💾 Archived View for altesq.net › ~lelkins › posts › emulation-p2.gmi captured on 2023-07-22 at 16:35:44. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
ay mates, lelkins here. today i'll show you the basics of emulation. i wanted to be a little cheesy with a "so you have waited for the limited wisdom i have" introduction but i am not good enough with words to do that.
please note that this is a beginner's guide (as the title suggests!) so there won't be any cool stuff like widescreen hacks, texture pack usage or any cool stuff (except internal resolutions cause i found those out), i am just trying to make classic games run on the computer. yes, i'll help out a little with android stuff too, there's not much but you can still play a large number of titles and consoles there. this highly depends on your specs, as games from the 8-bit era to the 16 bit era will most likely work on craptops. games from 64 bit consoles may work on medium spec machines as people were able to play mario 64 on windows xp with project64 back in the day, but i never dabbled on psx titles at the time.
let's start with the guide.
we are going shopping right now. by that, i mean we are going to download roms/isos. there are two great places: vimm's lair and cdromance. vimm's lair is pretty good, basically the og, but cdromance has games for some consoles that aren't in vimm's along with pre-patched roms. i will show how to patch *some* roms cause i don't know how to do it for disc-based games.
with the power of modern-day programs (that started from like 2008 via lunar ips for windows!), you can now patch games to be more balanced, have extra features, have bugs fixed or be a complete overhaul with the power of ips files made by fans. the best place to get patches is romhacking.net, the og. there's a page on the "submissions" section named "online rom patcher". note that you must make sure that the rom is compatible via the naming and hashes seen in the description of the patch you are downloading.
on linux, you can get "lazy-ips" on the aur if you're on arch or on the link here if you're on any other distro. on android, you can get "unipatcher" on fdroid. for any device, you can actually use the online patcher from the website you'll get your patches from.
romhacking.net, where you get the patches
patching is easy with the tools i gave, you put the rom and the patch files in there and you'll have a renamed rom file with everything ready to go.
now that we got our (optionally patched) game roms, we need to get a thing that actually runs those damn things. the easiest way to start emulating stuff is retroarch, a frontend for a ton of emulators and some game ports like cave story and doom (but those two are not our main focus!). on arch, you have to fiddle around with it to get it to install cores (those are the emulators that retroarch uses. if you have bad performance, you can safely download them separately on your system as a standalone program.) and other stuff, but the archwiki does a good job helping out. for mobile, you can also get retroarch, or you can get lemuroid, the frontend i mentioned on part 1.
archwiki link just for the thing i mentioned alone.
i didn't have a good experience with citra on retroarch, so i just installed it standalone.
i know what would happen next for some of you. something like "i wanted to have a ton of fun with miitopia, but my miis were just white boxes with a cross-out symbol! my rom is perfectly fine, what should i do?", i suppose. i have a solution for most of those problems. some emulators need a bios to run games properly, like the switch, playstation and even the 3ds. there's a magical place to get those. i did see that cdromance has bios files, but there's another page that has a pack for retroarch and lemuroid, along with stuff for other emulators. i recommend you get them even if you won't play on those exceptions, just for ease of mind. follow the instructions from the retroarch bios pack. on lemuroid, just dump them in the rom folder that you have on your phone and point lemuroid to that folder.
retroarch official website. can be installed using your distro's package manager of course
retroarch on fdroid. must be added to your client (or enabled on something like droidify)
bios files from emulation.gametechwiki.com
retroarch is a little weird to set up, but you can easily go through the settings and change keybinds, along with controls. i have to mention this cause it happened to me back then, but bind keys that you'd be comfortable with. don't press a, b, x or y to bind them to those respective buttons. i am not kidding, i was asked "where's the start button", even after telling them to press the keys i tell them to for the binding. i am sure that you'll be fine with binding your controls, do not worry, i just suddenly remembered that experience and wanted to share that.
to have a better experience in games, press f1 to get to the quickmenu and go to controls. you can make a specific control set for specific games or consoles. just don't forget to save the remap (core for the console/emulator, game for the game. already makes sense.). luckily, lemuroid is easier to set up. i don't have a controller, but it might be easier to play with one, to skip the entire process of remapping the main controls.
installing cores, if you set it up like that, can be done by going to "load core" and straight up downloading one from the list. to delete a core that you don't use anymore or accidentally installed, just go to settings > core > manage cores. lemuroid has them pre-installed and automatically detect what console the roms are for. there are some exceptions like the ds, where you have two options: desmume and melonds. melonds works better for most of my playthoughs.
now that we got the emulator, the cores, the bios files and your games, we can finally start playing them. you are now ready to explore the deep depths of old media. you are free to fiddle with settings cause that's what i did as a kid. experimentation and curiousity in a new world are to be expected. a small example of a fun setting to change is internal resolution for ds, making the ds's 3d games look less pixelated.
oh, and the emulation wiki? that place where you got all the bios files for retroarch? that's the number one place to look up issues and anything emulation-based in general. it's really detailed and easy to understand, so i'll just tell you to check it out cause this entire guide is over.
bye mates, i'm off to replay paper mario!