Anyone used one of these before? I’ve heard really good things. Mostly looking to emulate PS1, dreamcast, n64, and PS2 and from what I’ve read the retroid 4 does a solid job with all of them.
My main question is: how easy is it to get up and going with emulation on a dedicated handheld? I’ve done some really light emulation in the past, but only on pc and that was years ago.
Its usually pretty easy to setup emulators. The retroid will be running android and will have a setup page that asks to install certain emulators.
So you really have two kinds of emulators
Standalone emulators: These are emulators that will handle one sysytem and will usually handle them pretty well (dolphin is the one exception. It plays both gamecub and wii)
Retroarch: Some people dont like retroarch but to me its one of the easier ways to handle emulation. It is essentially an all in one emulation application. It includes most emulators as “cores” that can be downloaded within the app to play certain systems.
This is nice since you can do everything within one app. A downside is that some of the “cores” are not up to date and don’t perform as well as their standalone version. This doesn’t matter for older systems but things like ps1 and higher may be affected.
Setting up: So once you have decided between these two. Or use both options! You get to setup some folders for your roms. The way I do it is I setup a folder just for roms and categorize it by system. GB (gameboy), SNES (super nintendo), etc…
Place your roms correctly and then if using retroarch
playlist>import content>scan directory (your rom folder)
then boom. Retroarch is setup. You can do a lot with retroarch and watching a youtube video would help a lot.
If using standalone emulators the process is largely the same. It will ask you to add a rom folder for the system and then your games will pop up