Emulators - best practices for upgrading and maintaining emulator settings?

[ItchyRobot]

Hey guys,

I finally got my PC built, and have imported a couple sets of consoles, and MAME into LaunchBox ... pure awesomeness!
I am using RetroArch for NES, SNES, N64, and Intellivision games (pissed that Dragonfire is broken...grrrr).  I am using MAME 0.198 for arcade games.  And I am using Dolphin for GameCube games. I have no interest in keeping MAME up to date since it plays all the games I want to play perfectly.  Though, after messing around with a couple N64 and GameCube games, I realize that there is still room for improvement on those emulators.  That gets me to my question ...

What is the best methods for updating my emulators? Overwrite/or new folders for each version?

With the fact that updates to emulators is a continuing process, and can break working games accidentally, I assume I will want to have a completely knew folder for each new version of Dolphin and RetroArch as they come out with major updates. That way if a new update breaks a game that I like, I can always fall back to a later working build.  Is this the correct approach, or do you guys go "all in" with your updates and just deal with the accidental breaks in hopes that they get fixed with time?

Any tips for updates and best practices to saving controls/game saves/graphic setting/etc for emulators would be appreciated 

[neil9000]

2 minutes ago, ItchyRobot said:

Is this the correct approach, or do you guys go "all in" with your updates and just deal with the accidental breaks in hopes that they get fixed with time?

Personally i keep my emulators updated. Its rare for a emulator to break games in a update in my experience, and there is usually genuine benefits to updating. 

[ItchyRobot]

13 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

Personally i keep my emulators updated. Its rare for a emulator to break games in a update in my experience, and there is usually genuine benefits to updating. 

Thanks for advice. I'm new to emulation, so any of these tips are appreciated.

Does Dolphin and RetroArch allow me update within the software, or will I need to manually install the new builds and migrate setting/config files/folders each time I update?

[neil9000]

3 minutes ago, ItchyRobot said:

Thanks for advice. I'm new to emulation, so any of these tips are appreciated.

Does Dolphin and RetroArch allow me update within the software, or will I need to manually install the new builds and migrate setting/config files/folders each time I update?

Dolphin does have a updater that you can turn on in its settings, also are you using the official 5.0 build? If so dont, its like three years old at this point, download the most recent dev build instead, it's come a long way since the last official 5.0 build.

Retroarch doesnt update the actual program itself, but i use a third party program called stellar to update mine.

https://github.com/StellarUpdater/Stellar/releases

[ItchyRobot]

7 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

Dolphin does have a updater that you can turn on in its settings, also are you using the official 5.0 build? If so dont, its like three years old at this point, download the most recent dev build instead, it's come a long way since the last official 5.0 build.

Retroarch doesnt update the actual program itself, but i use a third party program called stellar to update mine.

https://github.com/StellarUpdater/Stellar/releases

I cant remember which one I am using (at work now), but I may have used the older stable build. Thanks for the tip; and thanks for the RetroArch update tool suggestion. 

[DOS76]

For RetroArch I just download the exe and debug.exe and throw it right inside my current build then start RA if I get a error message about missing dll files I then download the redist package and add it to the same folder so it basically just keeps using my old config. Have been doing so for about 3 years now without issue but if you want to be safe back it up 1st.