Video Game Console Emulation Setup

In a world where support for legacy hardware is declining fast, Video Game Console Emulators are a God send. And fortunately for Linux users emulation is as easy as it gets.

Today’s guide will focus on setting up emulation via the RetroArch application on Arch Linux.

(RetroArch is not related to Arch Linux)

Downloading

We need an application called RetroArch which nicely unifies seperate console emulators (referred to as “cores” in libretro lingo). We are also going to need “Cores” and BIOS files for the consoles that we need to emulate.

Packages

• retroarch (the unified frontend for these emulators)
• libretro-duckstation (for PlayStation 1)
• libretro-pcsx2 (for PlayStation 2)
• libretro-flycast (for Dreamcast)
• libretro-mgba (for GameBoy Advanced)

sudo pacman -S retroarch libretro-duckstation libretro-pcsx2 libretro-flycast libretro-mgba

BIOS Files

After installing RetroArch, download these files and put them in the specified directories.

GBA - BIOS files not required

PS1 - Put these in ~/.config/retroarch/system

PS2 - Put these in ~/.config/retroarch/system/ps2

DC - Put these in ~/.config/retroarch/system/dc

(NB : Create the ps2 and dc directories if not present)

Configuration

Now with all downloaded and installed let’s configure our cores.

1. Open RetroArch

2. Navigate to UI settings and change the UI to your likings (restart RetroArch for changes to apply)

3. Select the vulkan video driver from Driver settings

4. Place your Game Files inside a convenient directory. I also recommend you to organize said directory into subdirectories for each system.

   Example /media/seagate1tb/roms

   within this directory we can have subdirectories named psx, ps2, dc, gba, etc.. and games put into their respective directories

5. Now we need to import them into the RetroArch library for easy access and organisation.

6. First go to the ‘Online Updater’ in RetroArch and update the databases.

7. Go to ‘import content’ and choose your directory (in this case /media/seagate1tb/roms)

8. Your games will now be available for easy access run them and enjoy.