Tips and tricks for Emulating safety.

[middler]

I couldn't find a thread for safe practices when it comes to emulating in the modern world.

Figured we could use a place for recommendations and advice for those of us both seasoned, and fresh to this awesome hobby. Safe places to find ROM's that aren't available here, trusted Emulators that don't infect or damage your device, MAME configurations and repositories that work well, and so on.

Try to keep recommendations simple so this can be useful to everyone.

Thanks, and happy Emulating

 

[DunkeyKong]

Well for ROMs, there's CDRomance and probably some other sites I wouldn't dare to go yet

But for emulators? My first advice would be to search their official website or official build on GitHub

If you need Bios, CDRomance has that too. But for the others like PS Vita or PS3 firmware, you need to go to the official Sony site

 

[middler]

But for emulators? My first advice would be to search their official website or official build on GitHub

If you are emulating on Windows PC I reccomend only using "portable" emulators. Portable means that it can run, and even be updated from the directory you place it in, but it dosent have to install itself into the Operating System. It isnt a perfect solution but it makes me feel a bit better personally.

 

[Waffles]

Lovely idea, dude.

Since I don't have a PC, I'm almost entirely out of the game... but I'd recommend people to be very careful with Project64. Seems that it has been very problematic for a very long time.

 

[DunkeyKong]

If you are emulating on Windows PC I reccomend only using "portable" emulators. Portable means that it can run, and even be updated from the directory you place it in, but it dosent have to install itself into the Operating System. It isnt a perfect solution but it makes me feel a bit better personally.

Yeah there's multiple versions of every emulator, unfortunately some still doesn't have the version for different OS
But yeah mostly it's available for Windows

 

[RageBurner]

A tip I can give is always keep untouched copies of your ROMs/ISOs if you can spare the space, that way whenever a translation/bugfix or whatever updates you only need to download the patch, which is much smaller.

 

[Leifang]

I switched from using 100500 emus with different versions of each to emulating almost everything in Retroarch, it uses libretro ports of popular emulators as "cores" and works on PC, Linux, Android, even consoles...

But generally, ANY popular open source software is safe because if it had trojans or backdoors, someone would have had noticed it (you can't hide anything if source code is publicly on Github).

Romance has a lot of pre-patched roms and homebrews, but you can also manually install hacks (or get emulator to autopatch them on the fly) from RomHacking net, which is a safe and fully legal site (it doesn't host roms, only patches).

Whatever isn't there, I suggest going to /r/Roms megathread, even if you don't use Reddit, it will link you to good pages on archive org and other hosters with so many full romsets! That's enough for most use cases.

A little less safe is just googling for romsets directly, especially CHD files or equivalents (i.e. "PSP CHD roms" and going to folders on Internet Archive, for big files (PS2 or Gamecube isos and the like), use any download manager.

I had to use some specific sites for obscurer platforms, is it allowed to list rom sites here or not? If yes, I will list the pages I had most luck with, safe and working well.

 

[Inkingsama]

Anyone getting into emulation should check out the video game emulation for newbies guide

 

[ATenderLad]

https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

Covers pretty much every question about what emulator to use, what this term means or that, yadda yadda.

 

[RageBurner]

I switched from using 100500 emus with different versions of each to emulating almost everything in Retroarch, it uses libretro ports of popular emulators as "cores" and works on PC, Linux, Android, even consoles...

But generally, ANY popular open source software is safe because if it had trojans or backdoors, someone would have had noticed it (you can't hide anything if source code is publicly on Github).

Romance has a lot of pre-patched roms and homebrews, but you can also manually install hacks (or get emulator to autopatch them on the fly) from RomHacking net, which is a safe and fully legal site (it doesn't host roms, only patches).

Whatever isn't there, I suggest going to /r/Roms megathread, even if you don't use Reddit, it will link you to good pages on archive org and other hosters with so many full romsets! That's enough for most use cases.

A little less safe is just googling for romsets directly, especially CHD files or equivalents (i.e. "PSP CHD roms" and going to folders on Internet Archive, for big files (PS2 or Gamecube isos and the like), use any download manager.

I had to use some specific sites for obscurer platforms, is it allowed to list rom sites here or not? If yes, I will list the pages I had most luck with, safe and working well.

That's some great insight, even though I don't like Retroarch myself.