I don’t have a lot of space for consoles and cartridges, or money for consoles and cartridges but I do have a decent computer hooked up to a TV. What’s the best way to get an authentic experience via emulation? Here’s what I have so far:

Retroarch Settings

  • HDR enabled (cant tell if it actually helps)
  • Run-ahead enabled
  • Mega Bezel shaders
  • Retrobit saturn controller (having trouble getting configured but has an excellent dpad)

Emulators/cores:

  • NES - Mesen
  • SNES - bsnes
  • Jaguar - Bigpemu (need to configure shaders)
  • Megadrive/CD/32X - Picodrive
  • PSX - ??? Swanstation?
  • Saturn - Beetle Saturn
  • N64 - Mupen64plus

Thing I need to work on:

  • Tweaking shader settings as the defaults are very dark
  • Configuring retrobit controller to work with Steam big Picture (how I launch Retroarch) and retroarch seamlessly
  • Possibly finding a Big Box theme that is focused on original artwork and not garbage

Any advice/pointers? My goal is to eventually have a “pick up and play” setup possibly with different 8bitdo/retrobit controllers for each system.

  • d3Xt3rEnglish
    9·
    4 months ago

    Get some decent CRT shaders and spend some time calibrating your display and setting them up correctly - it makes a massive difference IMO. Personally, I’m a big fan of the “Megatron Death To Pixels” shaders, check out this video on how to set it up properly.

    My goal is to eventually have a “pick up and play” setup

    For that, I’d highly recommend switching to a gaming/emulation-oriented Linux distro, such as Bazzite with Emudeck, ChimeraOS, Batocera, Lakka etc. I personally prefer Bazzite due to it’s Steam-first approach and excellent compatibility with various controllers and proprietary drivers (nVidia), but Lakka might be better if you’ve got an Intel iGPU or an AMD card, and want to stick purely to retro gaming - it’s the official distro for RetroArch afterall, so it’s very polished in that regard, and very lightweight.

    • Jediwan@lemy.lolOPEnglish
      3·
      4 months ago

      Megatron Death To Pixels

      Thanks I’ll check that out!

      Also I’m currently running Big Box as my windows “shell” because I wanted to be able to do Steam Games as well. I’ve been curious about all the Linux distors, is there one you’d recommend?

      • d3Xt3rEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        Ah, if you’re interested in Steam games as well then look no further than Bazzite - it’s got all the optimisations that Valve put into SteamOS + more (like more recent kernel and drivers). But before you switch though, you might want to check whether your Steam games are compatible using this website: https://www.protondb.com/