Hot take, but I don't like Retroarch that much

[Leon]

Retroarch is made for Emulator boxes connected to a television and controlled by a controller.
It's terrible for playing emulators on a PC. Maybe if they focused an ounce of effort for fixing mouse support inside retroarch it would be worth using on PC. I can't understand why the UI is so terrible on PC.

Or just make the desktop mode actually function properly, yes it has one outside of the wierd controller menu one, but good luck getting it to work right, it's like it was written by AI.

 

[NOTthatHARD]

Retroarch is trash, it performs way worse than any dedicated emulator and is also incredible hard to set up and use.

 

[DragonMals]

I wanna hear your opinions about how I'm wrong and stupid

Wrong and stupid?????? What on earth are you on lol I hate RetroArch too because of the same reasons you've provided. Standalone emulators have just enough fidelity to get ne around and about and its always something that I like doing more than just having to configure specific emulator stuff within a hub for emulators alike.

 

[raiden_dj]

I think RetroArch has it's place and is very useful for just being the centre of your emulation, but I've always loved how it's so cool that you can change settings per emulator, and I've always disliked using standalone emulators and not being able to tweak everything to my liking. That's my actual opinion.

 

[R66-Y]

Personally i prefer Bizhawk when i need a multi-platform emulator, but yeah, sometimes it's more convenient to just use standalone emulators.

 

[raiden_dj]

I've been using it for yeeeeaaaaaarrrrsss so im inmune to the "oh no too complicated" problem lol
with things like auto save state and auto load state, shaders, controller autoconfig, screen rotation for shmups, per game configurations, all in a single program i can use without using anything but my controller, i just cant for the love of god not use it un-fucking-less i stricktly have to use a standalone emulator because of performance or compatibility issues or stuff you cant play on retroarch
but aside from that, retroatch ftw

linux user btw lol

 

[CheesyExplosive]

Do on what you see fit... after all i sometimes post new emulators from time to time.

 

[Kamako]

RetroArch is pretty great nowadays. It's so convenient having everything in one place, and it's way easier to setup now. The only features I can fault it for is trying to stream directly from it (better off using open-source third party software) and the inability to hide your pw when linking your socials.
Otherwise it's pretty much perfect for me.

 

[Questless Knight]

I love retro arch easy to use and set up and once you set up you can just copy the whole folder to usb stick and use it on other PC even if that other PC has linux.

Also just like I prefer steam I want every thing in some kind of library with a nice UI. Looks rely neat when you set it up so you have box art with each games and so on.

Sure the best one I wish PC had is OpenEMU that once the best.

 

[JellyjamLu]

Your not alone, took me ages to get Cows of Moomasa, Dungeons and Dragons & Ninja Baseball batman running. I can't even get Aliens vs Predator arcade to boot. 'Git gud' i suppose lol

 

[blahbleh]

I don't like retroarch either it's best to use different emulators. Retroarch is for beginners

 

[DanCalibur]

This is how I feel about RetroArch interface

 

[TechBlisSTer]

I wish they would spend just a moment to fix the garbage desktop UI.

 

[BassForever]

I used to hate Retroarch, finding it a pain to set up and crashing often. In the modern age of emulation handhelds and pcs running front ends/distributions like ES-DE or Batocera, where most things are set up automatically for you, I'm much more accepting of it. For the bulk of retro consoles, it's often a set it and forget it emulator, with the main settings being easily tweaked in the ES-DE/Batocera main menu. When there is an issue though, I still get incredibly frustrated with RetroArch as I dig through dozens of menus trying to find the one thing I need to fix and then hoping it actually saves properly. When you need to tinker with a game to make it run better, I find stand alone emulators like Dolphin or Azahar to be far easier to work with.

 

[Sfjeov]

Not really a hot take because retroarch menu is ugly. Also, I would rather spend time emulating the game that I want to play instead of spending hours having to fiddle every settings. However, I do like dosbox and amiga cores tho.

 

[DanCalibur]

I just can't accept an UI that convoluted this day and age when ZSNES showed how it's done more than twenty years ago

 

[ThatOneLum ThatOneLum]

I mostly use RetroArch on my vita because it supports RA and it's quicker than trying to find a bunch of stand alone emus for stuff I wanna play.

 

[Gabrinius]

I never got to make it work, using it is horribly complicated, so i simply gave up and back to using standalones... i don't know if your thread is a hot take or not, but i do know that retroarch is hot shit.

of those "multi-emulator" things, Ares is way easier to go, even bizhawk.

 

[TechBlisSTer]

I never got to make it work, using it is horribly complicated, so i simply gave up and back to using standalones... i don't know if your thread is a hot take or not, but i do know that retroarch is hot shit.

of those "multi-emulator" things, Ares is way easier to go, even bizhawk.

One thing you can do when Retroarch stops working is delete everything and start from scratch. It's because the desktop UI is such garbage you can accidently change settings with your mouse clicks that destroy your installation.
The UI is so bad that it's easy to make invisible selections with mouse clicks. So another tip would be to set it up with a controller even though you're on a desktop PC.