pcsx2, cemu and very rarely WinUAE. Some times playing around with Spectrum emulators. 95% of the time using Retroarch.
I know PCSX2 have a bad reputation on RetroArch, but it got better. I understand that one, but why Cemu? What are the reasons or the reason?
I play Breath Of the Wild some times.
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Ooops! I was thinking of Citra. My bad. Yeah, Cemu does not exist on RetroArch. So never mind.
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Let’s keep it positive in here. @John.Merrit, there’s no reason to denigrate other users.
@GemaH From my perspective, the problem with using/supporting/suggesting closed-source emus is that they’re dead-ends. The author will eventually stop working on them and the APIs and libraries the executable depends on will eventually rot, and then you’re stuck. Meanwhile, open research and development gets stymied because the closed-source emu has such a head start that nobody has any reason to use or improve (or to even create in the first place) the open source alternative.
Kega cast such a shadow over MD/Genesis emulation that it took the Wii homebrew scene (where Kega wasn’t an option) to motivate improvements to Gens/Genesis Plus!. And thanks to Pete’s closed-source OGL2 plugin being “good enough”, we didn’t get a modern open-source hardware-accelerated PS1 renderer until Rustation (that is, the renderer that’s in beetle-psx-hw).
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You mentioned some emulators individually as an argument that RetroArch is far more complex and difficult to use than those. That’s true. RetroArch IS more difficult to use than almost any individual emulator. But the key word here is individual.
What happens when you have a multi-system setup? Let’s say, around 75 different systems, which is where my RA setup is pushed (in total i have 85 systems). That’s actual 75 different systems, not random custom collections. How many individual standalone emulators would you need to support them? I’d say about 30 emulators since stuff like MAME and Mednafen can cover quite a few systems by themselves.
But still. That’s 30 different emulators to setup, learn the way they work and become familiar with their menus. But RetroArch is one single program. So yeah, it may be more difficult to setup than 1 or 2 emulators, or even 4 or 5. But compared to 30+?
In my case RetroArch not only saved me from this madness, it also made my setup much more consistent since i don’t have to deal with all different behaviors and jank so many emulators would have. And here’s the funny thing. I still have to use some standalones like the Model 2 emulator and Supermodel. These two in particular cause me all sorts of problems and make my setup much more difficult to use in different devices, to the point where i prefer to just exclude them from future projects. RetroArch though is perfect for this scenario because it’s made to be used in such way. It’s not meant to be used as a single system emulator.
You are right that Open Source emulators have a better future in general. As long as there is interest, they will always be “alive” and ported over newer hosts. But there has to be interest. A lot of people care about systems like the Gamecube/Wii and PS2 so you have these huge teams that work on them for years, almost non stop. If these were closed source and only a single person working on them, they wouldn’t even be halfway where they are now, assuming they would still be active.
But there is the other side of the coin. What if there is no interest? Like an obscure system. Let’s say the Atari Jaguar. We had Virtual Jaguar for decades. Yet the emulator is inactive since what, 2014? That was the last version released. There are some more recent forks and the core has seen some minor updates since then but they don’t make much difference. All these years, this open source project brought nothing to the table. Probably because the Jaguar is more work that it’s worth.
Enter BigPEmu. This emulator exists because a publisher showed interest and decided to release a bunch of old games that some of them happened to be Atari Jaguar ones. And the author was let to release the emulator too, though only in a closed source form. Which is still amazing considering it was meant for a commercial product, so count our blessings i guess?
Thing is, after so many years, we finally have a 100% compatible Jaguar emulator. I’ll take that over having to wait another 10 years for the next Virtual Jaguar update. (i know there was also Phoenix, another good closed source emulator for the system, but BigPEmu is better in all fronts).
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Fair points! 
And yeah, that’s usually what I tell people, too: RA may be more complex than any single emu, but it’s less complex than any 5/10/15+, so it’s really a matter of economies of scale. If someone just wants to play Mega Man 2 or whatever, it’s probably not the best choice, but each additional system you want to emulate lowers the marginal cost per emu.
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I would even prefer using RetroArch for a single system over a dedicated standalone emulator (let’s say on some hardware to install single core). Simply because I am familiar with the concept and all the features RetroArch provides, such as the best in class Shaders, gamepad support, maybe Run-Ahead. RetroArch is on Steam with support for Cloud saves. Even if I only want to play SNES games on the Steam Deck and nothing else, I would prefer installing RetroArch only with one core. Just throwing some thoughts and reason that RetroArch is not only useful if you want have a multi system setup.
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Yeah, i didn’t want to imply RA is only useful for multi system setups, even though i said it’s made with this idea in mind. I was commenting on the issue of it’s complexity and difficulty to learn VS individual emulators. And tried to explain how the way it handles so many cores/systems, like a multi-emulator would, justifies that.
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for me linux is the greatest “winner” from RA existence, before there were few emulators and everyone feels cumbersome to use to say the least, some only command line, other with some frontend written from someone else apart from the author, and other with a gui but the emu not working as intended.
It was a mess trying to set up one emulator on linux, then RA came and it was like a blessing, all emus/cores in a single place, all options available on the gui, no more .ini editing, no more dependencies that broke other dependencies, no more compiling.
one of the strengths of RA is its consistency, you learn how to RA and you can use it in whatever is installed.
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RetroArch raises passions and this kind of questions are always sensitive. I don’t think they can be compared, although in essence they do the same thing, they are different products.
Some emulators will have improved the interface recently, the truth is that the two historical characteristics that define them are that they are very difficult to configure and that the interfaces are horribly designed. Some, as the friend says, don’t even have them.
RetroArch has design flaws, but it is by far the best designed and most expansive emulation interface out there today.
But really, what does it matter? I’m a RetroArch diehard, but if I ever get bitten by the worm and want to play ICO, if it doesn’t work on AR, I’m going to install PCSX2.
We classic game lovers are lucky. We are living the golden age of emulation, there is abundance, options to choose from and things are happening, almost miracles, that before not even anyone could imagine.
@John.Merrit I guess PSCX2 already solved its configuration deficiencies. I know someone who in his articles always says that “RetroArch is hard to configure” and I would say, “I install, I get to play Dreamcast and you are still configuring PSCX2 controls”.
@GemaH Apart from the interest in general I think there are other factors that affect, an incentive ($) to a developer, the technology now is more powerful, or simply chance, because Jaguar is not a popular console, but Saturn is and was long in the shadows, even, we name Model 2, there is no arcade more famous than that plate and is ignored.
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Retroarch cores are generally slower than standalone emulators but it offers a lot of advantages in term of compatibility, unified configuration, features…
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I don’t know if this can be generalized. The RetroArch cores are basically the same emulators as the standalone ones, as they “just” get ported over (I know there is a lot of work behind the scenes). How fast an emulator or core operates isn’t affected drastically because it is on RetroArch.
However, there are some more modern 3D based systems, which are not up to date in RetroArch and are missing optimizations from their standalone version. On the top of my hat (lol, I meant head) Citra comes to my mind. In example the new standalone version supports Vulkan, which may take some time before it’s updated in RetroArch. Vulkan can improve performance. I think the PS2 emulator was outdated for a while too, but it got updated a lot in recent times in RetroArch.
My point is, for most emulators the speed/performance difference does not matter VS RetroArch core equivalents. Unless it is something like described above. And off course I speak from the perspective being on PC. It could be different on Android smartphones in example.
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You’re right cores are basically the same emulators it’s particularly true for ScummVM for example but the ScummVM implementation is a lot slower on Retroarch. It’s hard to see on powerfull PC but on little handhelds ARM like Miyoo Mini you can clearly see the difference. And it’s the same for PCSX, mGBA or Mame for example.
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Is it Really Noticeable?
I’m waiting for MAME to properly emulate Model 2, Hyper NEO GEO 64 and later 3D systems, will let you know wh…
As for the topic itself, I find that systems post the Dreamcast era, in my personal experience and preferences are better handled and played using standalone emulators, while Dreamcast and before I just don’t even think of using them outside Retroarch.
It’s interesting to read some users who think it’s convoluted, but it actually is quite simple, specially if you just want to load a game and play it, gamepads are 99% of the time pre-configured. Its extra features aren’t exactly complicated, they are just plenty and the frontend provides details for them, scrolling horizontally, if needed.
Maybe it wasn’t foreseen when the developers started working on it, but the majority of activity here is about shaders and overlays, which is something that speaks by itself, it became a huge part of the experience. Input lag elimination, and many core options, per game/per directory/per core configs/remaps/shaders/etc, this is brilliant stuff.
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This is partially true.
Recent console cores are slower, require more optimization work. Emulators that are already fully integrated into RetroArch work just as well or better.
RetroArch has an advanced synchronization API.
I have personally done performance tests on some systems.
MAME is faster in RetroArch.
The standalone has auto-frameskip enabled and Vsync disabled, if you disable frameskip, or if you try to use shaders, the most demanding games are very affected.
3rd and 4th generation systems.
In many cases the standalone has more input-lag, 1 frame or even 2. And the resource consumption is higher.
The best N64 emulation is with RetroArch, and you have exclusive stuff like Beetle PSX HW, all audio chips with Genesis Plus GX, or DOSBox PURE.
Usually people talk about what RetroArch lacks, but it has a lot of exclusive stuff.
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I wonder what that is, the only thing I could think of is binding two buttons to a single one, which was discussed in other thread. It can be done to some extent in FBA which provides its own macros.
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I do not understand the analogy.
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In what way?
Mupen64plus-Next with Parallel RDP is very good but N64 emulation has finally started focusing on timing accuracy, as projects like Simple 64 and Ares show. And while i’m not expecting too much from Simple64, provided it’s still based on the ancient Mupen code, i’m sure Ares will soon become the new standard for N64 emulation.
I’m still going to use Mupen as a second choice because sometimes its nice to play games at faster frame rates. But other than that, Ares is where N64 emulation is at. Maybe an Ares core would indeed make N64 in RA the best solution though.
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