Emulating Retro Games on Xbox with RetroArch

RetroArch is an excellent tool for emulating retro games on various platforms, including the Xbox. One of the key features of RetroArch is its ability to play multiple console systems using the same emulator, making it a great option for those who want to play a wide range of classic games without having to switch consoles.

For this tutorial, we'll be using RetroArch on an Xbox Series S, but the process can be applied to other consoles as well. To get started, we need to set up our RetroArch configuration. This includes selecting the console systems we want to emulate and setting up the necessary file extensions for each system.

In this case, we're going to focus on Game Boy Advance (GBA), GameCube, Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), and Wii games. We'll be using GBA .dot gba files, which are specific to each console system. It's worth noting that these file extensions can vary depending on the system, but for higher-end consoles like GameCube and Wii, we use .iso files.

Once we have our game selection set up, we need to transfer our games from their original storage devices to a USB drive. We'll create a folder called "games" in RetroArch's configuration directory, which will contain all of the emulated systems. From there, we can transfer our games to the USB drive using a file manager or by simply dragging and dropping the files onto the drive.

To use the USB drive with RetroArch on our Xbox, we need to set up some basic security permissions. We'll right-click on the USB drive, select "Properties," and then go to "Security" in Advanced. From there, we'll choose "Advanced" and select all application packages, and then double-click to replace all child object permissions. This ensures that RetroArch can access the files on the USB drive.

With our security settings set up, we can now use the USB drive with RetroArch on our Xbox. We'll plug in the USB drive, start RetroArch, and load a game using the "Load Content" menu. For this example, we're going to load Sonic 2 for Game Boy Advance (GBA) using the VBA Next core. The emulator runs smoothly, with an FPS counter displaying the accurate frame rate.

From here, we can experiment with different emulators, cores, and settings to fine-tune our RetroArch configuration. For example, we can try loading a gameCube or Wii title using the Dolphin core. We'll also explore the "History" feature in RetroArch, which allows us to go back to previously loaded games.

To fully customize our RetroArch setup, we can remap the Xbox controller keys using the "Input" menu. This is particularly useful for those who want to create a more intuitive control scheme or for players with disabilities. The FPS counter may lag slightly behind the game's actual frame rate, but it provides an accurate representation of the emulator's performance.

One of the most exciting features of RetroArch is its ability to emulate various console systems on a single platform. By using RetroArch on our Xbox Series S, we can access a wide range of classic games from different eras and consoles. This makes for an excellent gaming experience that's both nostalgic and modern.

For those interested in learning more about RetroArch, there are plenty of resources available online. We can check out the RetroArch website, which features an extensive wiki with tutorials, guides, and FAQs. Additionally, there are many communities, forums, and Discord servers dedicated to RetroArch, such as Dom's Discord and Gamer 13's YouTube channel.

Overall, emulating retro games on Xbox with RetroArch is a fantastic way to experience classic gaming without the need for specialized hardware or complicated setup processes. With its intuitive interface and wide range of console systems supported, RetroArch is an excellent tool for any retro gaming enthusiast.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today i'm going to show you the easiest way to get emulators up and running on your xbox in retail mode no depth mode is needed for this method here so you don't need to do any kind of resetting or anything like that we can access everything from our dashboard i've got retroarch installed here there are a few other emulators like a standalone psp emulator known as ppsspp but in this video i'm going to show you how to set up retro arch it's really easy to do and we'll have access to a ton of different emulators including dolphin for gamecube and wii but keep in mind this will also work on the xbox one and the xbox one x but you won't get the same kind of performance in the higher end emulators on those devices and when it comes down to it my favorite version of the xbox to run this on is the series s it's an affordable unit you can pick them up refurbished on ebay for around 240 dollars that's exactly what i have sitting here i'm running it on the s right now but if you only have access to the older xbox ones or a series x you can always install it on there now before we get started here i do want to give a big shout out to gamer13 i'm going to leave a link in the description to his youtube page he's also got a patreon because he does pay out of pocket for his developer account and really that's the only way it's possible for us to run these in retail mode and i would highly recommend joining the discord it's known as dom's discord all of the information you need about this is over there you can run this in retail mode and there's other ways to get different emulators up and running in developer mode but i wanted to keep this as simple as possible and personally one of my favorite ways to play is in retail mode so that's exactly what we're gonna go over today you'll still have access to the microsoft store you'll have access to all of your games and the only thing that's changed here is i now have access to retro arch and i can play emulators on my xbox so there are a few things you're gonna need obviously you'll need an xbox i would recommend the series s there's not much of a difference between the emulation and the s or the x given the cpu here another thing we're going to need is a usb drive to store all of our games and bioses on i'm using a cheaper usb 3 128 gigabyte drive that i picked up on amazon i'll leave a link for it in the description you can go much larger if you want to and there are ways to access the internal storage of the xbox but using an external usb drive is just the easiest way to go and the final thing we'll need here is a windows pc you can use windows 10 or 11 and we're only going to need this pc to set up the usb drive and get our games transferred over to so if you're interested in getting emulation up and running on your xbox in retail mode let's go ahead and jump into it okay so first things first we need to get retroarch installed on our xbox and this has actually been made really easy by gamer 13. we're gonna head to the edge browser and if you don't have this you can get it from the store we're just gonna head over to gamr13.github.io and from here you can actually join the discord you can donate you can check out the twitter reddit and his youtube channel with a lot of different tutorials but what we want to get here is the app store gamer 13's app store download app we're going to open we're going to install it's now installed looks a little something like this we're going to open it up and from here you can see we've got access to retro arch retrex gold which is actually really awesome this is something i will do a separate tutorial on it's more of a ui based emulation front end but for the higher end emulators i've had much better luck with retroarch so that's exactly what we're going to be using in this video we've also got access to ppsspp duck station and flycast we're talking about retro arch here with a ton of different stuff integrated so we're going to go ahead and click on this we're going to install this site is trying to open up the microsoft store we're going to choose open we can install retroarch right here we're going to install it so now it's downloaded we're going to go ahead and start it up for the first time it will need to extract some information and there is a little bit of setup to do here before we move over to a pc and get our games loaded up on a usb drive from here we're going to scroll down to online updater we want to update the assets it's going to extract it and it'll look a bit different it's going to give us some nicer font here with retro arch as you can see font has been changed another thing i personally like to do is update core info files i also want to update my controller profiles next thing we want to do is head to core system files downloader and from here we're going to scroll down to dolphin and download the dolphin zip this is the dolphin bios it's not 100 necessary for every game but it's good practice to go ahead and get it b will bring you all the way back to the main menu we're gonna head to settings and we're gonna go all the way down to the bottom to directory now this is very important to get your cores to show up when you start up a game but from here we need to set up our config file so we're going to choose configs we're going to go all the way down to the bottom and we need to set this to the correct directory so as soon as we go in here this is our retroarch folder that's installed on the xbox now we want to find the config folder choose this and we want to use this directory next core info and this one's really important you do want to set this because your cores won't show up once you start a game it just can't decipher what game goes with what core so we're going to find our info here use this directory database use this directory now it might look like it was already set up but i did run into issues with that core info so that's why i changed these just in case you can't get a core to load up we're going to back up from settings again we're going to go to input we're going to set up our menu hotkey toggle on our xbox controller so we're going to scroll down until we see hotkeys menu toggle control combo and i personally like using l3 and r3 that way while we're playing a game we press those two buttons and it'll bring us back into the retro arch menu and we can mess around with the settings there one last thing from the settings that i personally like to change is turning on a frame counter or an fps counter and we can do that by heading down to on-screen display on-screen notifications notification visibility and we're going to turn on the display frame rate it's going to be up in the top right hand corner that way we know if our games are playing at full speed or not you don't have to enable this if you don't want to but i personally like having it there so now we're going to go all the way back to the main menu configuration file save current configuration we're going to back up once and now we're going to quit retro arch so we've got retroarch set up our cores are already installed they're ready to go but we don't have any games so we're going to go ahead and move over to a windows pc we're going to load up some games on a usb drive we need to change a few permissions for that drive and then we should be set to play some retro games alright so here we are at my windows pc we're going to go ahead and get this usb ready for our games i've already plugged it into my pc it's just named usb drive we want to format this ntfs and we can actually name it whatever we want so if we right click here format i'm just going to name it xbox because i've got a bunch of these drives floating around make sure we're ntfs start once it's finished we can now transfer our games over to the usb drive i'm just going to snap it over here to the right hand side so we've got our freshly formatted usb drive i'm just calling it xbox and on my desktop i've created a folder called games inside of here i've separated the games i'm going to be running on the xbox by system so we've got gamecube gba for game boy advance snes and wii games so when it comes to the lower end systems you can leave these zipped if you want to but a lot of mine are already extracted for gba dot gba now keep in mind with these file extensions they will be different per system but for the higher end stuff like gamecube and wii i use dot iso files so dot iso and all of this information can actually be found out over on retroarch's website you can check out their wiki i'll leave a link for that in the description tons of awesome information over there and would highly recommend reading through some of it so we've got gamecube gameboy advance snes and wii in a folder called games we're going to go ahead and transfer this whole folder right over to that usb drive we're going to give this a little time to transfer over and then there's one last thing we need to do to this usb drive for it to work properly with our xbox and retro arch all right so we've got our games transferred over to that usb drive this is where we're going to be running them from on the xbox using retroarch got them separated by system now what we need to do here is right click on the usb drive we need to go to properties from here we're going to go to security advanced add select a principal advanced find now and from the bottom here we need to find all application packages we're going to double click on this we're going to choose ok ok close this down replace all child object permissions make sure this is checked we'll choose ok yes continue and we're good to go now we can use this usb drive with the xbox problem at all so we're going to go ahead and move back over to the xbox we're going to take our usb drive that we just set up plug it into our xbox we'll start retro arch and now we're ready to emulate some games on our xbox so we can go to load content and since we're in retail mode or usb drive will be drive d let's do gba first we'll go with gba i'm going to go with sonic 2 we can choose the correct core there's a few to choose from here as you can see personally i like vba next or mgba we're just gonna go with vba next we're now emulating retro games on our xbox in retail mode obviously this is a very simple emulator it's game boy advance doesn't take much to run it you can see i've got the fps counter up in the top right hand corner you can press your xbox button go home start a real xbox game if you want to but remember we set up that menu toggle hotkey pressing those two keys will bring us back into the menu we can exit the game we're playing now and move back over to load content we can load something else up i'm gonna go with gamecube one of my favorite games we'll do auto modalista the core list we need to choose the dolphin core so go with this one right here this will do gamecube and wii and we can now emulate gamecube and wii games on our xbox so i'm going to jump into some gameplay real quick gotta go through these menus but yeah this is really awesome and your xbox controller is already set up it's ready to go there's no configuration you really need to do now if you wanna totally remap all of the keys on the controller itself you can do that through retro arch by going to input and remap your keys from there the fps counter up in the top right hand corner might lag behind a little bit but as you can see this game is playing at full speed i mean we're right there at 59.95 fps but yeah gamecube and wii does run really well on the series s i'm going to go ahead and move back over to my desk and we'll try a wii game here we have capcom versus tatsunoko for wii and it runs really well on this unit but once you start up a game inside a retro arch we have another section here known as history makes it really easy to go back to those games and with retro arch there's just a lot that you can do with this you can add images for games and everything like that and all of that information you need is over on the discord or over on retro arch's wiki page this was just a basic setup to get you up and running in retail mode but there's a lot more that we can do with this and i would highly recommend checking out dom's discord lots of great information over there and another great resource for this is gamer 13's youtube channel link for all of that is in the description but this is really awesome i mean have an emulation in retail mode on the xbox is absolutely amazing and i highly recommend trying it out but that's gonna wrap it up for this one all links for everything that i mentioned are in the description and like always thanks for watchinghey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today i'm going to show you the easiest way to get emulators up and running on your xbox in retail mode no depth mode is needed for this method here so you don't need to do any kind of resetting or anything like that we can access everything from our dashboard i've got retroarch installed here there are a few other emulators like a standalone psp emulator known as ppsspp but in this video i'm going to show you how to set up retro arch it's really easy to do and we'll have access to a ton of different emulators including dolphin for gamecube and wii but keep in mind this will also work on the xbox one and the xbox one x but you won't get the same kind of performance in the higher end emulators on those devices and when it comes down to it my favorite version of the xbox to run this on is the series s it's an affordable unit you can pick them up refurbished on ebay for around 240 dollars that's exactly what i have sitting here i'm running it on the s right now but if you only have access to the older xbox ones or a series x you can always install it on there now before we get started here i do want to give a big shout out to gamer13 i'm going to leave a link in the description to his youtube page he's also got a patreon because he does pay out of pocket for his developer account and really that's the only way it's possible for us to run these in retail mode and i would highly recommend joining the discord it's known as dom's discord all of the information you need about this is over there you can run this in retail mode and there's other ways to get different emulators up and running in developer mode but i wanted to keep this as simple as possible and personally one of my favorite ways to play is in retail mode so that's exactly what we're gonna go over today you'll still have access to the microsoft store you'll have access to all of your games and the only thing that's changed here is i now have access to retro arch and i can play emulators on my xbox so there are a few things you're gonna need obviously you'll need an xbox i would recommend the series s there's not much of a difference between the emulation and the s or the x given the cpu here another thing we're going to need is a usb drive to store all of our games and bioses on i'm using a cheaper usb 3 128 gigabyte drive that i picked up on amazon i'll leave a link for it in the description you can go much larger if you want to and there are ways to access the internal storage of the xbox but using an external usb drive is just the easiest way to go and the final thing we'll need here is a windows pc you can use windows 10 or 11 and we're only going to need this pc to set up the usb drive and get our games transferred over to so if you're interested in getting emulation up and running on your xbox in retail mode let's go ahead and jump into it okay so first things first we need to get retroarch installed on our xbox and this has actually been made really easy by gamer 13. we're gonna head to the edge browser and if you don't have this you can get it from the store we're just gonna head over to gamr13.github.io and from here you can actually join the discord you can donate you can check out the twitter reddit and his youtube channel with a lot of different tutorials but what we want to get here is the app store gamer 13's app store download app we're going to open we're going to install it's now installed looks a little something like this we're going to open it up and from here you can see we've got access to retro arch retrex gold which is actually really awesome this is something i will do a separate tutorial on it's more of a ui based emulation front end but for the higher end emulators i've had much better luck with retroarch so that's exactly what we're going to be using in this video we've also got access to ppsspp duck station and flycast we're talking about retro arch here with a ton of different stuff integrated so we're going to go ahead and click on this we're going to install this site is trying to open up the microsoft store we're going to choose open we can install retroarch right here we're going to install it so now it's downloaded we're going to go ahead and start it up for the first time it will need to extract some information and there is a little bit of setup to do here before we move over to a pc and get our games loaded up on a usb drive from here we're going to scroll down to online updater we want to update the assets it's going to extract it and it'll look a bit different it's going to give us some nicer font here with retro arch as you can see font has been changed another thing i personally like to do is update core info files i also want to update my controller profiles next thing we want to do is head to core system files downloader and from here we're going to scroll down to dolphin and download the dolphin zip this is the dolphin bios it's not 100 necessary for every game but it's good practice to go ahead and get it b will bring you all the way back to the main menu we're gonna head to settings and we're gonna go all the way down to the bottom to directory now this is very important to get your cores to show up when you start up a game but from here we need to set up our config file so we're going to choose configs we're going to go all the way down to the bottom and we need to set this to the correct directory so as soon as we go in here this is our retroarch folder that's installed on the xbox now we want to find the config folder choose this and we want to use this directory next core info and this one's really important you do want to set this because your cores won't show up once you start a game it just can't decipher what game goes with what core so we're going to find our info here use this directory database use this directory now it might look like it was already set up but i did run into issues with that core info so that's why i changed these just in case you can't get a core to load up we're going to back up from settings again we're going to go to input we're going to set up our menu hotkey toggle on our xbox controller so we're going to scroll down until we see hotkeys menu toggle control combo and i personally like using l3 and r3 that way while we're playing a game we press those two buttons and it'll bring us back into the retro arch menu and we can mess around with the settings there one last thing from the settings that i personally like to change is turning on a frame counter or an fps counter and we can do that by heading down to on-screen display on-screen notifications notification visibility and we're going to turn on the display frame rate it's going to be up in the top right hand corner that way we know if our games are playing at full speed or not you don't have to enable this if you don't want to but i personally like having it there so now we're going to go all the way back to the main menu configuration file save current configuration we're going to back up once and now we're going to quit retro arch so we've got retroarch set up our cores are already installed they're ready to go but we don't have any games so we're going to go ahead and move over to a windows pc we're going to load up some games on a usb drive we need to change a few permissions for that drive and then we should be set to play some retro games alright so here we are at my windows pc we're going to go ahead and get this usb ready for our games i've already plugged it into my pc it's just named usb drive we want to format this ntfs and we can actually name it whatever we want so if we right click here format i'm just going to name it xbox because i've got a bunch of these drives floating around make sure we're ntfs start once it's finished we can now transfer our games over to the usb drive i'm just going to snap it over here to the right hand side so we've got our freshly formatted usb drive i'm just calling it xbox and on my desktop i've created a folder called games inside of here i've separated the games i'm going to be running on the xbox by system so we've got gamecube gba for game boy advance snes and wii games so when it comes to the lower end systems you can leave these zipped if you want to but a lot of mine are already extracted for gba dot gba now keep in mind with these file extensions they will be different per system but for the higher end stuff like gamecube and wii i use dot iso files so dot iso and all of this information can actually be found out over on retroarch's website you can check out their wiki i'll leave a link for that in the description tons of awesome information over there and would highly recommend reading through some of it so we've got gamecube gameboy advance snes and wii in a folder called games we're going to go ahead and transfer this whole folder right over to that usb drive we're going to give this a little time to transfer over and then there's one last thing we need to do to this usb drive for it to work properly with our xbox and retro arch all right so we've got our games transferred over to that usb drive this is where we're going to be running them from on the xbox using retroarch got them separated by system now what we need to do here is right click on the usb drive we need to go to properties from here we're going to go to security advanced add select a principal advanced find now and from the bottom here we need to find all application packages we're going to double click on this we're going to choose ok ok close this down replace all child object permissions make sure this is checked we'll choose ok yes continue and we're good to go now we can use this usb drive with the xbox problem at all so we're going to go ahead and move back over to the xbox we're going to take our usb drive that we just set up plug it into our xbox we'll start retro arch and now we're ready to emulate some games on our xbox so we can go to load content and since we're in retail mode or usb drive will be drive d let's do gba first we'll go with gba i'm going to go with sonic 2 we can choose the correct core there's a few to choose from here as you can see personally i like vba next or mgba we're just gonna go with vba next we're now emulating retro games on our xbox in retail mode obviously this is a very simple emulator it's game boy advance doesn't take much to run it you can see i've got the fps counter up in the top right hand corner you can press your xbox button go home start a real xbox game if you want to but remember we set up that menu toggle hotkey pressing those two keys will bring us back into the menu we can exit the game we're playing now and move back over to load content we can load something else up i'm gonna go with gamecube one of my favorite games we'll do auto modalista the core list we need to choose the dolphin core so go with this one right here this will do gamecube and wii and we can now emulate gamecube and wii games on our xbox so i'm going to jump into some gameplay real quick gotta go through these menus but yeah this is really awesome and your xbox controller is already set up it's ready to go there's no configuration you really need to do now if you wanna totally remap all of the keys on the controller itself you can do that through retro arch by going to input and remap your keys from there the fps counter up in the top right hand corner might lag behind a little bit but as you can see this game is playing at full speed i mean we're right there at 59.95 fps but yeah gamecube and wii does run really well on the series s i'm going to go ahead and move back over to my desk and we'll try a wii game here we have capcom versus tatsunoko for wii and it runs really well on this unit but once you start up a game inside a retro arch we have another section here known as history makes it really easy to go back to those games and with retro arch there's just a lot that you can do with this you can add images for games and everything like that and all of that information you need is over on the discord or over on retro arch's wiki page this was just a basic setup to get you up and running in retail mode but there's a lot more that we can do with this and i would highly recommend checking out dom's discord lots of great information over there and another great resource for this is gamer 13's youtube channel link for all of that is in the description but this is really awesome i mean have an emulation in retail mode on the xbox is absolutely amazing and i highly recommend trying it out but that's gonna wrap it up for this one all links for everything that i mentioned are in the description and like always thanks for watching\n"