Emulation

Emulation

Heronite detects the emulators you have installed, scans your ROM folders, and adds each game to the Collection with its art. Install the emulators yourself (from your distribution, Flathub, or their websites); Heronite finds them on PATH, as Flatpaks, and as RetroArch cores.

Supported emulators

Emulator	Systems
RetroArch	Many, through cores (see below)
Dolphin	GameCube, Wii
PCSX2	PlayStation 2
DuckStation	PlayStation
PPSSPP	PSP
RPCS3	PlayStation 3
shadPS4	PlayStation 4
Vita3K	PlayStation Vita
Cemu	Wii U
Ryujinx	Switch
Azahar (or Citra)	3DS
melonDS	Nintendo DS
mGBA	Game Boy, Game Boy Advance
Xemu	Xbox
Flycast	Dreamcast
MAME	Arcade
ScummVM	Adventure games
Custom	Any other emulator: give the program and its arguments

RetroArch cores

Heronite uses these cores by default when RetroArch runs a system.

System	Core
NES	nestopia
SNES	snes9x
Game Boy	gambatte
Game Boy Advance	mgba
Nintendo 64	mupen64plus_next
Nintendo DS	melonds
Mega Drive, Master System, Game Gear	genesis_plus_gx
Saturn	mednafen_saturn
Dreamcast	flycast
PlayStation	pcsx_rearmed
PSP	ppsspp
PC Engine	mednafen_pce_fast
Neo Geo Pocket	mednafen_ngp
WonderSwan	mednafen_wswan
Lynx	mednafen_lynx
Atari 2600	stella
Arcade	fbneo
MAME	mame

Install cores from RetroArch's own Online Updater. Heronite looks for them in RetroArch's cores folder (~/.config/retroarch/cores or %APPDATA%\RetroArch\cores), the Flatpak, and the system libretro folders.

ROM folders

Keep one subfolder per system, for example:

ROMs/
├── snes/
├── psx/
└── gba/

On the first run, Heronite scans these folders if they exist:

• Linux (in your home folder): ROMs, Roms, roms, Emulation/roms, Games/ROMs, Games/Emulation/roms, retrodeck/roms, RetroDECK/roms; and Emulation/roms, roms, retrodeck/roms on other disks.
• Windows: ROMs, Emulation\roms, Games\ROMs, Documents\ROMs in your user folder; and Emulation\roms, ROMs, Games\ROMs, RetroArch-Win64\roms at the top of each drive.

Add more folders on the Emulators page (Ctrl 5). Scans skip bios, firmware, saves, states, cheats, system, media, and manuals folders. Multi-disc games are read from .m3u, .cue, and .gdi files, so each one shows up once.

Save states

A game's page lets you continue from a save state.

Achievements

Connect a RetroAchievements account in Settings to see your achievements for emulated games. See Metadata and Art.