Emulators vs RetroArch

RetroArch General
#21

Besides this, there’s also a lot of laziness, weak-mindedness and entitlement at play as well. Some are unwilling to invest the time and effort required to increase their knowledge, abilities and as a consequence their enjoyment of and participation in life.

Then there seems to be an issue when it comes to literacy. People might know how to read but are too lazy in this tl:dr world.

For those who only like instant gratification or don’t even want to try, there are other hobbies and interests.

No need to berate an immaculate and amazing piece of work because your mind can’t seem to get around it.

That’s typical fox and the grapes attitude there.

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#22

Beautifully said. And there’s only a sizeable time investment if you actually want to delve deeper into RetroArch’s features. If you just want a quick and dirty way to play games, it’s a matter of reading a 10-min (or less) tutorial once and you’re set for life. Fundamentally, it’s still the same procedure since more than a decade ago… on every platform RetroArch has ever been. Damn, 10 minutes of reading for more than a decade of usage through many different platforms seems a pretty good deal to me. And you can even improve your skills for further enjoyment, instead of being confined to “menu > graphics > muh 4k > load game” that many other emulators die on.

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#23

Still, this RA vs Standalones trend isn’t as bad as Software Emulation accuracy vs FPGA when it comes to Youtube. This really grinds my gears. Youtube is literally the absolute worse place to seek information about software emulation because there is nobody who is knowledgeable enough about it.

Most retro youtubers are physical game and console collectors with huge libraries who spent a ton of money and time to acquire. So it’s only natural they have bias against something like free emulators and roms. These don’t have any monetary value, people who play on emulators didn’t spend a fortune on them so there is no way the experience can be as good as ours when playing on real consoles, am i right?

This is why these people also shill for FPGAs. Because they cost money and are usually “premium” products meant for the “hardcore audience”. So again, emulation has to be worse. That’s why they usually compare those with crappy old emulators and cheap retropie setups. They use stuff like zSNES, old PJ64 emulators, ePSXe, etc when they compare to FPGA rather than the more accurate emulators because they need to make emulation look as bad as possible.

Sorry for the offtopic rant, got carried away there.

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#24

This may be lack of familiarity with the handling. I remember very well the previous experience with emulators, folders, files and settings all over the place. RetroArch is a shock, there was nothing like it before.

Also that many of these ‘complaints’ are being carried over from the beginning like karma.
The interface is very optimized, but to be fair, at the beginning it had its ailments, I remember the first post I made in this forum, I could not make playlist because they were off, I received very kind answers but others really rude, that produces a boomerang.

But these people go to the communities of ‘other’ projects that really aren’t condescending and literally get their asses kicked twice, there they don’t complain.

I once heard, “offending is very easy, highlighting virtues is really hard because you need to be smart.”
These people do the only thing they know and can.

I think it can all be summed up in this:

There are very few who really know. Most of them want to make quick video (popcorn) and don’t do deep research.

All big projects have their critics, but in the case of RetroArch it is disproportionate, and these comments will drag on for a long time. But on the other hand, the community that RetroArch has is worth gold.

2 Likes
#25

To the intense ‘it’s too hard’, I always say. With RetroArch you can play Dreamcast in 3 steps:

  1. Install retroarch.
  2. Download the core.
  3. Load the game.
  4. Play fucking stinker.

And to the inputlag intensives, play Snes Mortal Kombat on console with a CRT and on RetroArch with latency reduction on 5, and then we’ll talk. They usually don’t have much to say.

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#26

They not worth our time

Just Ignore them

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#27

I’m honestly over this whole topic already. I saw that video on my feed and thought I’d share it here cause honestly I don’t really pay attention too much to what people think about RetroArch and care even less if they don’t like it.

But it goes back to what I said up top, it’s their loss in my eyes. As far as I’m concerned RetroArch is one of the best programs to hit the emulation scene. When I first used it I too was a little lost but I didn’t go crying about it on social media, I took time to learn it, read a little documentation and eventually learned how to use it.

In that video the guy said if you configured one stand alone emulator you can basically do them all, well RetroArch is pretty much the same way if not even easier. Once you learn how to navigate around the settings and the core options it’s gonna be the same pretty much for all the other cores. I even tried using a mouse in the menu for the first time to scroll up and down and had no issues with that.

I was tempted to leave a comment on the video but then asked myself what’s the point, either users will take the time to learn it like me and everyone else here did or they won’t. As far as the behind the scenes politics that’s not my space so I won’t even engage in any of that.

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#28

Retroarch can even replace a front-end, as long as your roms have the right name. Nowadays es-de requires android 10 if i am not mistaken and costs money, but retroarch still runs on Android 5 and right now matching all c64/cpc/zx spectrum/atari st (and amiga or dos if i rename them) games after renamed them, and scraping is hell of lot faster than es-de. I would much prefer the program to do it itself but anyway. Plain and simple, a list with screenshots (not only damn box art) that’s all i need, I don’t care for fancy logos and videos.

Just name them as per this list and bang they appear :grin: http://thumbnailpacks.libretro.com/

4 Likes
#29

I couldn’t care less about any of the drama surrouding RetroArch, I get why people do and I don’t blame them, nor do I think they’re wrong… but I love having it all in one place and I can have exactly that with RetroArch, and with the XMB I loved so much on my PS3.

#30

I’m mad I even created this thread, I even forgot about that YouTube video already lol. Reading the comments there was all I needed to see to know what kind of audience the casual gamer is, it is what it is though. All I can say is I’ll be using RetroArch literally until the day I die.

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#31

You can’t be sure of that, because maybe in the “beyond” there is a port of RetroArch.
:man_shrugging:t2:

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#32

I like how you think. Hopefully the “beyond” is a alternate reality where displays have gotten to a point where they’re literally 1 for 1 like crts as well.

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#33

This is where RetroArch changed everything for me.

I have been trying to build a “just works” multi-system setup for many years. I wanted to make a couch setup where you can sit, relax and play thousands of games from many systems, using only a controller on my PC.

Back then, the only way to achieve something like this was via Hyperspin/Rocketlauncher or other similar frontends. But Rocketlauncher was specifically made for arcade cabinets so it had to be able to work with just a joystick/buttons. It had options to force standalone emulators to exit with a button, for starters. Or force them to launch games in fullscreen without having to do it manually via their own UI, etc.

I spend months, and many hours/day to build a setup like this. I wanted a build where i can use a gamepad on my couch and never have to touch a keyboard/mouse again. And for the most part i managed it.

But the whole thing was a complex, janky chain of programs, modules, extra commands, external additional programs (like JoytoKey), etc, that was just about barely holding it together. You could feel that, at any time it will collapse. And it would, many times i had to correct errors, freezes, games not launching at full screen or at all, games not exiting, controls being wrong or not recognized, windows popping left and right before you see the actual game, command windows getting on top of the main window and hundreds of little issues like that. And the more systems/standalone emulators you added, the more potential issues you had.

Not to mention that each standalone emulator has it’s own behavior and quirks. So using such setup never felt like a consistent experience, even when it worked.

Just the thought of it today makes me shudder.

And one day i saw an image of a GameBoy game using RetroArch shaders. So i decided to give it a try just for using that particular shader. First i didn’t know anything else about it.

Long story short, RetroArch completely replaced my previous standalone build. I sill use frontends for the media and metadata but 90% of systems are based on RetroArch. With the exceptions of stuff like Dolphin (outdated in RA) and BigPEmu/Model 1/2 (not available in RA). And recently even the PS2 core became good enough to replace the standalone for this job.

RetroArch fixed all my issues i had with using 30+ different standalone emulators for 80+ different systems. All of the jankyness was gone. Because now every system would behave the same. Every game launches smoothly in fullscreen and exits without issues. And yes, I also had to spend a lot of time to make every core work since each one may need a different bios or driver, and the controller setup is not the easiest to figure out but it was much easier than having to juggle between multiple standalones at the same time. So in that sense, RA is easier to setup VS standalones.

Not to mention how you can now do almost everything through the controller. I don’t remember the last time i had to reach the keyboard and mouse. Point is, my setup now “just works”. It’s night and day difference and there is no way to be able to achieve something like this with standalone emulators.

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