this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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The last time I tried emulation on a desktop PC, whether it was Windows or Linux, I had to install each emulator separately. It was a bit of a mess.

On my Steam Deck, Emudeck made it stupid easy. Retroarch wasn't terrible, but was a bit more irritating and buggy for me to get working. Either way, it had a bunch of emulators all in one spot so I didn't have to go hunting for a ton of them. Are there solutions like this for Linux as well now? What about for Windows or something like a RetroPIE?

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Depending what systems you want to emulate, just use ares.

https://ares-emu.net

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This looks similar to retroarch. Is it better? How?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It’s not retroarch. If you have been in emulation for a while that’s enough right there. No one is reusing retroarch cores here.

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

If you don’t want to spend 3 hours setting up an emulator, ares is basically just: open software, click to open what you want to play. The interface isn’t trying to reinvent a weird ps3 or Switch hybrid on your pc. It is similar to regular desktop software ui you might have used during your life.

Ares was developed by Near (rip). If you don’t know who that is, it’s a shame, but I’m not going to go into it here. It’s now maintained by people continuing Near’s work on trying to achieve cycle accurate, preservation quality emulation.

Some of the emulation cores, SNES, 32x, N64, MegaDrive and Sega CD are the best in class, by a wide margin. Turbografx is comparable if not better than mednafen. SNES especially good since that was Near’s main focus for many years - you might know it as bsnes or higan from before they started pushing the ares emulator more before they died.

Some systems are definitely best played elsewhere (mgba is better for gba, Stella is better for 2600, Duckstation for ps1, Sameboy for gameboy colour). But that defeats the purpose of your question. For the sake of having all the emulation in one place, ares usually do fine with these.

It can be taxing. If you are running an older underpowered machine, you might not have a good time.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Ares was developed by Near (rip).

I'll never quit being angry that the most brilliant mind in emulation was driven to suicide by organized cyberbullying.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Can you give me more informations on Near and cyberbullying?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Near was a target of KiwiFarms, a messageboard focused on harassing people for fun. There's a pretty good article about it here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

could you link the article?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I did. Isn't the link working?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

nope, can you resend?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

OP mentioned trying retroarch, and that it was not too bad, but wondering if there are alternatives.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

you can install emudeck on any regular linux distro

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I think Emudeck is available as a Flatpak, so you should be able to install it on your desktop too.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

It is not, you may be confusing it with retrodeck, which is solely distributed as a flatpak.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Oh really? Boo.

Retrodeck looks good, but the recommended install instructions were just too nutty for me: curl https://... | bash is not ok.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

You can download and read the installer script

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You...can just download the script and inspect it yourself before running. This cargo cult "security" advice needs to stop.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I did just that. It's not about security. It's about messing with my machine's setup. I don't want to run a bunch of rando commands that might mess with how my actual package manager manages my system.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

This is quite fair, and I agree. I just hear far too often people rejecting running scripts out of hand because sOmEoNe sAiD pIpE iT tO tHe sHeLL. Usually such scripts are just using the package manager anyway.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

If you can use a spare box or at least a boot device, there are systems like https://batocera.org/ that will box a lot of stuff together. Obviously independent emulators are all distributed independently though many of them do multiple systems.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

I think this is what you're looking for?

https://es-de.org/

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Just do a "RetroPie" install on Linux. It was originally built for Pi's but works fine on 64-bit Debian/Ubuntu etc

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Emudeck is just an installer for RetroArch with Emulationstation as the frontend, so just install those, and you'll have the same experience.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Retroarch is solid after you take some time to configure it to work exactly how you want it to cuz some of the defaults are a bit weird

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Lutris, you can easily manage all the emulators

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Emudeck supports Linux

sh -c 'curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dragoonDorise/EmuDeck/main/install.sh | bash'

https://www.emudeck.com/#download