Best platform for emulation

I'm looking to put together a small entertainment center for my living room but would like to leave out all the consoles for aesthetic reasons. I'd like to set up an emulator for my Nintendo games (NES - Gamecube) and I'm trying to find the most simple platform to set it up on. A plug and play type of set up with as little configuration as possible. I have an nvidia shield and a mini pc (asrock deskmini) and was thinking of using one of those. I had the "wiiflow" set up on my original wii years ago and it was perfect in that regard. Everything was all on one screen and interactive. I remember having issues with it crashing constantly though and I eventually gave up because of the little time I had to mess with it. To my knowledge, at that time, there weren't many controller options available. The set ups I seen were very bulky to deal with. I'd like to use the wii again but don't know whether there's been support for it over the years or if people have moved onto other platforms. I also purchased the mini NES which seems to work well especially with the wireless remotes, but it's still only limited to the NES for both games and controllers (as far as I know).



I guess the TLDR version is that I'm looking for a platform with an easy to use set up and interface for Nintendo games.

Everyone has their own favs and what is hard to set up to one is not hard to set up to the next. I have used many setups and will tell you the easier set up is a raspberry pi running retro-pi but it is not exactly a work horse. Because of that I stick to computers for emulation for the most part.

That said, I find my nvidia set up is pretty simple and nice but its the same as the swich really so I use it now. It certainly has the power to do the more demanding emus. I never really liked console emulators like running on the wii but RetroArch has made that a bit better.

My emu rigs of choice now.

1) My beast (the computer) does it all and my front end makes life easy.
2) Switch hacked, amazing! Love this thing, running RetroArch
3) MiSTer, this thing just gives realistic emulation. Its not for every one but has the best 1:1 emulation hands down.
4) R-pi, still good, easy set up but not the best emulation.

Thanks for the info. I was looking up front ends for the computer and based on what I saw, that’s pretty much the route I’d like to take. A lot of them have graphical interfaces and it’s basically a grab and go type of set up. The only thing is the controller. I’ll mostly be playing Nintendo games, so can I pretty much get any wireless controller for the PC or do I need something more specific? Also, how does the controller work across the different platforms when switching from one to the other? Will the buttons have to be configured every time or can that be saved?

I find the quickPlay frontend to be the best with PC setups if you do not want all that graphics. And with all emulators and their mappings Either get two (one to match n64 and one to match snes) or get somethign like a bliss-box.

For emulating now only two things:

https://www.hardkernel.com/

"ODROID-H2"

And PC everything else is weak.

Regarding what was mentioned by the original poster, I believe that your choice of "asrock deskmini" would be the best! I will assume that it is one of these: https://www.asrock.com/nettop/AMD/De...A300%20Series/

If that is anywhere near what you have as a setup then I would recommend you go with a dual drive setup (m.2 for the OS and a 2.5 inch one for file storage).

Afterwards setting up the software is all you need to worry about but in any case it will be a pretty strong system for a media center PC or for a "console" like experience. It all depends on how you set up the software.