Could someone help me turn my PC into a great emulation system?

[Shinigami Kiba]

Believe it or not I still use my original Xbox I got in 2003 as my main emulation console and my PSP as my main emulation handheld. I play them practically every day, but I'm worried that eventually my Xbox's 80GB HDD will give out and I don't have the original HDD anymore so if it dies it'll be a brick.

I have a nice set up going where I pulled a long 7m USB cable from my PC all the way to my living room TV so I figured it's time to turn my computer into my main emulation system, but PC Emulation just doesn't seem as good in terms of UI.
I'm looking for a front end for all emulators or emulators that give me list of ROMs complete with screenshots and all that I can navigate with a controller, or at least the keyboard since I use my PS4 controller and have all sorts of cool mouse/keyboard profiles mapped to it.
I also have no idea what the latest and best emulators for PC are, I want something that will run in 1080p fullscreen and use all sorts of fancy modern filters and shaders to make the games look better.

Googling around just leads to confusing results and I have no way of knowing that the things I'm going to download are indeed the best or latest.

 

[Hungry Friend]

High-end Intel CPUs are your best bet along with at least a mid-range GPU, but when I upgrade I'm planning on getting an i7 4790K+either a Radeon HD 7970 or a good Nvidia card. I'll likely get more/faster RAM as well and since I have a shitty AMD CPU I need a new MB as well as a better PSU. That's overkill, but I don't play many modern games and I want an emulation machine that'll last me at least 5-7 years. AMD CPUs, generally speaking, suck balls for emulation.

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

There are a ton of different emulator front ends out there that have what you want, the biggest problem will be finding one you like. Most emulator front ends will require quite a bit of setup, so you'll also need to do a bit of work configuring all the different emulators and everything you want on them.

Here's a basic list of the ones I remember:
Steam and ICE (ICE adds in emulator/ROM entries to Steam)
Hyperspin
Kodi and ROM Collection Browser
Launchbox
EmulationStation
Game EX

IIRC, each one will require you to setup emulators for each system, so you'll need to download emus for each system you want to play and set them up in whatever frontend you pick. Some of the best emulators (IMO, I'm sure someone will come in here and say otherwise lol):
NES: FCEUX or higan
SNES: higan or SNES9x
GB/GBC/GBA: higan or VirtualBoyAdvance
N64: Mupen64plus/Project 64
PS1: ePSXe
PS2: PCSX2
GC/Wii: Dolphin
DS: desmume
Gen/Sega CD/GameGear/: Kega Fusion
DC: nullDC
And for arcade systems, MAME of course.

You could also use Retroarch and the various cores for emulation as well, but IMO it's more of a pain to setup everything and get everything working compared to just simply using separate emulators when it comes to using graphical frontends like this.

 

[Catastrophic]

If you're looking for an emulator with a nice UI then RetroArch is a pretty good choice. I also suggest buying controller adapters and play using official controllers. Raphnet has some great quality adapters although they don't come cheap.

 

[Shinigami Kiba]

Thanks for the list of emulators
I need emulators for everything up to the N64, I just don't enjoy playing N64 on an emulator since I always feel something is missing so I play it on the actual system. I have an extensive collection of retro games and systems, as well as modern systems of course.

My PC is good, got it in 2012 and it still runs games on highest or close to highest
i7 3820
GTX680 2GB
16GB RAM

I want emulators for
All Atari systems
Fairchild Channel F - so i don't have to lug the thing to the TV every time i want to play, plus the antenna cord is so damn short
Colecovision
Intellivision
C64
Amiga - tried this once it was a pain to run games, never seen anything so complex and bad
NES and SNES
SMS and Genesis/Mega Drive
All Arcade stuff, MAME/Neo Geo/CPS what have you
Turbo Grafix 16
Other obscure systems

I want to set up a frontend with screenshots and such, don't they have fontends that automatically download screenshots and everything for you?

I have ICE on Steam, but only use it for a few GCN/Wii games...tho why i dont know when the GCN, Wii and Wii U are hooked up lol but ICE would make browsing through entire rom sets very difficult and make a mess of my Steam library

I'll look into the other frontends y'all suggested, keep on posting suggestions and recommendations guys

 

[GamerzHell9137]

RetroArch has all of the emus but its a pain in the ass to configure.
Try that one if you want (and change to XMB layout)

 

[Shinigami Kiba]

RetroArch seems perfect for what I need
now to see some youtube videos on how to get the latest version up and running, though I doubt it will be all that complicated, if it's just some moving around of files and editing some txt/ini/config files i should be fine

if it requires coding/recompiling it won't be for me

 

[emmanu888]

AMD is good for emulation as well, i have a Phenom 2 X6 and it works great for Dolphin so you know its powerful

 

[Shinigami Kiba]

RetroArch is AMAZING
I didn't even need to look at tutorials to get it up and running, so good not even funny
Tried a bunch of NES ROMs of games I own, Little Samson, Rodland, Over Horizon and they all work

and yes I do actually own Little Samson PAL and Rodland PAL (one of the rarest PAL games)

 

[Shinigami Kiba]

EDIT: Well turns out the idea is not to use those stupid Good sets and use No Intro ones
all is good one as the program detects the ROMs as it should and classifies them by systems automatically

I hope it stays problem free

 

[Shinigami Kiba]

Update for anyone who cares, might find this info useful.

I set up Retroarch as a backend now and Emulationstation as a frontend
This seems to work like a charm, at least for my NES ROM set which has headers I'll try a No Intro headerless ROM Set later and see if Emulationstation can detect the ROMs and download appropriate boxarts and scrap ratings and info