RetroArch Easy Setup Guide 2023

retroarch can be a daunting program to learn in fact many gamers shy away from the complicated interface and overwhelming number of features and that's understandable because many of us don't have as much time as we used to and so we're more inclined to the pick up and play type experience however in my opinion retroarch is worth learning once it's configured it provides a powerful all-in-one emulating solution and because it works the same across multiple platforms once you've learned the program let's say in Windows you'll feel right at home operating and understanding how it works on an Android phone or a Linux handheld so my goal with this series of videos is to demystify the complexities of retroarch I didn't want to make this one long how-to video that covers everything about retroarch because I personally find those types of videos to be very overwhelming rather this will aim to be a series of videos that will only require you to dive as deep into the features as you want to so if you just want to get your games up and running we'll show you how to do that but if you'd like to know how to configure shaders overlays hotkeys and other features we'll get you there as well so in part one of this series I'm going to show you how simple it is to get a basic retroarch setup so you can start gaming as Mario would say let's go we're going to begin by downloading retroarch from the official website which I'm sure you've guessed it is retroarch.com and if you want to enter it yourself go ahead or there's also a link in the description once here we want to click on the get retroarch link on the main page and that's going to take us to the download page now this tutorial is going to focus on the Windows version of retroarch that's the operating system I use on a daily basis and it's going to be the easiest way for me to make these tutorials but as I mentioned earlier once you learn retroarch on one platform you'll be more than competent to use it on any other so here under Windows 10 we see an option to either download as an installer package or a zip file I prefer the zip format because that allows your installation to be portable meaning you should be able to move it around freely and not have things break and that's not always the case when do the installer package now after the file downloads be aware that it's not going to be a normal zip file that you can just open with Windows it downloads in a 7z or 7 zip file format which is a freely available file compression program so you want to head over to 7zip.org and again the link is in the description and first install this program once you have it installed you can then right click the retroarch zip and you'll have this 7-Zip menu and then we can select open archive so now we need to decide where we're going to put the retroarch program now if you want you could simply put it on your desktop but I recommend that you keep your folder structure organized similar to what I have here on my machine you'll notice I have one folder for games and then within that folder separate folders for each console with the games in those folders then I have another folder that's for emulators and here's where I'm going to put each emulator that I download in this case I'm going to put the contents of the retroarch zip in here now we are ready to jump into retroarch itself if we open the retroarch folder and scroll down we will find the retroarch executable if you so desire you can right click and make a shortcut to a place of your liking for easier access but that's not required and totally up to you I'm going to double click and open retroarch and now we are in The Maze that is the Retro Arch menu but please don't get overwhelmed I promise you we're going to have this down in no time so first things first I'm going to come up here and click window and then full screen I prefer full screen rather than windowed mode but please choose whatever you prefer if you enter full screen and then want to exit you can just hit alt plus enter on your keyboard and it will go back into windowed mode now here's how navigating the retroarch menus works you can use the mouse your keyboard or a Gamepad now with the mouse when you select an item with the left click you can then get back to the previous menu by clicking anywhere with the right Mouse button with the keyboard you can hit enter and that will get you into a menu item and then backspace on the keyboard is going to get you to the previous menu if you have a dual shock or Xbox controller retroarch will Auto configure it once it's connected and as you can see from my on-screen controller display here I can use that as well my dual shock to navigate the menus other gamepads may or may not work I can't guarantee that it will your mileage may vary there so the best thing to do is just connect it and see what happens see if retroarch will recognize it the last thing to keep in mind is that if you want to exit out of retro Arch you can just hit the Escape key twice and that will take you back to Windows so now you're thinking what we're all thinking how do I play games on this thing man so the key to harnessing the full power of retroarch is to understand what it is and what it's not many think that retroarch is itself an emulator really it's not you might think of retroarch as a toolbox it doesn't do the work of each tool in the box but it allows each tool to be carried managed and accessed from a convenient location retroarch is really the toolbox that allows us to access and configure a number of emulators and emulation tools from a single convenient location let's add our first tool or emulator to the toolbox in retroarch an emulator is called a core to add a core we go to online updater and then core downloader in this menu we find all the various cores or emulators that we can download to retroarch our toolbox I want to download a core that will play Sega Genesis so I'm going to scroll down this list you can see it's a very long one until I find Sega and as I look at these cores they tell me that they will play Master System Game Gear Mega Drive or Genesis which is what I'm looking for Genesis is what it was called here in the U.S and Sega CD now looking at these three cores we see that all of them will play Genesis games so which one would I download well often that is totally subjective to the type of emulation experience you're looking for some cores or emulators are designed for Speed and will run better on older Hardware While others are geared more toward being accurate and they will require faster more powerful Hardware so if you'd like to know what cores I prefer for the mid-range computer that I'm using right now I've put a list in the description down below I'm going to download the Genesis plus GX core because that's my preferred emulator for Sega Genesis after I've selected it and it's downloaded I get this hash symbol over here and that means that the core is installed now that we have an emulator in place we're now ready to add games to retroarch so let's back out to the main menu we'll hit F5 on the keyboard and this is going to open up the desktop user interface there are some tasks that are easier to do from this interface and adding games happens to be one of those tasks so here in the content browser right click and select new playlist I'm going to call my playlist Sega Genesis after you've created a new console playlist you want to make sure that you first select it before the next step now in the name box over here I'm going to right click again and select add folder I'll navigate to and select the location of my Genesis folder with it selected I click ok now here in this new playlist entry box you want to make sure that we select the correct core for this system and I'm going to select the one I just downloaded remember the core is the emulator and here in this box select the database for the system which is going to be of course Sega Mega Drive or Genesis now this setting is important because it allows us to later download box art which we're gonna explore in a future video now we can click OK and we'll see our list of added games now we want to close the desktop interface and then retroarch itself and when we open retroarch back up we now have a Sega Genesis selection or playlist in our menu and when we highlight it we can see all the games that we just added so I'm going to go back into full screen mode I'm going to select a game select run and we are now gaming via retroarch baby so when you Tire up playing one game you can either hit the Escape key twice and that will exit retroarch as we talked about earlier where you press F1 on the keyboard and that's going to open you back up to the retroarch menu and if you wish you can close the content and then choose another game and play to your heart's content that wraps up part one of this ongoing retroarch tutorial as you can see it really doesn't take much time to get it set up and ready to play your favorite classic games hopefully you're feeling a bit less apprehensive and a bit more confident that you can tame this emulation Beast I invite you to please come back soon for part two where we will explore the immense power of custom hotkeys and how you can harness that power to heighten your Retro Gaming skill until then happy gaming my friends

Channel: OTG Gaming

Views: 4,846

Keywords: RetroArch Setup, RetroArch Setup Windows, RetroArch Easy Beginners Guide, RetroArch Beginners Guide, RetroArch Setup PC, RetroArch Setup Guide, RetroArch Guide, RetroArch, RetroArch Tutorial, Emulation, Emulator, RetroGaming, RetroArch Starter Guide

Id: 0v2Fl4FtOh4

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2023