Play your retro games with RetroArch
TURN THE CLOCK BACK ON YOUR OLD FAVOURITES, AND GIVE THEM A WHIRL ON PC.
IF YOU’VE BEEN following this column for a while, you’ll probably have noticed that retro gaming is one of our top guilty pleasures. We’ve covered a number of sites where you can play old console and arcade games online, and this month, we thought we’d take a look one of your best options for playing them on your PC: an awesome little program called RetroArch.
USING RETROARCH
So you’ve collected a nice little set of older games on your computer. They can be zipped up DOS games, Amiga or Commodore 64 disk images, cartridge images from your favourite retro console, or perhaps ROM images from arcade cabinets. How do you get your PC to play them? The answer is an emulator, and when it comes to emulators, there’s probably none more popular right now than RetroArch.
Technically, RetroArch is just a front end, with the actual emulation software running in the background. From a user perspective, however, it looks like a one-stop shop for emulating just about any platform. In the background, it uses ‘cores’, which are emulation applications transformed into libraries using a tool called Libretro. As a user, you don’t really need to know how it works, just that it does, and it will play most games from most platforms.
It’s available for Windows, Mac and Android, as well as some more exotic platforms such as hacked consoles and rooted iPhones. To get it on Windows, head to www.
retroarch.com and download it for your version of Windows. We’d recommend getting the ‘Download (7zip)’ version and uncompressing it yourself rather than using the installer (which we found pretty flaky).
Go to the folder you unzipped it to, and then run the retroarch executable. We should note that, when we first ran it, we had an issue with our Windows 10 PC not having DirectX 9 — a problem that we fixed by heading to the following address and using the Microsoft DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer: www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/ details.aspx?id=35
Once you’ve done that, RetroArch should fire up in a window. Now it’s time to load a core, then a game. Just follow these steps: Click on Load Core. This is where we’ll load the core for the emulator you want to run. By default, there are no cores on your PC, so you’ll have to download one. Click on Download Core.