Should add
simple64 to the N64 section. It's accurate and doesn't require messing around with plugins.
Project64 should really only be used on lower powered or older Windows devices and for some mods.
Retroarch sucks. The menus are horrible. The
only reason to use it is if you are locked into it based on your system (it's the best experience on Switch, for instance). I really prefer using individual emulators which have easy to use UIs and it's all accessible from my mouse in the form of checkboxes and dropdowns. There is a lot of drama with Retroarch from a few different developers, and there is also the problem of some cores becoming outdated or having their own compatibility issues.
In general, I think that using one emulator with a bunch of different cores to emulate a lot of different systems is inherently a bad idea that comes with a lot of downsides, just for the one upside of "convenience." In reality, the issues I have run into with Retroarch have caused more annoyance than just running individual emulators. If you really must use a consolidated emulator like that, I would recommend
BizHawk over RetroArch simply because the UI is standard and not forced into that weird XMB layout.
A few years ago I made a little emulation box and used
Steam ROM Manager to incorporate all of my games into Steam Big Picture. If all you are looking for is a frontend, then Steam really gets the job done. You can search, sort games by platform and genre, etc. It takes a little bit more setting up than something like Retroarch does, but the end experience is so much less clunky. I can also recommend
LaunchBox, though you'll have to pay for the "big picture" equivalent and it can be pretty pricey. For that reason, I went with Steam ROM Manager, and it worked swimmingly. A lot of the process was automated where I just had to drag and drop my ROM files and it grabbed all of the necessary game information for me, as well as arguments for launching the standalone emulators in full screen. I really liked having the ability to manually decide how each of my Gamecube/Wii games were configured with Dolphin's advanced configuration files, alongside cheats that would remain static for each game like Widescreen patches. Again, it took more work to set up initially than something like Retroarch would, but the end result was a
much smoother experience that was so dead simple that my mom could figure it out.
For anybody wondering, PS2 online is easy to setup with pcsx2:
The biggest problem is that the least popular games(ratchet) pretty much require discord to setup arranged games because public matches are practically dead.
The definitive way to play Ratchet Deadlocked and Up Your Arsenal is through
Horizon. It's a private server for those games, and they even have a PC client that uses PCSX2 for the backend and Unity for the graphics rendering and some other nice features like KBM support.
BotW for the longest time was recommended to be played on Cemu (Wii U emulator) but afaik that may have changed?
4mo old but doesn't look like it and i dont think they made a 75% performance improvement in those 4mo
cemu also had built in easy mods to get a 60fps patch going since patches and mods are built in. also doubt that you could get any sort of gyro aim on the switch emus, which is pretty easy on cemu.
It definitely is still better to play Breath of the Wild on CEMU just because of the huge performance difference as well as modding being more popular on Wii U, if that's something you want to do.
However, the Switch emulators do support gyro control and have for a few years.
Something else worth mentioning is that there was never any problem with the Wii common key in Dolphin and Nintendo never issued a DMCA. What actually happened is that Valve asked Nintendo if they were okay with Steam having a release of Dolphin, and Nintendo said no while
citing DMCA. Valve probably did this because they have a great relationship with Nintendo, especially right now, and they don't want to do anything that would disturb that relationship. If there was something actually wrong with Dolphin, why has nothing happened to it all of these years? There is no legal ground Nintendo has to stand on, and they have often used their relationships with companies to enact takedowns even when one wouldn't hold up. Nobody wants to go against Nintendo though, because of how much of a giant they are in the industry. It's scare tactics, essentially. The same thing happened to Project M, a popular mod for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, with Nintendo threatening Twitch due to them allowing the mod to be streamed on their platform. There was never any official takedown notice or cease and desist served to the dev team.
You can read more about the whole debacle on the official Dolphin blog:
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/07/20/what-happened-to-dolphin-on-steam/
