Emulators that can run almost every video game

During your childhood or even in your teens, you should have already played video games and enjoyed some classic games that you would like to see again. In turn, be it for computers or cell phones, there are several emulators, which can be installed separately to revive these games, but that require some specific settings.

At the beginning of this year 2019, it was announced that the popular Retroarch will arrive on the Xbox One, being a program with several emulators to run games from Atari to the generation of Wii, needing only one configuration that will fit all consoles. Here’s how to set Retroarch on your computer to emulate classic video games.

Important

Before beginning the tutorial, the user should keep in mind that the use of emulators itself is not illegal. However, games played on these virtual machines are original or have been obtained from original discs owned by the individual. In addition, for some specific video games, it may become necessary to use a BIOS, which is a file that must be obtained from your console containing system information being emulated.

Getting Retroarch

As noted above, Retroarch is a program that is available for many platforms, including mobile phones, computers, and video games. Although it has some visual differences to adapt to each of these platforms, the name of the functions and the way to set Retroarch in them is the same.

For the step-by-step below, the process was performed on a computer running Windows. This choice is due to the Windows version having more emulator options and better performance, which of course, may vary depending on your computer hardware. Here’s how to proceed:

1. Access the official download page and choose the version appropriate for your computer. In our case, the 64-bit version was chosen;
2. During installation, at least in Windows, it is recommended to change the folder where the Retroarch files will be to an easily accessible place, without having to touch any other parameters of it.

Once you have installed Retroarch, it is recommended to configure your folders, so it will be ready for use and you can go out and play whatever you want. Check out how to do:

1. From the Windows “File Explorer”, go to the folder where Retroarch was installed;
2. In the “System” folder, you should put the BIOS you got from your video games, following the instructions of names that are present in this link . Note that by default, Retroarch does not bring any BIOS with your download;
3. Back to the default Retroarch directory, create a new folder named “Roms” and paste the copies of your games into it.

Starting Retroarch

After performing the above process, you still need to do some more settings, which will be done within the program itself. At this point, you can now connect a joystick to the computer, but preferably the Xbox 360 / One or PlayStation 4 controls, as they are recognized and mapped automatically in Retroarch. Here’s how to proceed:

1. Open Retroarch using the executable inside the folder;
2. Using the “keyboard arrows” and the “Enter” key or your “Joystick”, enter the “Online Updater”;
3. Now enter “Core Updater”;
4. In this list, you must select each video game that will be emulated within Retroarch. Note that for some consoles there are even more than one emulator, but you only need one of them to play. In the tutorial, we’ll use Megadrive for emulation;
5. Press the “delete key” until you return to the Retroarch main menu and select the “Load Content” option;
6. From the computer directories, navigate to the “Roms” folder where you have placed your games;
7. When selecting a game, use the “Load archive” option. This screen appears when the games are compressed in ZIP format.

In most cases, Retroarch must automatically identify the game type. If this does not happen, after the last step described above, you just need to select which video game to play the selected game. Finally, with the game loaded, to leave it in full screen, just go in the option “Windows> Toggle Exclusive Full Screen”.

Ready! Now, you already know how to run classic games of several video games without having to install an emulator for each of them and worry about complicated configurations.