Sorry for my MAJOR rant, but i’m just so sadly frustrated that I’ll be uninstalling retroarch AGAIN.
Some users obviously want to tinker, and its great for them to have every single little granular option exposed. But other people don’t need to put every little bit of ikea furniture together one piece at a time.
The main purpose of this app is for people to be able to play old games. Why so many hoops just to get started? The interface is not intuitive at all, rather still a half baked rip off of the ps3? Why are game cores still not called Emulators, like everywhere else. Why am i bug testing just to get games working. Why do I have to look up youtube videos on how to get a game started? Who in the world would think that: “install SNES emulator”
would equal
“online updater > core updater > (pick one of the 15 SNES emulators at random that all have truncated names)” and hope for the best!!! After all this time is there really NO recommended emulator? No recommended settings?
Like the title says. I install retroarch every 6 months or so when I get a new pc or new work setup, then uninstall it after a few days every time. I want to LOVE this project so much. But every single time I have to sift through menu after menu searching for things just to make it work. Then backtrack and try more things to make something else work. Then sift through the forums AGAIN. Its a jack of all trades master of none situation. The forums are filled with users trying to figure out how to get this working properly.
I’m sure a lot of fanboys have switched me off by now, but I have some thoughts on how to improve the new user experience.
Something as simple as a WIZARD section when you launch would help IMMENSELY. The wizard is optional, with a plain old “close” for all those who want to manually sift through it all.
Current UX is so bad you need to get launchbox to cover it up. Why has this never been updated?
UX should be:
- User installs retroarch
- User inputs Roms folder
- Waits for install/update to complete
- User presented immediately with wall of playable games.
Behind the scenes:
- Have a default roms path. This folder is scanned on launch without user input.
- Have user option to input rom path.
- Retroarch scans folder for file types, and self identifies file formats to Emulators.
- Retroarch self tests for the matching emulator, and if one is not installed, it installs the best one for that rom.
- Upon detecting new rom, perform scrape of igdb (or similar open source game database) for individual game artwork and data. (Because your servers are s.u.p.e.r.s.l.o.w)
- Scrape for platform artwork, icons and sounds.
- On first install, retroarch scans GPU, CPU, RAM, and matches that with minimum specs to run games. Flagging potential underpowered systems.
- User presented with a wall of immediately playable games with default plain posters. Posters, art and sounds update in front of users eyes as the scraping completes. (see plex/kodi)
I just want to play my games. Launchbox and individual emulators are fine, but it just seems that if this app was a bit more seamless, it would be the one ring to rule them all.
If anyone is actually in making this project look and feel nice, I will put my money where my mouth is and help for free. (i’m a designer and 3d artist)
See you in 6 months.
EDIT: formatting