Excessive EmulatorUI stacking?

[domerdel]

After several years of my rom library(ies) collecting dust and seeing emulation making a comeback, I decided to look at making a dedicated emulation station. Because I'm not linux savvy, I found RetroArch, which had an option for Win64. At first I was thinking to myself "finally, they made EmulatorUI like Plex" with their PS3 OS clone. However, even with simple guides, my first impressions were that of disappointment. Between the nonintuitive terminology and clunky menu, I reached for youtube.

Althought I would still argue RetroArch's horrible design flaws stated above, the youtube user was showing me an "easy setup" with another middle man called Launch Box. I went from disappointed, to slightly optimistic, then turned confused. It felt like an unneeded passthrough... Launch Station > RetroArch > SNES9X

This may be a false equivalency, but this starts to feel like in order to play my HD video content, I must download a Kodi, incorporate plex in order to run VLC.

Am I missing something? Do I really need three layers to run a rom in order to be centralized library?

[DOS76]

The answer is yes if you use RA there are stand alone emulators that work with LB also and then you would only have 2 layers the things is though once you have it all set up in LB and configured in RA you never have to see the RAUI again if you don't want or at least only on rare occasions mostly everything like creating and loading save states can be setup using hotkeys in RA for either your keyboard or for your controller.

[Lordmonkus]

3 hours ago, domerdel said:

This may be a false equivalency

Yes, it is false equivalency. The reason being every emulator has a UI of some sort and in the case of Retroarch it is the UI for the cores / emulators that it runs. Whether the UI is a traditional Windows like UI that you see in most emulators or it's the PS3 style UI it is still just the UI to configure it all.