There are many options to chose from when it comes to retro game emulators, you of course have all the individual emulators that can be installed seperately, then you have the front ends that combine all these individual emulators into a neat package and make customizing your experience with each emulator a relatively simple experience, even for beginners.
This is where RetroBat comes in, in my opinion it is probably the most popular emulation front end available. It is free and doesn’t have a paywall for any of its features. That being said, I would wholeheartedly encourage you to drop a donation, however small on the team to help them continue to build up on and continue the development of RetroBat.
What is RetroBat?
Put simply RetroBat is an all-in-one emulator front end designed to make retro gaming simple and accessible by integrating multiple emulators under one single interface. Designed primarily for Windows RetroBat is relatively lightweight and can run on most modern PCs, even low spec PCs can manage to play older systems such as Atari, NES and the like. However, to play the more modern systems, such as PS2 and Gamecube a dedicated GPU and more powerful hardware is needed. To help beginners in their quest for retro nirvana RetroBat includes an installation wizard that helps you to setup and configure emulators, so no deep technical knowledge is required.
What Can I Play?
Thanks to the ever popular RetroArch multi-system emulator and it’s many available cores, you can play over 80 different systems. That covers almost every console made in the last 50 years. You can even emulate handheld consoles such as the Nintendo Gameboy, Sony PSP and even the Sega GameGear. When it comes to the standard consoles you have the ability to emulate any console from the Atari 2600 all the way up to fairly modern PS3 and Xbox 360. We should also not forget that while RetroBat uses RetroArch cores by default, you can add custom cores or standalone emulators if a particular game or system performs better with those.
How Customizable is RetroBat?
RetroBat uses EmulationStation as its graphical front end. This provides you with a easy to navigate interface to browse and select games be system, genre and title. The base theme used by RetroBat is actually decent if you just want to get going. However, RetroBat offers a multitude of customization options. Not only for the frontend but also for the gameplay. You can install various themes that change the look of the interface, or you can add shaders and screen filters to emulate the look of old CRT televisions. If that is not enough RetroBat also supports the use of The Bezel Project, which improves the aesthetic of your gaming setup by offering custom bezels which display around games that don’t natively fill the screen of modern widescreen monitors and TVs.
Is RetroBat really that simple?
Well yes it is. If you can turn on a computer and use a web browser then you can get up and running with RetroBat. In the coming days, I will go deeper into each of the features I have mentioned, with setup guides and helpful tips to set you on your way. So if there is something you are struggling with then the chances are I will be covering it in the very near future.
Finally
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Legal Disclaimer
Something I need to get across just so you understand (and I don’t get sued by some over zealous CEO at Nintendo) that whilst the use of RetroBat and other emulators is perfectly legal. The way you obtain and use copyrighted ROM’s, BIOS files and games without proper ownership or rights can be illegal in many jurisdictions. Of course, we both know that we own all of the games we will emulate so this is not a problem for us to contend with (winky eye, smiley face).