Easy Emulation on Windows! EmuDeck Starter Guide

[Music] hey everybody this is R Metro gamecore starting today UDC for Windows has been released as a public beta previous to that it was under Early Access under patreon but now it's open for everybody and so I thought it was a great time to do a new video about it and so in this video we're going to talk about emck and all of its features and then also do a full installation guide so this should be an a toz video in terms of getting this set up on your Windows machine so if you're looking for a very easy way to set up emulation this is going to be your ticket right here and so without any further delay let's go ahead and Dive Right [Music] In okay to start let's talk about what emed actually is and how this might improve your emulation experience and this tool has been around for about a year and a half at this point it got it start as a steam deck tool but obviously now it's moved over to Windows and with a new public beta you'll be able to throw this on any Windows machine you have that could be a desktop a laptop or even a handheld PC and in order to really understand what UD can do for you I think it's worth going over what your typical emulation setup process is going to be on Windows and to give you the most barebones example you'd have to go onto the internet and then find and download the emulator for whatever system you want to try we're going to do Nintendo GameCube right here so after you've gone and Googled it and figured out that dolphin is the correct emulator you would then have to install that program and then once you open it up you'll have to do all sorts of configurations to get everything to work in the first first place number one you'll have to point it to your ROM library to make sure that it can find your games and then you'll also have to go into the emulation properties and click around to just make sure everything is tweaked just so and then of course in order to actually play these games you'll have to configure your controller to make sure that all the buttons are going to work properly and depending on your overall knowledge of how to work with emulation this might be a very easy process or it might be a little bit of an uphill battle anyway once you've got that set up you'll have to make a shortcut to be able to access that emulator and then you'll have to periodically keep it up to date and so that's how you would quickly set up and maintain one specific emulator now of course if you want to play more than one system you'll have to do that for all the other emulator options you have out there and depending on how far in the weeds you want to get with emulation this might be a little bit intimidating after all you may just want to be able to play your old games and not really want to put that much work in and I think that's where emid deck as a tool really shines because it takes care of a lot of that extra work for you so for example once you've got it set up you can go into emid and manage all your emulators all in one space this will include things like resetting the configurations updating the emulator app or even just uninstalling it if you don't want to use it in addition you have all sorts of other configuration options all within a single tool so if you want to change out the aspect ratio you want to add or remove bezels or you want to add LCD shaders you can do all that here there's also a tool to adjust the emulator resolution so if you want to play all these games upscale to 1080P or all the way up to 4K you can make all these settings tweaks right here and then finally the most important feature of UDC at least for me is the fact that it'll integrate into into your steam Library so for example if you're using Steam Big Picture Mode you'll be able to see all of your regular PC games but then you can also tab over to your non steam collection and then access all of your games directly here within this interface and of course I'm going to walk you through this entire setup in this video and in addition to integrating with your steam Library you can also use front-end launchers through IDC including emulation station and Pegasus this will allow you to manage much larger libraries without cluttering your Steam OS interface and so we'll walk you through all of this in this video too and so for me this is the magic of emud once you download and install this one app it's going to be able to install all the other emulators and then it'll preconfig all the settings and all the controller mapping and it'll also organize your ROM and bios locations and integrate with your steam library and then also provide access to Alternative front-end launchers anyway I think it's pretty clear on why emid is such a useful resource for most people and so let's jump into the installation process now now first we're going to go to edc.com and if you want to read more about it to be able to see what other features features are available beyond what I've just mentioned in the video you can see them here but of course we're just going to jump directly into the installation so we're going to click on this download button and then as of today we have four different OS options on the far left we have the steam deck and then the two in the middle are going to be for desktop Linux but of course the one we're focusing on in this video is going to be for Windows so that's going to be on the far right now when you click on it at least as of today it's going to give you a quick disclaimer and that's just because the windows version is still in beta so because this is still pretty early in the development cycle I would expect a couple bugs here and there so let's go ahead and move on and actually download the file and so this is what the file is going to look like when you first download it let's go ahead and double click on it to start it up and right off the bat I'm going to warn you that there will be a couple weird things happening as you first install it just because Windows is kind of funky to work with so for example it doesn't recognize the app and so you have to go into more info and then select run anyway and you might get a couple other pop-up warnings I would just click through each of these now another step in the installation process is that it has to check whether or not Windows store is completely up to date so there's going to be an option where you hit hit to continue and it's going to bring up your Windows store and all you have to do here is once you're on the homepage click on the library button and then on the top right it's going to have an option to get updates and this is simple just follow through the prompts and update all of your software anyway once that's done you can close out a Microsoft store and it's going to bring up that command prompt again and it's probably going to automatically detect that you're good but if not just press enter within the command prompt from there it's going to install a couple other smaller apps and these are all necessary in order to install the various emulators for EMC and so again just go ahead and follow through all the prompts and you'll be good to go and after all of that backend stuff is done it should start the installation process of muud itself and you'll be good to go once you see this UDC loading screen however like I mentioned the windows version is still in beta so you might run into some bugs especially during this step and if you do I recommend going to the emid Wiki page I'll have this link down below and I found that most of the solutions when it comes to installing on Windows can be found under the known issues mck for Windows section within here there's a list of different installation issues and so if you run into any of these problems s then I think these Solutions are going to be right here so I would recommend trying one of these out and if all else fails then I would try restarting her computer because sometimes that is worked for me anyway let's just go ahead and assume that you got through the installation process and move on to the rest of the setup now to start you're going to have the choice between easy and custom mode easy mode is just going to do everything for you but we're going to do custom mode because it does give us a few options to work with on the next page it's going to show all the places you can install IDC my computer has three hard drives that's why you see them but you could also use something like a flash driver micro SD card depending on what type of Windows machine you're running anyway once you've picked your drive let's go to the next page and here it's going to ask what kind of device you're using and there are quite a few windows-based handhelds that have specific configurations but if you're not using one of those for example just a generic Windows PC or handheld those are available as well for me I'm just using a desktop PC so I'm going to choose that on the next page is a list of emulators and tools that emud will install and by default a bunch of these are selected but if you don't want to install any specific emulator you can unselect them here and you can always choose to install one of these later so it's not a big deal what you choose right now on the next page it's going to show all the emulators and tools and ask you which ones you want preconfigured and because all the configuration files are super tiny I just leave all these selected after that we have a bunch of different configuration options starting with autosave this means that when you close a game it's going to save it and then when you load it back up it's going to go right back to where you were now on the next page we can enter our retroachievements information and this is a really fun tool and you can sign up for it for free on retro achievements. org anyway once you've signed up it'll give you a username and password and you can enter it here and now you can earn achievements for all your retro games our next configuration is whether or not we want game bezels for any of these specific retro systems and this will be great to cover up the black bars if you're playing a system that maybe ran an original 4x3 aspect ratio along those same lines on the next couple configuration screens you can change the aspect ratios for certain systems there's a lot of debate about which one is best for each of these but personally I like to keep everything at 4x3 however if you're interested in using widescreen hacks or something else along those lines you have all the options right here and finally the last configuration changes you can make have to do with shaders this can do things like apply an LCD Grid or a CRT look to each of your classic systems and bear in mind you can also turn these off at any time and I'll show you how to do that here in this video now in the next page we going to choose different front ends for your Windows machine we have three different options now by default I would recommend using at least the steam library and one of the other two the steam Library one is going to be more curated so that's going to be all the games that will show up in your steam interface and then within emulation station and Pegasus you can have your entire collection so that way you're not going to be cluttering up your steam interface but you'll still have access all your games and for this video we're going to choose Steam and emulation station and we'll configure both of these and then on the next screen you can choose your default emulation station theme the ones that actually come out of the box are great but if you want to change it to something else this is where you would do it and then finally our last configuration page is going to be the different resolutions by default everything will be set up for a 1080p upscale just as a standard resolution however if you do have a more powerful computer you could set some of these up for a 4K instead anyway once we've chosen all these different configurations it's time for the full installation and this will take a few minutes because it's going to go through and find all those different emulators you chose and then download them and install them onto your computer and there's going to be a couple times during the installation process where it's going to ask you to confirm installing other programs this is part of the emulation installation process so I would recommend choosing yeah man I want to do it anyway once that's done you'll get a pop-up screen talking about controller configuration essentially what they're saying here is you need to make sure that you launch all your games via steam to make sure the controls work and after that we're pretty much good to go it's going to give us the option to open Steam RW manager and install our games but we're not quite there yet we need to actually add the games to our computer first let's do that next so the first thing you want to do is go to whatever drive you decided to install IDC on for me personally I chose my D drive that's because it has a bunch of space and I'm going to move all my ROMs onto it and now when I open up that drive you can see I have a folder named emulation and you'll have the same with whatever Drive you chose for UDC as well and when you open it up you're going to see a bunch of different subfolders the two we're going to focus on right now are going to be bios and ROMs and we'll start by talking about the ROMs this is going to be the actual game files you'll need to add to your computer to be able to play these emulators now when you open up that ROMs folder you're going to see a bunch of different subfolders and some of these make sense like they're pretty easy to figure out what system they're for but some of these other names might be a little bit confusing and so you might not know which specific ROMs are supposed to go inside now thankfully there's a really easy way to figure this out out and it all comes back to the emid Wiki page over on the left side you'll see an option for bios and ROMs cheat sheet and this is an entire page dedicated to setting up your games and putting them in the right place so if you're brand new to emulation I would recommend reading through this just to get a little bit acquainted with the whole process but in a nutshell all you really want to do is go to the various cheat sheets here at the bottom so for example under the Nintendo one you can see that we have five different columns and each of these columns are going to be labeled by the system or the ROM folder or whatever emulator it's going to use use and then you'll also have a list of all the acceptable file formats for that particular system and then finally on the far right side it'll have a listing of whatever bios files are required if you're trying to play any specific system so in this example let's look at Nintendo GameCube you can see the name of the system and then the two folders that are acceptable and then you can see that it's running using the Dolphin Emulator after that you can see all the different file types that are accepted for Nintendo GameCube and you can also see that there are no bios files required to run these games and then finally if you're looking for more information than this cheat sheet on the left side you will have a listing of all the different emulators and so if you wanted to click on the dolphin one to learn more about the Gamecube Emulator you'll have all the information you need right here either way I think this is a great example of how emid really takes care of you when it comes to setting all this stuff up it has a lot of information if you need it but it also makes it a very simple process to install and so going back to that original ROM folder each of these different subfolders are going to pertain to a different system and you just need to add your ROMs here and then of course if you don't know which ROMs to add to which folder I I would recommend checking out those cheat sheets now the other question I get all the time is okay where do I find these ROM files and number one these are copyrighted files so I'm not going to share them but there are a couple tools within the internet that are pretty handy now it might be bold of me to say because we just met but you're probably a pretty smart person after all you're watching one of my videos which means that I bet you can figure out where to find these ROM files you just need to find the right place to look it definitely is one of life's great Mysteries but I'm pretty sure you can figure it out anyway let's go ahead and move on and actually start moving our ROM over and so this is usually what it looks like when I'm setting up emid for myself on the left side we have a listing of all those ROMs folders We were talking about before and then on the right side I have my own personal ROM collection and so sticking with the theme let's go to Nintendo GameCube as our example in EDC the ROM folder is going to be labeled GC and then on the right side I'm going to go to my own GameCube folder and then find a bunch of games that I want to play on EMC and then copy them over and really the setup process is that simple you just need to drag and drop your ROMs into those emu folders and you'll be good to go now next I want to talk about bios files these are system files that are required for certain emulators to run properly and for many of these systems you don't need bios files at all but there are a couple that do require them and the setup process here is very similar to how it is when you're setting up your ROMs but the only main difference is you'll put them in the Bios folder instead of the ROMs folder and so here we are with my typical setup on the meex side on the left I have my BIOS folder open and then on the right side I have my own bios collection now if you're brand new to emulation you might be totally intimidated right here because it looks like a completely different language and so let me break it down for you really quickly here's a listing of all the most common bios files and there's a couple things to make note of for example on the leftand column all these systems will work with bios but they are completely optional in fact adding these will basically just give you a boot logo when you start up your game and so it makes it a more authentic experience but it's not necessary to be able to play the game itself now in the middle column all of these are going to be required to be able to play these systems but for PlayStation 1 and 2 in particular there are many different bios options available I'm just giving a couple couple examples right here and of course if you want a full listing of more examples then I would recommend checking out that Meed wiki page finally on the far right column we have a couple that are highlighted in a different color to start when it comes to Dreamcast and Yuzu these will actually be placed in their own subfolder so for example the Dreamcast bios file which is called DC boot.bin has to go into a folder named DC and that folder has already been added by emid so you really just have to make sure you put it into that folder that's already been created and the same thing is going to happen with your switch file as well it's going to have to go into the subfolder and then finally Neo Geo is a little bit weird because instead of putting the BIOS file in the Bios folder you actually put it with all the other ROMs anyway this is a quick listing of all the most common bios files that I recommend using and these are also copyrighted so you're going to be on your own to find them and then add them to IDC anyway that's really about it when it comes to adding ROMs and bios files you're on your own to actually find them and then after that you just add them to the corresponding folder so now let's go ahead and open up Ed again and as part of the installation process you should now see an ed shortcut app directly on your desktop and after you open it up it's going to check for new updates and then bring you to the homepage and so now I want to walk you through the MC interface which is basically going through all the buttons on the left hand side on the top is the manage emulator section within here is going to be a listing of all the emulators that are supported by emud and within here you can choose to update or install or uninstall any of these apps as you want also within here are a couple really handy tools for example if you want to check out the hot keys for each of these systems you can check them here and so my recommendation would be to open open up muud periodically and then go through and update each of these emulators I would say do it every couple of weeks just to make sure you have the latest and greatest now also within here you have all the other options that we configured previously in this video so if you want to change out the aspect ratio or the bezels all these are going to be enabled within the quick settings and same thing with the resolutions for example if you found that some of these are a little bit harder to run in your system than you would like there's a screen resolution option at the bottom where you can change all these out again in addition if you really mess up your settings and you want to go back to how they are by default def fault you can do a quick reset as well there's also a couple other handy tools within emud including one that's called the emud store within here is a bunch of home brew and demo and freeware games that are available for various systems so if you want to try out some Community made made games it's pretty cool you can actually download and install these directly onto your system from here also if you run into any issues when getting all set up there's a help Button as well this will bring you directly to the IDC Wiki page and you can type out your question and it'll usually find the answer to what you're looking for and finally one last tool I think is is really handy is called the BIOS files Checker and this will look through your bios folder and make sure that you have the correct file that way if it shows up red that means you know you need to go back and fix it so that's it when it comes to the EDC interface now we're going to integrate these games into our steam library and to do that we're going to open up a tool called steam ROM manager which is again a button on the left hand side here of emid and the way that steam ROM manager works is that it's going to look through all your different ROM folders then find your games and then add them to steam however depending on the amount of games that you've added you may not want to add every single system so in this section I'm going to show you how to curate the steam ROM manager experience to make sure that only your very favorite games show up in your steam interface to start there's an option at the top that says toggle parsers and by default all these are going to be turned on but what I'm going to do is actually turn them off and that's because there are only certain systems I want to actually show up in my steam Library so what I recommend doing here is turning on just the ones that you find the most important and first of all I do recommend turning on either emulation station or Pegasus depending on which front end you chose and for me I chose emulation station so I'm going to pick that one another one that I recommend turning on is going to be the emulators that means that you'll have buttons to access each of the emulators directly within Steam so for example if you wanted to launch Dolphin to get into the GameCube settings without having to actually find it within windows I would recommend turning this on then after that I would think about all the systems where you added ROMs and then consider which ones you want to have games actually showing up within your steam Library so even though I added a bunch of different ROMs to my emulation folders I'm only going to add a couple here within Steam ROM manager and this will be my very favorite systems and games that I want to show up within Steam anyway once you've gone through and chosen all those favorite systems then you want to select the button on the bottom that says add games from there click on the button that says parsers and it'll bring you to this page and from here the program's going to look through all those ROM folders that you selected and then it'll find your games and then also scrub them against the steam database and this might take a couple minutes depending on the size of your library I have 80 different games here total and it took maybe about a minute altogether to grab all those assets anyway after that's done you're going to see a listing of all the games from the systems that we chose previously in that last step and so the majority here for me are like Super Nintendo Wii U PS2 and GameCube now it may be that some of these games you want to see within Steam but others you won't so I'm going to show you how to hide some games if you don't want to see them on the bottom you're going to press the button that says exclude games and then from there you just want to click on all the games that you don't want to actually see within Steam and after you click on it it's going to unselect it and it'll turn dark so in this example I'm just going through all all the different games that I have here and then unselecting the ones that I know I don't want to see within my steam interface and also bear in mind that by unselecting each of these it's not going to hide them all together you'll still be able to access all these games but it'll be through one of those front-end launchers like emulation station or Pegasus so really all we're trying to do here is just declutter that steam interface anyway after going through my 80 titles I decided that 46 of them I didn't actually want to see and so now that I'm done I'm going to press that save button on the bottom right and here we are now we have 34 different titles that incl includes a bunch of emulators and then all my favorite games next we're going to curate these even more we're going to make sure that all the art matches what we want to actually see and probably the easiest way to do this is to go to each of these games and if you don't like the artwork you can actually go left and right to change the different artwork options and I always find this process to be a lot of fun so I would recommend going through here finding each of these covers and if there's any you don't like then you can change them out really quickly now for some of these other ones you might have a mismatch for example here it's showing the dolphin Atari 2600 game but I know this is actually supposed to be my Dolphin Emulator and thankfully it's pretty easy to fix mismatches like this you just hover over the game and then on the bottom left there's an option to fix it and once you click on it you're going to see a bunch of different options that you can choose from but as I look through all these selections I see that the Dolphin Emulator is not there now this is a problem I've seen many times before and I know what you have to do is type in the search box dolphin and then within parentheses the word emulator if you do that then press the search button the Dolphin Emulator will show up as the first option from there I can choose it and press save and close and we are good to go and then finally the last step I like to do within steamr manager is to go up to the artwork tab on the top right and then choose the option that says all artwork this is going to show all the various assets for each of these individual games so for example if there's a banner or a title that doesn't quite match up to what you want to see you can change them right here and so this is always the last step I like to do is just to go through and make sure that everything looks nice and clean and every once in a while especially with Nintendo games you'll find some that are blank and so it's always good to go through here and find one that works anyway once this is all set up we are ready to add these games individually into steam so once you're happy with everything we're going to press that button on the bottom that says save to steam and on the top right you'll get a little window that'll tell you how the progress is going we're looking for the option that says done adding removing entries once you see that you're good to go now if you happen to miss that because it flashes by pretty quickly you can click on the log button on the bottom right and then scroll down and you should be able to see it here and once you see that we are good to go you can close out a steamr manager as well as IDC and now we can open up steam itself and then go into the library section and you should see a listing of all those games that we just added and these are going to show up both in desktop mode of steam like this but then also in Big Picture Mode and honestly I think they look the best in Big Picture Mode let's move over to that and so we're going to click on that little monitor icon on the top left next to our username that's going to open up Steam Big Picture Mode and this will look exactly like how it does with Steam OS on the steam deck and so you can now navigate through all your PC games like it would with any other steam library and so all your regular PC gaming stuff is still here and and it hasn't been touched but now let's move over to the other tabs we'll start with the collections tab within here you'll see all your different games organized by system and so if you want to grab all the GameCube games that you added via steam raw manager they'll be right here but my favorite tab is going to be the non- steam tab that's going to be a listing of all the different games that we added and sure enough all 34 games that we included from steamr manager are now available right here and the cool thing is that launching any of these games is like launching any other PC game within Steam and so this is my favorite part of the whole integration the fact that my very favorite games now show up just alongside my other PC games now if this is your first time using emid you're probably wondering how do I get out of a game once I started and the easiest way to do that is to hold on to the select button and then press the start button you might have to do it twice but either way that's how you close out of a game and really that's all there is to it when it comes to integrating your favorite emulated games directly into steam however there's still a lot more that we can do and that's going to be through the emulation station interface and again this is just going to show up within your steam interface as an app so if we open open it up it's going to launch an entirely new front end and like I mentioned before this is where your entire collection is going to be so if there are games that you didn't include within Steam ROM manager they're all going to show up here and this is a really simple and easy to use interface as well you just pick your system then navigate through your game and then launch it from there and same thing here if you press select and start it's going to close out of that game and then launch you back to the emulation station interface so this is a great example if you have a larger collection you want to access every once in a while but then you want to have all your favorite games within Steam now even though emulation station on its own is pretty nice looking there are ways to make it look better to start let's talk about different themes if you press this start button and then go into UI settings there's an option within here for theme downloader and this will give you a listing of a bunch of different themes that are available for emulation station and all you have to do is press the a button to download and install any of these so I'm just going to grab a random one right here and then we're going to back out to that UI settings menu and now under the theme section we can choose the various themes that we have downloaded we'll start with this one here called elect full it's one of my favorites and sure enough yeah I think this one looks really great it's nice and clean looking and I personally love messing around with these different themes just because it can give a nice facelift to your whole experience let's try a different theme this is the art book next one and I think this one is really clean as well and actually is used in a lot of other custom operating systems now finally the other thing you can do to make these even prettier is you can add box art and videos to each of these games to do that we're going to do a process called scraping we're going to press start again to bring up the emulation Station menu and then we're going to go into the scraper section and to start you can choose all the different systems you want to scrape we're going to keep things simple and I'm just going to choose Nintendo GameCube and then after that within the scraper menu there's an option to add your account settings and this one's simple to set up as well you're going to go to a website called screens scraper and within here you just want to register for a free account and get a username and password after you've done that you just want to go back to emulation station add your username and password and now you're good to go let's go ahead and press the start button and then it's going to go through all my different GameCube games then compare it against the screen scraper database and then as long as it finds a match it's going to download the box art as well as the video for each of those games and this might take a few minutes depending on the size of your collection we're just doing five games here really quickly so it's not going to take too long and now as we navigate through our GameCube system you can see all of the different box art as we scroll through each game and if we hover over a game for a few seconds it'll actually bring up a video so this is really handy if you're not really sure what game to play but you want to get a quick preview before you choose it and so really that's emulation station in a nutshell I think this is a really great alternative to just having everything within your steam library and I love the fact that we can integrate all of our collection into one single app okay now that we're set up I do want to talk about a couple additional features available within IDC and these are all available via what they call the Early Access which is part of their membership perks of being a patron and right off the mat there are two features that are pretty handy the first one is called boot mode this is a tool exclusive within windows and this one's pretty neat what it's going to do is bypass the entire Windows boot sequence and go directly into steam instead so so this is Handy if you're using a computer that's a dedicated gaming machine and you don't want to have to deal with all the windows setup stuff instead when you power on the device it'll go directly into steam and you can start playing your games right then and there another option that's been in the works for quite some time now are Cloud saves and this is great if you want to store your save games in the cloud or if you want to use the exact same save between multiple idex setups and then finally as part of their Early Access program they have a bunch of other new features in the works and they just released a road map here the other day in addition to the Cloud sync and boot mode that we already talked about there's a couple new features that are pretty exciting for example they're working on a sync feature between onion OS on the Mio Mini Plus and udex that's pretty neat if you have both systems and they're also working on ad hoc multiplayer if you want to play between a steam deck and an Rog Ally you can do that as well and they're also working on bringing IDC to other platforms including Mac and Android and this process will be pretty similar to how it was with windows so if you're An Early Access member you can try these out and help beta test it with the developer and then once the testing is complete it'll move over into public beta like how it is for Windows right now either way if you want to stay on The Cutting Edge of EDC and all the different tools that they're building then I would recommend checking this out and I'll leave it all linked down below finally the last note here is that if you want to uninstall emck it's very simple there's a button on the bottom left of the app and so this will clean out all of the emulator apps but it won't touch all of your ROMs or save files so you can still access those if you want and so that's really about it for this video here I think that mu deck is a really excellent tool for getting set up with emulation and I think it's especially handy if you're brand new to all this stuff but want to play some retro games without having to figure out all these configuration menus and I got to be honest even for me somebody who plays with these systems all the time I still prefer to use iduck just because it streamlines the whole process and of course I love the fact that it integrates directly into my steam Library so I can choose between playing a PC game or one of my retro Classics and it's all there so let me know what you think in the comments Down Below have you already tried out emid on a steam deck but are you also thinking about trying it on Windows as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy [Music] gaming

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 154,892

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Id: 05dunYi6hkY

Length: 28min 13sec (1693 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023