Hmm, the Wii U port is sort of more of an emulator than normal RetroArch is, as normally you load RetroArch in one app and load the emulator core within it; with the Wii U port, you load each core as an individual app, so it's interesting in how that works. But yeah, it's a wrapper that loads emulators. People don't like RA for the GUI, which is their opinion and taste, but for the Wii U, they don't have much of a choice and they can either use it, or not.
Good show mate. Once again, is all about PREFERENCE. Yes retroarch is the only functional emulator on wii u at the moment, yes it works well for what people do with it, but is not everyone preferred emulator to go to considering how it works. Both on wii u and vita have the retro arch emulators, which accoording to many, work well at the moment, But i use the psp and wii emulators on both, the psp emulators like masterboy, pico drive, and nester j work, it may not be usin g PSVITA upgrade support but it worked fine on PSP for most of my situation, has nice and simple setup process, all i had to do was copy over the stuff on my psp memory stick to the vita homebrew loader like vita halfbyte loader. Good part is you don't need to run the henkaku/taihen hombrew enabler thing cause it woks without it. It can also work with the adrenaline as well, but still the vhbl advantage is nice.
On v wii, again is not using full potential on wii u but just like the psp emulators, they were designed to work on the system naturally and use as much as the resources as possible and it works well in my opinion. FCEUGX, SNES9XGX, VBAGX works well and so does the GENPLUS GX, it has like near 100% accuracy on both Genesis, Master system, game gear and sega cd Games. Plays the large rom files like the rom hack for mortal kombat 3 which is 10MB and pier solar and great architechs which is 8MB, and also has the sega cd enhance audio compatible set up, along with easy to use setup gui, has cheats you can add on the fly instead of only by text files, with accurate emulaton of every game even virtua racing, is near flawless even with framerate and turbo frame skip, I know some gba games on the gx emulator isn't very well in performance, but it tries at least, is playable for the most part, and all emualtors been upgraded to use the wii u pro controllers, and some been modded to use other HID USB controllers like ps3, It had more time to be developed and processed to make better.
I know a port of retro arch is already on wii, and i use it for the arcade games like street fighter and some wonderswan, but it had some time to get used to, and i still didn't use it as much, the idea behind the retro arch all in one is very smart idea but the cores and database rom loading, why couldn't it be simple as load the emulator and select rom file and play? setting up a core first and having optios for different ones, would someone who never used a emulator before know what it all means? I am not saying retro arch is bad, is just preference, that is all i mean by these statements.