RetroArch never works right. Even once you get past the cores and all the other stupid bs, once you get to setting up the controls it never works right, most buttons just do not work in game, if they even work in the menus.
So many years, so much effort, all wasted.
It’s still so much easier to keep BlastEm, Snes9x, Duckstation and whatever else installed, so much faster to set up controls and most of the time you don’t even need to as everything works out of the box.
And yet plebbit will say nuhhh use muh libretro cores!!!1 so heckin’ wholesome Keanu chungus 100!!! I love my wife’s boyfriend!!!111 Thanks Reddit!!!
When I was in uni, I was part of a student art club that put on exhibitions in the campus gallery. We decided to do a tech-themed show, so all the art had to contain some digital component or comment on technology. So I decided to make my own short game using a cracked copy of NESMaker someone published online.
Anyway, I really wanted to give it an authentic feel, and it just so happened that a buddy and I found a CRT on the side of the road that looked to be in OK shape. We hauled it back to my place, plugged it in, and sure enough, it worked. A few cracks in the glass here and there, and the built-in DVD player was broken, but I think it added to the charm.
About a week before the show, I’m furiously putting together assets and trying to program a few enemies, along with making sure the controls didn’t hard lock if you moved left (ha ha). I was able to get the game to a playable state, and now needed to find hardware with a component input that also had NES emulation capability. I didn’t want to use my personal laptop because there wasn’t any security at the gallery, plus purchasing an HDMI to component adapter seemed dubious quality-wise. I had an old hacked PS2 slim with Free McBoot but the NES emulator available at that time didn’t support the mapper for my game. I thought I was going to be SOL for the exhibition.
Just my luck, a few days before the show, I stumbled across a port of retroarch for the PS2. It had a working NES core (which technically how they figured that out was beyond me). So fingers crossed, I loaded retroarch onto the memory card with the NES core, plugged in my USB with the game, and booted it up. It worked. And mind you, retroarch had JUST been ported to the PS2.
The exhibition went great and a lot of people liked my game (it was a side scrolling shmup that took place on campus, at night. I couldn’t program music to save my life so I took the midi 3AM theme from GCN animal crossing and slowed the tempo down, which was perfectly creepy/melancholic).
In retrospect, it seemed like divine timing, but that random developer out there really saved my skin, and enabled me to share a cool piece of art that I made with other students. I suppose they thought some other people might have had a use for retroarch on a PS2, as useless as that might seem in today’s age.
So yeah. Retroarch is cool. Sometimes complicated, sometimes bad, and not meant for everyone and everything, just like any software. But if you love video games, and it can play them okay enough, does it really even matter?
Retroarch is like the power users emulation front end. Regarding button mapping. Once you realize that there is Retroarch UI button mapping and separate mapping for the core you’re using it gets much easier to figure out. But, yeah, it’s not an easy to use front end for the newbie.
Lol fuck off. I’ve been in the emulation scene since long before this absolute garbage became recommended by you drooling 12 year olds. It’s not a matter of “newbie”, it’s a matter of shit design that looks and functions worse than PCSX2 did circa 2013.
This is a shitty, fuzzy program that tries to do everything but does nothing. It’s useless for arrogant morons and otherwise non-technical people like yourself without emulationstation or some hundred hour youtube tutorial, and it’s useless for actual devs and technical folks like myself who want a clear simple model of program flow and interaction between all the settings so we can quickly troubleshoot whatever issues arise and get on with our lives.
You should be using Ludo, better than RA. Link: https://ludo.libretro.com/#about
I don’t use RA at all, I just have to fix it for those who end up using it because of Reddit. Thanks for the recommendation though, I’ll check it out.
Are things alright with you, man?
Incredibly, I was about to comment this on another one of their comments and decided to check their profile to see if it was a one-off thing.
RetroArch is great though. I set it up for my mum on an rpi with a bunch of preinstalled roms and there’s been no issues. The controller worked out of the box and everything runs smoothly.
Depends on the controller used I guess. Which controller are you using? Most of my 8bitdo controller works out of the box.
I find it works in most cases, but I have also seen it “just not work.” I feel like your good “this does everything you need for this one thing and just works” apps like Retroarch and VLC have become FAR less reliable in recent years.
VLC is one of the scariest apps on my phone. Normally when I kill an app (I have “kill” bound to long-press home), it stays dead.
VLC doesn’t die. If you connect a Bluetooth headset to your phone, VLC spawns in the background and begins recursively scanning your media, even if you didn’t give it permission to.
Its otherwise a highly performant media player for me, but my god it terrifies me.
If you have a setup that works great. For a lot of people(including me) retro arch also works. There doesn’t have to be one solution to a problem, and there shouldn’t be. I hate iOS but some people love it. That’s how the world works.
what I hate most about RetroArch, is that you can’t do a ‘full reset’ if you fuck something really up. tried to delete installation directories, nothing helps.
