Came across this video earlier:
I didn’t know the general consensus of how the casual user views RetroArch after reading some of the comments. It was a interesting watch.
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I saw it and I found it to be clickbaity nonsense, looking for relevance.
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Perhaps it is from the video creator’s point of view. I was more interested in the comments actually. Do people really find navigating RetroArch that hard? I got the hang of things pretty fast for the most part when I first came on the scene.
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My interpretation was that the creator was pretending to be giving the perspective of a casual user.
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Yeah I see it the same way. He seems like he would be able to figure things out easily but hey, on the plus side he actually mentioned you in the video and gave your presets a shout out so that was cool at least. Even showcased them for a bit.
the tl;dw of that video seems to be: “I randomly changed a bunch of settings I didn’t understand and now my system’s b0rk3d. Why did you do this to me, RetroArch?”
It’s funny how the “zomg RetroArch performance worse!” meme has really taken off. We stopped pointing out how much better latency, sync and frame-deviation are in RetroArch to avoid ruffling feathers and the result is that people see a lower raw FPS number and blame it on “overhead” and “bloat”. 
To be fair, I think there are a lot of people who exclusively emulate PS2 and newer consoles, which are not well-represented in RetroArch (though I do think dolphin-libretro gets waaay more flak than it deserves), and to them, yeah, running a handful of standalones is probably a better/easier experience.
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Some people use a mouse to navigate inside RetroArch, so there you have it. I still remember when rgui overcame phoenix and I was fascinated how I could finally navigate through every game and option without putting my controller down. Unfortunately, folks can’t get that and insist comparing apples to oranges. What RetroArch could do is to state clearly that it favors a big picture-like UI, tailored to gamepads or the keyboard. Perhaps it would ease the confusion of new users.
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What I really wish is that we could shake the idea that RetroArch is supposed to be an easy/simple on-ramp for emulation targeted at beginners. This extremely common misconception sets up a whole slew of unrealistic expectations that leaves low-info users frustrated and confused.
Then they go make 30-min rant-videos on youtube or come to the forums/subreddit/discord for support and then gripe about us being “rude and condescending” when we don’t want to hop on TeamViewer to salvage their system for them or otherwise personally sherpa them up Mount RetroArch.
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First thing I noticed was the guy using version 1.17, at least review the most latest version but that’s nothing. The part about configing buttons on a controller threw me off, not once have I ever had to go into the input settings to manually config any buttons, every controller I’ve used auto configed themselves. Only when I start playing on cores is when I may change some buttons around.
Maybe it’s just me but half the problems he talks about I’ve never had or are easily avoidable either by not touching the setting or looking it up or asking a question about it.
I came into RetroArch fully prepared to navigate around with a controller. I actually prefer it that way over a mouse.
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I think a lot of those problems are indeed ones that people create for themselves. They’re used to mapping buttons when they set up emulators, so that’s what they do when they open RetroArch. Hmm, they have a 6-button pad, but they don’t see C or Z buttons listed… better just hit ‘bind all’ and then mash stuff. Oh wait, now the buttons are crazy! Better go into the config file to fix it, but none of this makes sense. Better change stuff randomly, etc. etc. Why is RetroArch so hard?
The input thing is super-common, so I moved them into their own menu with a warning that apparently no one reads 
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That’s foolishness to me for any new user to not only think that way but actually DO exactly that. Maybe someone like that just shouldn’t use RetroArch. I figured most users even using this would be able to figure things out and navigate around especially if they’re used to do doing exactly that in stand alone emulators. Having my buttons auto configured sounds easier to me than having to map them. Even when using cores buttons are auto configured so you could just start gaming right away.
You did your part. RetroArch already have good documentation, and several good third-party tutorials on the Internet. Frankly, if the user can’t do a minimum of reading, there’s no hope for him going further with emulation. Yes, “emulation”, not only “RetroArch”. Even simpler emulators have people around them asking lazy questions, with no drive to gain knowledge. Call it gatekeeping if you wish, but ignoring who behaves like that is the sanest procedure to follow.
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I’m a fan of playing on TV screens, so sitting far enough and still being able to control everything using a gamepad has a big appeal to me. I even map mouse and keyboard inputs to my controller, so I can also use it outside of RetroArch (and with other emulators). Although these days we have plenty of wireless mice and keyboards to choose from, not having to frequently swap between peripherals is still quite useful.
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That still didn’t feel like much consolation though.
I came away from that whole video pretty much saying “oh well that’s their loss”. I’m at a point where I can’t do my retro emulation gaming anywhere else except RetroArch.
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“a mgba dev got banned after pointing out that retroarch was doing something illegal blahblahblah”
As a direct witness, the truth of the matter is that the mgba dev was wrong : the incriminated code was said to be from a sony sdk, but it was actually from gcc (and also used by the sony sdk), hence under GPL license and perfectly legal to include into another project under GPL license.
That mgba dev started this on reddit unilaterally. As a result, people started flaming and doxxing the “toxic libretro project lead”, i saw with my own 2 eyes his home address being shared on duckstation’s discord (whose emudev is another “poor victim of the toxic libretro project lead”) so that people could go “beat him”.
It’s amazing how people are still using that story as a deterrent against the libretro project. It always makes me wonder many things about all the other stories i’m less familiar with.
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my 7 year old daughter is able to use retroarch without any problem
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The one thing that always come to my mind when the topic is “stand alone vs retroarch” is just how a normal, functional mind can think that learning one single program is worse/more difficult then learning to use a multitude of different apps.
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That’s a good point, but a counter too that is that a multitude of apps may still be easier because of simplicity, better organisation, less is more etc. Eg. for me, I prefer RA because of the unmatched shader system and flexibility for scaling, but a lot of people don’t have use for that, or only want to mess around at the surface level.
The average computer user can barely handle a single program (usually, the Internet browser), much less many different ones or even something more complex like RetroArch. You can polish UX to a certain point, but you can’t make complex task become a brain-dead one. That’s just how life works; toddlers go to kindergarten, kids to school, adults to college. There are levels to knowledge.
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