Last post I was yapping about emulation on a daily driver PC. What did I mean by that?
Well you remember back in the day when we used to have consoles? Wouldn’t it be dope to have all those consoles again? What if they all existed in the same machine? You smoking what I’m growing? Don’t daily drive this bird. Have it be a dedicated machine just for this purpose. But before we get there, we need to think about front ends, loading and unloading ROMs, maybe a little bit of content scraping? Eh? Videos, screenshots, manuals and the such?
Retroarch doesn’t solve that completely, but it sure gets you on your way.
This tutorial will be for Windows, with a Linux one later on. Mac lol.
Head straight to https://www.retroarch.com/?page=platforms to start
Extract it into its working directory and run the .exe
Sick. Now that it’s running we can do stuff.
Retroarch is built around Cores. Think of these as in house emulators. You need a Core for each system you’re trying to emulate. Some Cores can do more than one system.
In Main Menu, navigate to Online Updater
Then Core Downloader
That’ll update a list of all the in-house Cores available. For this tutorial we’ll set up Snes9X. Go down the list and elect the one shown highlighted below. All the Cores are different and they all do things the same, or different, or better, or worse. That’s up to you to dig into.
Once it’s installed, you’ll have a cute ampersand next to it.
That’s it. The core is installed. Now reference those ethically sourced ROMs and drop one in a directory somewhere
I’m making a sub-directory called /roms in the main retroarch directory
Inside said directory, I’ll create one for the system I’m emulating. Keep things organized and such.
In Retroarch, from the Main Menu select Import Content
Scan a directory
Then navigate to your newly created SNES directory, or whatever your chose. Once inside it, elect <Scan This Directory>
It’ll take as long as it takes depending on the amount of files.
Back out all the way to the main menu. You can now select Playlists. At the bottom, you should see an automatically generated one for the system game type detected.
Once inside, you can click the game and have a good time.
It looks hella boring though, and we could spruce it up a bit more. Back on the Main Menu, go to the Online Updater
From there elect Playlist Thumbnails Updater
And then the console you wish to update content for. In our case, SNES.
Once complete, navigate back to your playlist. It should have a little more soul.
Now, you’re more than welcome to stop here, use Retroarch for all your gaming needs. It’s more than capable of adding overlays, shaders, running fullscreen, doing hotkeys for exiting and whatnot. But in another tutorial, I’ll introduce you to the world of emulation front-ends.
Things to do now in Retroarch – review hotkeys, controls, bindings, shaders, and overlays. Most of this you can figure out on your own. But if you have any questions, feel free to ask.
