the sort to have thousands of roms of games I will never play. I don't give a shit about making the playstation/xbox style game lists with cover and other crap work. All my filesystem folders are neatly organized and only contain games I actually care about.

You know what emulator is an actual pain in the ass? MAME. Now that's a pain in the ass. You upgrade it and play the russian roulette as to which of your rom won't work anymore because MAME people did a new dump and somehow they decided you should not be allowed to run your current rom at all.
This is actual user hostility right there.

Retroarch's ui isn't the nicest, but it works ok and the main thing of the program, to be the one end point for most emulation, while adding features that do things like reduce lag or give you universal access to shaders is on point and indispensable work.
Heck they even help with the MAME bullshit by including a MAME version for everytime they did major rom breaking. This of course pisses the beejesus off the MAME developers who screech on every media on the internet that retroarch deserves to die for that sin. Allowing people to run obsolete roms? wow dude that's worse than hitler!

 

[Great Deceiver]

Retroarch is both great and terrible. It is great because it has easy way to access various emus but try to for example create your own game list with covers and use your own roms and you will not get it working great. You will have to run games like peasant through browser rather than game list.

Their stance on using checksums for no-intro and other collections is completely retarded.
And the ui. Somehow emulator station needs dedicated music section and video and 1000 other things by default.

My Retroarch runs entirely curated playlists (with custom icons) with boxarts/screenshots - including for arcade games (platform/hori shmup/vert shmup/platform/1 screen platform, etc.). You can build them from scratch or you can automate the process through scripts if you're starting from full romsets.

You're just lazy.

I've never understood why people have a gripe with Retroarch's UI - especially now that you have so many options (I still prefer the old XMB style, which is what I use). You get per-core, per-game or even per-directory configs, the best shader implementation out of any software that I've seen, perfect sync (including for nonstandard refresh games like Raiden or Mortal Kombat) and runahead if you choose.

I guess it used to be a fashionable thing to say RA sucks compared to standalone emulators about oh, 10 years ago, when people thought it was just a front end. But it's not, and it's a pretty retarded stance nowadays.

I couldn't care less about the dramaqueen policies of the emulation 'scene', so that part doesn't bother me at all. I've been emulating shit since DOS Nesticle in 1997 and it's never been better.

 

[Perkel]

Dude last thing i want is to spend days of work to build game list with box arts when pretty much every other modern emu does that for you without being anal for checksum of some shitty roms collection

It's retroarch that is retarded.

 

[Lutte]

without being anal for checksum of some shitty roms collection

It's retroarch that is retarded.

Not focusing on your pet feature doesn't make retroarch 'retarded'. The checksum method is the quick way of making that kind of feature while ensuring correctness - because people like you would bitch and whine harder if a game has the wrong metadata pulled than if there was no metadata pull at all.

Some people like to waste time developing features like heuristics for this shit but personally I'd rather RA devs focused on actually useful things. You know, like runahead, or cores that are improved over the emus they fork.

 

[Perkel]

without being anal for checksum of some shitty roms collection

It's retroarch that is retarded.

Not focusing on your pet feature doesn't make retroarch 'retarded'. The checksum method is the quick way of making that kind of feature while ensuring correctness - because people like you would bitch and whine harder if a game has the wrong metadata pulled than if there was no metadata pull at all.

Some people like to waste time developing features like heuristics for this shit but personally I'd rather RA devs focused on actually useful things. You know, like runahead, or cores that are improved over the emus they fork.

wtf are you sniffing ? you can pull up what rom you have by reading rom data and comparing it to database. Which is how most of modern emus do their database pulls. No need for some idiotic checksum against someone arbitrary rom collection.

This wouldn't even be an issue if not for retarded policy that you can't edit easily those lists. So if i have modded Goal 3 rom with english translation i need to either run it like a peasant via browser everytime or create completely new separate list and fiddle with shit.

 

[Insect Hordes]

I went for retroarch maybe 3 years ago 'cause I thought it would be a simpler way to play arcade and PCE shit I didn't have a tried and true standalone for. If it defaulted to the desktop view I'd've had a more familiar experience when I was just trying to get my first time setup going. Anytime it's in that fullscreen controller interface it's a ballache. It's a flashcart experience on PC. Maybe it's closer to ZSNES filesystem navigation using only a dpad and 2 buttons.

I don't like the core downloading part. I'm not bound by any system requirements so I just want the absolute #1 current choice for whatever system. There's all these saturn variants but I still ended up just using medgui reborn. It's better for an oldtimer who just wants the least amount of clicks before I'm pressing start. I just want to point it to my folder with complete romsets and be done. Then I can focus on what's really important: having every old game and never playing any of that shit.

My ideal interface for a goddamn desktop emulator is Kega Fusion. Has all the shit I want right where I think it's going to be and that's it. Rightclick in full screen and it has a drop down menu. It ain't going to spread folders around into obscure parts of you computer.

I used to think finding BIOS files was a hassle until I recently used Yuzu for the first time. There's all this cat and mouse bullshit for something that should just be a real easy to find 300 meg zip file. I was on git hub (which I still fucking hate. every goddamn time something I want is on there it's like "where is the fucking download link") and there's all this fart smelling bullshit about ripping your own syskey from your switch. Motherfucker. When I finally found the little string of text I needed it just worked but up until then, balls were aching. Stealing all the games was easier than first time setup. I went on a discord for the first time. I didn't know it was just like if yahoo chat had old shitty mIRC inside the browser shit. I thought discord was like a chatroom not an old empty weird to navigate website. Whatever, I fucking beat bayonetta 3 for free on launch weekend. Shit sucked.

I've been playing Metroid Prime on dolphin vr. Looks fucking amazing. Monsters are 9 feet tall. Audio seems crackly sometimes. How the fuck has the vr part not been updated since 2016? I need more VR modes for some of these old 3d systems.

Remember back when PC engine cd dracula x shit had you converting mp3s into wav files and rebuilding an iso for a fucking 350 mb cd image 'cause internet used to be slow? Then you fuck around for a whole weekend and the sumbitch still didn't work?

The MAME romsets becoming obsolete with new version is just fucking stupid. That shit didn't happen in the good old days. Way back yonder in ye olden days that 45 mb Metal Slug rom would last you for a decade. Redownloading a whole set is easier now than taking time to just get the stuff you actually play and it's still horseshit. Remember back when they first started getting CPS2 games running and final burn alpha and neo and all that horseshit? Fuck you.

NEORAGEx and NESticle for life.

Take me back to old super dark purple zophar's domain and plasticman.org.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

None of you use launchbox or bigbox?

I'm still looking for the ultimate colecovision emulator. And i can't get my expansion module 2 (steering wheel) to register (hope it ain't broke). Thrustmaster would be cool if it worked. The site was not helpful with my garage sale find of a legacy wheel and i had to dig up my own drivers and manual online. Maybe they'll work. Those wheels are made fucking solid. Great find if i ever get it to work.

 

[Rincewind]

Every single time I tried RetroArch in the past I rage quit in less than 10 mins. That UI is a fucking nightmare.

Mind you, I have zero care for consoles, arcade games, gaming on a TV from 3 meters using a controller, box art, media player like interfaces that shows all my games — all that kind of stuff RA seems to have been built for.

I want to use individual emulators with lots of customisations like a real computer, sitting in front of a real computer, using keyboard, mouse, etc. I'm only into emulating personal computers, DOS, C64, Mac, Amiga, and ZX Spectrum mainly, and for these standalone emulators are vastly superior. You just cannot cram all those myriad of config options into a unified least common denominator interface — well, I guess you can if all you care about playing some arcade games with minimal fuss, but for power users it's always gonna be individual standalone emus, zero doubt about that.

*One* nice feature of RA on paper is the unified shader system, and that's the only reason I attempted using it to try how early Mac and ZX Spectrum games would look with a CRT shader. But never got so far, I just cannot stand that thing...

 

[Lutte]

you can pull up what rom you have by reading rom data and comparing it to database

Do you have a consistent way of doing that for the entire library of things RA supports?

'm only into emulating personal computers, DOS, C64, Mac, Amiga, and ZX Spectrum mainly, and for these standalone emulators are vastly superior

Water is wet.
As a heavy retroarch user, I do not use it for things it wasn't optimized for ie computer type stuff. If a game wasn't designed around gamepads, it shouldn't be played on RA. You spend most of your diatribe whining about the UI being designed for console style use so what possesses you to try to use it for computer emulation? next thing you know, putting your hands onto a fire burns.
RA works extremely well for anything that is a subset of an xbox 360 gamepad. You configure your pad once, and it works greeat as is on all platforms that are a SUBSET. A 360 style pad will reasonably map to things like a NES, SNES, Saturn etc well. On the other hand, you'll be fighting against the grain if it has things that are more complex, like Wiimotes (better to run native dolphin) or keyboard and mouse.

 

[Rincewind]

As a heavy retroarch user, I do not use it for things it wasn't optimized for ie computer type stuff. If a game wasn't designed around gamepads, it shouldn't be played on RA. You spend most of your diatribe whining about the UI being designed for console style use so what possesses you to try to use it for computer emulation? next thing you know, putting your hands onto a fire burns.

Okay, I hear you, let me try again.

I dislike consoles in general, and am against the consolification of personal computers for whatever purposes. As such, I hate RetroArch with passion, and I think it should be killed with fire.*

Better?

(* but before that, let me take their shader system and port it to DOSBox )

 

[Lutte]

As a heavy retroarch user, I do not use it for things it wasn't optimized for ie computer type stuff. If a game wasn't designed around gamepads, it shouldn't be played on RA. You spend most of your diatribe whining about the UI being designed for console style use so what possesses you to try to use it for computer emulation? next thing you know, putting your hands onto a fire burns.

Okay, I hear you, let me try again.

I dislike consoles in general

Someone's getting lost.

 

[Rincewind]

As a heavy retroarch user, I do not use it for things it wasn't optimized for ie computer type stuff. If a game wasn't designed around gamepads, it shouldn't be played on RA. You spend most of your diatribe whining about the UI being designed for console style use so what possesses you to try to use it for computer emulation? next thing you know, putting your hands onto a fire burns.

Okay, I hear you, let me try again.

I dislike consoles in general

Someone's getting lost.

No, this is a general emulation thread, in the wrong subforum.

 

[Lutte]

Oh please, the amount of times something like dosbox even gets mentioned in this thread doesn't go past 3 pages in a search - out of the 165 pages we've filled. This is the console emulation thread and you're deluding yourself.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

I could say this about most console emulators too, but you don't really need any help with DOSbox unless you're trying to set-up some non-standard setting like a fancy sound card or something. And in those cases there are usually guides telling you all you ever need to know to set it up. Its good to go otherwise, outside of very specific games. Meanwhile despite claims to the contrary, multi-system emulators like MAME and RetroArch are pains to set up, which is why they keep coming up in this topic.
Also, on asking Codexers about old computers never seems to work out, you're always better off searching dedicated forums for that. Case in point, I was trying to get an Acorn Archimedes game working this week, something I highly doubt anyone on the Codex would be able to help with at all.

 

[Rincewind]

Its good to go otherwise, outside of very specific games. Meanwhile despite claims to the contrary, multi-system emulators like MAME and RetroArch are pains to set up, which is why they keep coming up in this topic.

Yeah, what I only wanted to do with RA was to test it with a single core with a single game. Sounds simple enough, but instead of allowing me to do that, it started downloading ROM lists, tried coercing me into setting up global controller configs and god knows what else. A few minutes later I was greeted with a game list of a few thousand entries. WTF? Just nope.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I don't use RA for computer emulation, except for Sharp X68000 stuff (which benefits a lot from shaders).

I also don't use it for 64-bit consoles after the Dreamcast as the standalone emulators are still strictly better (PCSX2 which recently got huge improvements especially re: frame timing and latency, Dolphin).

Other than that, though, I use it for everything else.

 

[Rincewind]

I don't use RA for computer emulation, except for Sharp X68000 stuff (which benefits a lot from shaders).

I also don't use it for 64-bit consoles after the Dreamcast as the standalone emulators are still strictly better (PCSX2 which recently got huge improvements especially re: frame timing and latency, Dolphin).

Other than that, though, I use it for everything else.

Jokes aside, I never owned any console, or even played any game on one for more than a few minutes. So I'd be interested in trying a few good console games out of interest that aren't JRPGs, twitch action games, or kiddie platformers.

You seem knowledgeable about console emulation, what is currently the best way to emulate PS1, PS2 and PS3? DuckStation, PCSX2 and RPCS3 is my guess.

So far this is the list of games I'm interested in: Silent Hill, Metal Gear and King's Field series, Shadow of the Colossus, and Ico.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I don't use RA for computer emulation, except for Sharp X68000 stuff (which benefits a lot from shaders).

I also don't use it for 64-bit consoles after the Dreamcast as the standalone emulators are still strictly better (PCSX2 which recently got huge improvements especially re: frame timing and latency, Dolphin).

Other than that, though, I use it for everything else.

Jokes aside, I never owned any console, or even played any game on one for more than a few minutes. So I'd be interested in trying a few good console games out of interest that aren't JRPGs, twitch action games, or kiddie platformers.

You seem knowledgeable about console emulation, what is currently the best way to emulate PS1, PS2 and PS3? DuckStation, PCSX2 and RPCS3 is my guess.

So far this is the list of games I'm interested in: Silent Hill, Metal Gear and King's Field series, Shadow of the Colossus, and Ico.

Your list is pretty spot on. However, my personal recommendation is running the Beetle PSX HW core in Retroarch using the Vulkan driver, increasing the rendering resolution and enabling Supersampling (which downsamples to native resolution - 240p - again), with a good CRT shader. I find that this is the best approximation of how these games used to look on CRTs back in the day, especially those that mixed 2d and 3d assets.

For Shadow and the Colossus and Ico, I recommend the PS3 ports instead of the PS2 ones (both of them came in a single 'collection'), they run fine on RPCS3 and are much more stable than the original releases. I recommend playing the original PS1 version of MGS instead of the terrible GC remake (Twin Snakes). I recommend playing 2 and 3 (my favourite in the series by far) on RPCS3 (MGS HD collection). It is possible to run MGS4 on RPCS3, but there are still significant issues and it requires top notch hardware to run remotely close to properly.

My favourite King's Field is King's Field 4: the Ancient City (the PS2 game), I've completed it a few times on PCSX2 with no issues at all. Great soundtrack. If you like old From Software games and haven't tried the Shadow Tower series, definitely give it a go. The first game is on PS1 and is very primitive (still worth playing), but the second one (Shadow Tower: Abyss) is a trip and although it only came out in Japan, there's a decent translation available.

 

[Rincewind]

I don't use RA for computer emulation, except for Sharp X68000 stuff (which benefits a lot from shaders).

I also don't use it for 64-bit consoles after the Dreamcast as the standalone emulators are still strictly better (PCSX2 which recently got huge improvements especially re: frame timing and latency, Dolphin).

Other than that, though, I use it for everything else.

Jokes aside, I never owned any console, or even played any game on one for more than a few minutes. So I'd be interested in trying a few good console games out of interest that aren't JRPGs, twitch action games, or kiddie platformers.

You seem knowledgeable about console emulation, what is currently the best way to emulate PS1, PS2 and PS3? DuckStation, PCSX2 and RPCS3 is my guess.

So far this is the list of games I'm interested in: Silent Hill, Metal Gear and King's Field series, Shadow of the Colossus, and Ico.

Your list is pretty spot on. However, my personal recommendation is running the Beetle PSX HW core in Retroarch using the Vulkan driver, increasing the rendering resolution and enabling Supersampling (which downsamples to native resolution - 240p - again), with a good CRT shader. I find that this is the best approximation of how these games used to look on CRTs back in the day, especially those that mixed 2d and 3d assets.

For Shadow and the Colossus and Ico, I recommend the PS3 ports instead of the PS2 ones (both of them came in a single 'collection'), they run fine on RPCS3 and are much more stable than the original releases. I recommend playing the original PS1 version of MGS instead of the terrible GC remake (Twin Snakes). I recommend playing 2 and 3 (my favourite in the series by far) on RPCS3 (MGS HD collection). It is possible to run MGS4 on RPCS3, but there are still significant issues and it requires top notch hardware to run remotely close to properly.

My favourite King's Field is 4 (the PS2 game), I've completed it a few times on PCSX2 with no issues at all. Great soundtrack. If you like old From Software games and haven't tried the Shadow Tower series, definitely give it a go. The first game is on PS1 and is very primitive (still worth playing), but the second one (Shadow Tower: Abyss) is a trip and although it only came out in Japan, there's a decent translation available.

Thanks for the tips, man, I appreciate it.

 

[gerey]

Jokes aside, I never owned any console, or even played any game on one for more than a few minutes. So I'd be interested in trying a few good console games out of interest that aren't JRPGs, twitch action games, or kiddie platformers.

Ace Combat 4, 5 and Zero (in that order) - arguably rather easy arcade flight sims, but what you actually play them for is the story and spectacle. Can all be emulated very well on the PCSX2. Fan-translated version of Ace Combat 3 can be easily emulated on any PS1 emulator, and is far more ambitious than all the other games - several branching paths, 5 endings, cutscenes made by Production I.G (the guys behind the original Ghost in the Shell anime movie). Finally there's Ace Combat: Assault Horizon for the 3DS, which has nothing to do with the godawful mainline title of the same name and is instead a remake of Ace Combat 2, and Ace Combat X that can be emulated with PPSSPP.

 

[oasis789]

If you only play one of them, make it AC5.

 

[Lutte]

I could say this about most console emulators too, but you don't really need any help with DOSbox unless you're trying to set-up some non-standard setting like a fancy sound card or something. And in those cases there are usually guides telling you all you ever need to know to set it up. Its good to go otherwise, outside of very specific games. Meanwhile despite claims to the contrary, multi-system emulators like MAME and RetroArch are pains to set up, which is why they keep coming up in this topic.
Also, on asking Codexers about old computers never seems to work out, you're always better off searching dedicated forums for that. Case in point, I was trying to get an Acorn Archimedes game working this week, something I highly doubt anyone on the Codex would be able to help with at all.

You spouted a lot of words just to confirm that this is, indeed, the console emulation thread.

what is currently the best way to emulate

The answers are always here :
http://nonmame.retrogames.com/

 

[flyingjohn]

The only thing i wish retroarch ui would have is the visual representation of the controller you are trying to emulate.
It is not so easy to map stuff with a ps2 like layout when it comes to n64/saturn.

Also,i actually don't mind using the retro arch computer cores.They aren't better then standalone but they aren't broken as is the case with the pcsx2/psp core.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I use RetroArch whenever possible because it is simple and straightforward, and I can easily apply CRT filters. Using the other emulators is much more of a hassle that requires trudging through forums to figure out how to get them to run or to apply a shader.

 

[perfectslumbers]

So I'd be interested in trying a few good console games out of interest that aren't JRPGs, twitch action games, or kiddie platformers.

Idk if you count it as a JRPG but Demon's Souls is From Softs best game and an absolute masterpiece. I highly recommend giving it a go on RPCS3