Depending what systems you want to emulate, just use ares.
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This looks similar to retroarch. Is it better? How?
It’s not retroarch. If you have been in emulation for a while that’s enough right there. No one is reusing retroarch cores here.
https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Ares
If you don’t want to spend 3 hours setting up an emulator, ares is basically just: open software, click to open what you want to play. The interface isn’t trying to reinvent a weird ps3 or Switch hybrid on your pc. It is similar to regular desktop software ui you might have used during your life.
Ares was developed by Near (rip). If you don’t know who that is, it’s a shame, but I’m not going to go into it here. It’s now maintained by people continuing Near’s work on trying to achieve cycle accurate, preservation quality emulation.
Some of the emulation cores, SNES, 32x, N64, MegaDrive and Sega CD are the best in class, by a wide margin. Turbografx is comparable if not better than mednafen. SNES especially good since that was Near’s main focus for many years - you might know it as bsnes or higan from before they started pushing the ares emulator more before they died.
Some systems are definitely best played elsewhere (mgba is better for gba, Stella is better for 2600, Duckstation for ps1, Sameboy for gameboy colour). But that defeats the purpose of your question. For the sake of having all the emulation in one place, ares usually do fine with these.
It can be taxing. If you are running an older underpowered machine, you might not have a good time.
Like RetroArch?
OP mentioned trying retroarch, and that it was not too bad, but wondering if there are alternatives.
I think Emudeck is available as a Flatpak, so you should be able to install it on your desktop too.
It is not, you may be confusing it with retrodeck, which is solely distributed as a flatpak.
Oh really? Boo.
Retrodeck looks good, but the recommended install instructions were just too nutty for me: curl https://... | bash
is not ok.
You...can just download the script and inspect it yourself before running. This cargo cult "security" advice needs to stop.
I did just that. It's not about security. It's about messing with my machine's setup. I don't want to run a bunch of rando commands that might mess with how my actual package manager manages my system.
This is quite fair, and I agree. I just hear far too often people rejecting running scripts out of hand because sOmEoNe sAiD pIpE iT tO tHe sHeLL. Usually such scripts are just using the package manager anyway.
Lutris, you can easily manage all the emulators
Retroarch is solid after you take some time to configure it to work exactly how you want it to cuz some of the defaults are a bit weird
If you can use a spare box or at least a boot device, there are systems like https://batocera.org/ that will box a lot of stuff together. Obviously independent emulators are all distributed independently though many of them do multiple systems.
Just do a "RetroPie" install on Linux. It was originally built for Pi's but works fine on 64-bit Debian/Ubuntu etc
Use lutris
Emudeck supports Linux
sh -c 'curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dragoonDorise/EmuDeck/main/install.sh | bash'