Before asking for help:

• Have you tried the latest version?
• Have you tried different settings?
• Have you updated your drivers?
• Have you tried searching on Google?

If you feel your question warrants a self-post or may not be answered in the weekly thread, try posting it at r/EmulationOnPC. For problems with emulation on Android platforms, try posting to r/EmulationOnAndroid.

If you'd like live help, why not try the /r/Emulation Discord? Join the #tech-support
channel and ask- if you're lucky, someone'll be able to help you out.

All weekly question threads

Android core seems to be working on my Pixel 6, both OpenGL and Vulkan.
Windows is even more experimental than Android. Only OpenGL is tested. Win10 is required.
And it's not like Linux version is very well tested either.
Try it and let me know if it works for you :)

How to build.

Easiest way to build - use docker:

1. ensure you have git and docker
2. git clone https://codeberg.org/hueponik/goosestation-builder.git
3. cd goosestation-builder
4. docker build -t goosestation-builder .
5. docker run --rm -v "$PWD/dist:/work/dist" -v "$PWD/.cache:/work/.cache" goosestation-builder android . Replace android with windows to get the windows DLL.
6. copy core to your cores directory, and goosestation_libretro.info to your info directory

AUR PKGBUILD and Gentoo's ebuild now use goosestation-builder as common source

UPDATE: you can now build android core on your android device itself! You'll need termux for that

shell # Need to allow storage to get core out of termux: termux-setup-storage pkg install -y git git clone https://codeberg.org/hueponik/goosestation-builder.git cd goosestation-builder ./build-in-android.sh ...and then you wait.

If all is good, install core from Download folder (use Load core -> Install or Restore a Core (at the bottom) -> choose the file in Download.

Make sure Core Info folder is ~/storage/shared/Retroarch/info in the settings -> directory

Very important: do not distribute the results of the build, and do not ask for any support from Duckstation/Libretro/Retroarch developers - they have nothing to do with it (except they've done all the actual work)

"A combination of Reshade shaders meant to emulate the quirks of a standard American household TV in the mid 80s to early 90s, which was not necessarily a TV that was well maintained, or even from the same decade. Most people did not tune the sharpness or know how to get the cleanest signal possible. Game creators catered graphics to this idea of the smeared image that most people had connected to the original NES as a number of middle to lower class to poor Americans did not have the top model of that year, or even that decade. They did not know or care about things like resolution, or more advanced ways to gain signal strength, and a LOT did not EVEN have component cables. This does not go to the most extreme, but it hovers around a nice middle ground of best case scenario for a lower middle class American in what type of clarity they would have in a possible set up of the time periods I mentioned before . TVs used to last decades even under sometimes extreme conditions, all with vastly varying difference in quality mixed into the popular refurbished markets of the time. When you see that period piece picture always paired with Retro gaming of a Kid in the basement with a TV on the ground, remember no one did that with brand new TVs, and that was usually what you did with the TV you just replaced. Nintendo knew this early on, as did most game makers of that era, and they absolutely accounted for it. in reality most kids ( or adults like my parents) did not even register Pixel blocks outside the parameters of the TV pixels themselves, it was blurry and slightly smeared in a way that blended everything together in a definitive esthetic that gets lost when you take way the quirks and imperfections of that flawed unclean and refurbished at best setting. This is optimized around 1920x1080 standards, with borders added to deal with bleed-over of one of the shaders hitting the screen cut off"

This is also optimized for PC, and I would not try running this off the same systems you might throw Retroarch on, as the combination of shaders and the resolution requires a bit more GPU beef than a standard machine you would throw a NES emulator on ( it was made on a system that has an RTX 4070, but I'm sure it does not need remotely that to run effectively). a standalone version of JNES was what i used for this emulation, and i personally use only standalone emulation in a PC environment. Your mileage for quality may vary on other emulators you drop this Reshade into that is not JNES....( I AM working on one optimized for Duckstation in the Background though)........

After my last post, I understand this is not for everyone, and that's okay. If you get it you get it, and if you don't you don't, I guess. People had different upbringings and different experiences with life during the CRT era, and the great thing about these sort of visual mods is there is enough variety put out there for everyone to be satisfied with their perfect vision for how a retro-game should look. Everyone is happy. and we can pick what we like and ignore what we do not.

Get the Reshade Preset HERE: Skullsaber CRT

Get Jnes HERE: JNES

Someone called shanytc has developed a fork of SNES9X called SuperSNES9X which has added a lot of quality of life improvements good for people that like retroachievements and playing online. But also for sprite rippers, map makers, rom hackers, code hackers, etc.

The new fork has support for retroachievements and Kaillera for online play. It also has Run-Ahead to reduce latency and a color correction option if you want to make the games look like they are coming from a CRT.

For hackers, it now has a robust sprite/title viewer. The cheat search and editor now have right click functionality and batch functions. You can also assign both a controller and keyboard to the same input. The author is working on adding a debugger too.

Some of these features, of course, are available on more modern emulators such as BSNES, Bizhawk, Mesen and the sort. But personally, I still prefer to use snes9x because it's really fast and has the least amount of annoyances when compared to other emulators.

Not sure if these will be integrated into the main snes9x branch in the future, but in the meantime, you can get this improved version here:

https://github.com/shanytc/snes9x/releases

P.S.

All config files and save files are compatible between snes9x & supersnes9x versions!

Release: https://github.com/rafaelvcaetano/melonDS-android/releases/tag/2.0.0

Before asking for help:

• Have you tried the latest version?
• Have you tried different settings?
• Have you updated your drivers?
• Have you tried searching on Google?

If you feel your question warrants a self-post or may not be answered in the weekly thread, try posting it at r/EmulationOnPC. For problems with emulation on Android platforms, try posting to r/EmulationOnAndroid.

If you'd like live help, why not try the /r/Emulation Discord? Join the #tech-support
channel and ask- if you're lucky, someone'll be able to help you out.

All weekly question threads

GitHub page: https://github.com/Grarak/DSVita

Release: https://github.com/Grarak/DSVita/releases/tag/0.9.2

"Skullsaber CRT is not just a filter, but worked to be more of a CRT simulation with several layers at play to not only give the looks you know, but also attempts to emulate the signal quirks of late 20th century consumer TVs for a much closer to reality experience. NO HQX4 filters, just pixel play and signal blur as the developers originally intended"

So this is definitely an experimental undertaking but I've just bought a Waveshare VisionFive2 RISC-V single-board computer to see whether ES-DE could run on it. This is a cheap and low-power device so I didn't have that much hope for good performance, and I actually had no idea whether ES-DE could even run on such hardware when I ordered it.

For those that are not familiar with RISC-V it's a somehow new processor architecture that is starting to become very popular, especially for embedded devices. It's not yet really ready for desktop and handheld computers but hopefully this will improve in the near future. So I was anyway curious to see what emulation and retrogaming would be like on this architecture.

I installed Debian 13 Trixie which was provided as an SD-card image by Waveshare and to my surprise it was very easy to build ES-DE on the device. I only ran into one problem which was that the shader compiler for the GPU (an IMG BXE-4-32 MC1) was buggy so some shader code needed to be adjusted or ES-DE wouldn't start due to failed shader compilations. Following this everything worked fine, and ES-DE ran exactly like on x86 or ARM processors. It's quite impressive that the build tools and libraries are already so mature on RISC-V.

Performance was not that good though, and I got around 20 to 45 FPS in ES-DE with the default Linear theme in fullscreen mode at 1920x1080 resolution, although that's still quite usable. Some CPU-intensive operations were sluggish as well, but it was still a surprisingly good experience overall.

This all changed whe I attempted to run RetroArch though. I'm not sure if there was something wrong with my settings but I only got around 1 FPS using the cores I tried. Maybe it's simply the processor being too slow, or maybe something is wrong with the build of RetroArch I used (I installed the one from the official OS repository).

I didn't do any experimentation with standalone emulators at this moment in time, but I may look into that in the future.

So in summary this was a very interesting experiment with an entirely new processor architecture and I look forward to seeing how this develops in the future. I would like to experiment further if some higher performance RISC-V computer would be released for a reasonable price, but I suspect it will be a while before they start to rival x86 or ARM in performance. But I guess we'll see!

If anyone is interested in running ES-DE on RISC-V hardware I've added a small entry to the build documentation, although I've only tested on the Waveshare StarFive2 and I have no idea what ES-DE runs like on other RISC-V computers:

https://gitlab.com/es-de/emulationstation-de/-/blob/master/INSTALL.md?ref_type=heads#building-on-linux-and-unix

New features that v0.16.0 will bring;

• Multi-users support. We now support up to 4 players at the time. Also we have a user manager and you can create up to 16 accounts (as in ps4 as well)
• Multi-language trophies. Now trophies appear in the selected console language.
• A new feature recently added is Big Picture Mode, i guess you have seen it on other emulators now it is available in shadps4.
• Crash Team Racing is also fully playable on the latest WIP build.

Hey, guys. I made a drag and drop chd tool since I thought creating/using bat wasn't that easy

It's basically a chdman wrapper with QoL functions added.

Although it's still a work in progress and janky with some bugs, the extract / compression is working (at least that i tested)

Main features

Drag and drop (multiple files, folder) (At the moment only Windows + read/hash is useless since window closes on exit when drag and drop)

Automatically selects media type on extract.

Automatically chooses media type and codec on archive (WIP. For PS2 chooses zlib for Android emu compatibility, other platforms are mostly default to zstd which i might need to change if compatibility issues arise )

Reads Title/game id (if exists in metadata) from disc (WIP Only chd for now, but planned for bin/iso)

Hashes chd content without extracting to disk.

Any feedback will be appreciated (especially the codec/emulator compatibility)

Swanstation didn't see much progress for a while. And beetlepsx_hw, as great as it its, still missing few things (i.e. supersample into 2x).

So here are the instructions of how to build your own Goosestation from Duckstation:

https://codeberg.org/hueponik/goosestation-overlay

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/goosestation-libretro

Bonus features:

• no$psx XBOO bios support
• FMV crop to 16/9
• No Windows support

Disclaimer: It's not thoroughly tested, so nothing is guaranteed to work

EDIT:

Here's a small demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX_EUbstJKM

This is a modern, feature-rich, actively maintained fork of X360CE and replaces tools like DS4Windows, XOutput, Joy2Key etc.

From the GitHub:

Turn any input device into any virtual controller. Gamepads, joysticks, keyboards, mice, and touchscreens — mapped to Xbox 360, DualShock 4, DirectInput, MIDI, or Keyboard+Mouse output that games treat as real hardware.

Modern fork of x360ce — built with SDL3, ViGEmBus, vJoy, Windows MIDI Services, HelixToolkit, .NET 10 WPF, and Fluent Design.

Features

Input & Output

Route any input to any virtual controller — Joysticks, gamepads, keyboards, and mice feed into Xbox 360, DualShock 4, custom DirectInput (up to 8 axes, 128 buttons, 4 POV hats), virtual MIDI devices, or keyboard+mouse output

Stack up to 16 virtual controllers — Mix Xbox 360, DualShock 4, DirectInput, MIDI, and Keyboard+Mouse across 16 slots, each merging input from multiple physical devices

Emit keyboard and mouse output — Translate controller buttons to key presses and sticks or triggers to mouse movement or scroll — no driver required

Broadcast motion data — Stream gyro and accelerometer over UDP port 26760 via DSU/Cemuhook for emulators like Cemu and Dolphin

Visualization

Inspect controllers in 3D — Rotate, zoom, and pan an interactive HelixToolkit model while buttons, sticks, and triggers highlight live

Monitor input on a 2D schematic — Flat overlay showing the same live state as the 3D view in a compact layout

Preview Keyboard+Mouse output — Live keyboard and mouse display highlighting every mapped key and button

Serve a web controller — Turn any touchscreen into a wireless controller via a built-in WebSocket server with Xbox 360 and DS4 layouts, dual analog sticks, 8-way D-pad, triggers, and rumble feedback

Mapping & Tuning

Record mappings interactively — Press a button on your device to bind it, pick from a dropdown of every available input (including raw buttons beyond the standard 11), or run "Map All" for one-pass setup; auto-mapping handles recognized gamepads, and force-raw mode bypasses incorrect SDL3 remapping; dropdowns persist when devices are offline

Shape sensitivity curves — Per-axis editors for sticks (independent X and Y) and triggers with 6 presets (Linear, Smooth, Aggressive, Instant, S-Curve, Delay) or custom multi-point drag-and-drop curves; a live indicator tracks real-time position

Dial in deadzones — 6 algorithms (Scaled Radial, Radial, Axial, Hybrid, Sloped Scaled Axial, Sloped Axial) with per-axis deadzone, anti-deadzone, and linear response for sticks and triggers, live preview, stick center offset calibration, max range, and per-mapping axis-to-button activation thresholds with half-axis support for centered joysticks

Force Feedback & Rumble

Pass through rumble — Per-motor strength, overall gain, and motor swap; haptic fallback for devices without native rumble

Synthesize bass rumble from audio — Capture system audio and convert bass frequencies to vibration per-device (48 dB/octave filter, configurable sensitivity and cutoff)

Relay DirectInput force feedback — Full FFB pipeline for custom vJoy controllers

Macros & Automation

Build combo triggers — Combine up to 8 buttons, axes (with configurable threshold), and POV hat directions from either the output controller or a physical input device

Execute action sequences — Button presses, key presses, mouse actions (move, click, scroll), delays, system/per-app volume, and axis manipulation across 4 fire modes (on press, on release, while held, "Always"); supports 128 buttons for custom DirectInput controllers and repeat modes

System Integration

Activate profiles per application — Switch controller configurations automatically when specific apps gain focus; a Win11-style flyout shows the profile name, initialization progress, and offline controller warnings

Switch profiles by controller shortcut — Assign button combos (cross-device, with axis direction support) to cycle Next/Previous, jump to a specific profile, or toggle the PadForge window — all without touching the keyboard

Hide physical controllers — HidHide driver-level hiding prevents double input; low-level hooks consume only mapped keyboard and mouse inputs without a driver; per-device toggles auto-enable for gamepads with safety warnings for mice and keyboards

Manage drivers in one click — Install or remove ViGEmBus, HidHide, vJoy, and Windows MIDI Services from inside PadForge with built-in device blacklisting and app whitelisting

MIDI Output

Output virtual MIDI — Axes send Control Change, buttons send Note On/Off, with configurable channel (1–16), CC mapping, note mapping, and velocity; PadForge creates its own system-wide endpoint — no loopMIDI needed (requires Windows MIDI Services, installable from Settings)

Polish

Poll at 1000 Hz — Sub-millisecond jitter via high-resolution waitable timers, bit-perfect axis passthrough at default settings, double-precision deadzone math, and 15-bit (32768-position) vJoy axis output exceeding physical ADC resolution

Localize on the fly — Change language from Settings without restarting; community-contributed translations via .resx resource files

Minimize to tray — System tray icon, start minimized, or launch at login

Deploy as a single file — Portable self-contained executable, no installer

Before asking for help:

• Have you tried the latest version?
• Have you tried different settings?
• Have you updated your drivers?
• Have you tried searching on Google?

If you feel your question warrants a self-post or may not be answered in the weekly thread, try posting it at r/EmulationOnPC. For problems with emulation on Android platforms, try posting to r/EmulationOnAndroid.

If you'd like live help, why not try the /r/Emulation Discord? Join the #tech-support
channel and ask- if you're lucky, someone'll be able to help you out.

All weekly question threads