Good is always good. This is probably not the case at all, but it does appear to be in video games. Otherwise it cannot be explained that emulators are so successful. The first one that I met many years ago was MAME, the emulator that allows us to play arcade machines from the 80s and 90s. Later I met others that allowed me to play consoles such as the Mega Drive, the Super Nintendo or the Master System II. Later came more versatile emulators such as RetroArch, an emulator that contains everything we need so that we can play the titles of many different consoles.
The emulator took a few years to gain fame. It was first released in 2010, but back then many of us preferred to use several separate emulators because we already knew them and because they were more intuitive. Today, RetroArch is back in the news, and it's not because it released a major update, but because later this month will be available on the video game platform Steam. As your version for Linux, which we will find on Steam will be free.
Steam's RetroArch will be identical to what we already know
It will be the largest non-commercial emulation release ever to hit the Valve store. Libretro himself was in charge of break the news last Friday explaining the path that the launch will follow:
- Will be free.
- The Windows version will be the first to arrive (what a surprise…), while the versions for Linux and macOS will arrive later.
- At first, there will be no difference between the version that will be on Steam and the one that we can get on their website. There will be no Steamworks SDK functionality or additional Steam features. They do plan to update the emulator later to add Steam functionality as a platform.
- The initial release will be approximately July 30 (ahem… for Windows).
The third point is striking, which explains that nothing will be added from Steam in the first version. It is likely that at first it is not compatible with Steam Link, which would allow us to play on unsupported devices, such as Apple's iPad, iPhone or Apple TV. In any case, we will still have to wait for its official launch to know what we can not do in the RetroArch of Steam in its first version.
Unlike Apple, Valve does not have any regulations that restrict the use of emulators on their platform, but they do ban their discussions and tag themselves as "Pirate" on their forums. The company has not published any statement related to the arrival of RetroArch to its platform, but we can think that it will be official this month after the publication of Libretro.
Personally, I think that RetroArch is less intuitive than any other video game emulator made for a single console and I always end up using simpler ones. Maybe his arrival on Steam will make me change my mind.