To launch your emulated games on Retrom, you need to configure the emulator(s) that you want to use. Additionally, for each emulator you will need to configure a launch profile. Launch profiles are used to specify the command line arguments (if any) that the emulator should use when launching a game.

Tip

If you haven't yet setup your library, you may want to check out the Quick Start Guide guide to get started then come back here.

Adding an Emulator

To add an emulator you can click on the Emulators > Manage Emulators menu item. You will be presented with a UI that allows you to add, edit and remove emulators:

Emulator Fields

• Name: The name of the emulator.
• Platforms: The platforms that the emulator supports (or you wish to declare support for).
• Save Strategy: The strategy that the emulator uses to save games. This can be one of the following, and some emulators even support multiple strategies:
  • Single File: Save game data is stored in a single file. It is assumed that the save-file has the same name as the ROM file.
  • File System Directory: Save game data is stored in a directory. This is also commonly refered to as a NAND directory. Some common emulators that follow this strategy are: Dolphin, Yuzu, Ryujinx, etc.
  • Disk Image: Save game data is stored in a disk image. This is similar to the File System Directory strategy, but the save data is generally not traversable by your file manager. This could represent a memory card, or an internal hard drive. Some common emulators that follow this strategy are: PCSX2, Xemu, etc.

In order to use the emulator on this specific client, you need to point Retrom to the executable. This can be done in the configuration tab:

Adding an Emulator Profile

To add an emulator profile you can click on the Emulators > Manage Profiles menu item. You will be presented with a UI that allows you to add, edit and remove emulator profiles:

Tip

Sometimes you may want to have more than one profile for a given emulator. For example, you may want to have a profile for each platform that the emulator supports. Or, you may want to have a Fullscreen profile and a Windowed profile.

Profile Fields

• Name: The name of the profile.
• File Extensions: The file extensions that the profile supports.
  • Example: gb, gba, gbc for an mGBA profiles that will be used for Gameboy, Gameboy Advance and Gameboy Color games.
• Custom Arguments: Custom command line arguments that the emulator should use when launching a game.
  • When this field is set, you must include the {file} placeholder. This placeholder will be replaced with the path to the ROM file that is being launched.
  • Example: To launch a Gameboy game with mGBA you could use the following custom arguments: --fullscreen {file}.