Today I was messing with retroarch v1.20.0 on MX v25.1. There were many issues to just get to the point of installing cores. My basic install was missing download cores menu, which for whatever reason was turned off haha, so I had to enable it via settings>user Interface>Menu Item Visibility>Show Core Downloader & tick that radio button. Ok fine. I do that and update the core list and then I am met with failed to download cores as I choose which cores I want. Turns out that where retroarch installs to is within a read only core MX file and so I had to provide myself administrative read/write access to down load cores. Haha, ok whatever so in terminal I used.
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER / path of file needing write access.
To get the specific file path, one needs to go back into retroarch to settings>directory>cores and it will provide the exact file path you need. This did ultimately work and I was able to download all the cores I wanted for the various systems I already physically own without manually having to stick them there.
It is worth noting that I have never had to do any of this with retroarch on macos lol. I also am really not a big fan of retroarch's gui although I get that it is designed more with a controller in mind vs kb/m. Oh well dems da breaks
What has prompted all of this fun is that I am contemplating installing MX25 on my kids imac 9,1. If I were to go the route of legacy corepatcher, it still only brings their imac up to macos11 (w/o a metal compatible gpu) which is still old at this point lol so if I were to drop MX onto their imac, I figured I needed to understand what all Id need to do in regards to their emulators they use. MX has retroarch which is great but I have been using openemu which is a macos only frontend unfortunately and one they have an easier time navigating generally. Still, I may do this as it will bring their aging imac into a much more modern and supported os, apps etc and it will be their first exposure to Linux & I think MX would be an easy & pretty intuitive lift for them plus as always if they had any questions they can ask.
We'll see. I might also start looking around for a newer 2013-15ish imac and go that route but the caveat there is thats when everything starts getting taped/soldered together and not readily user serviceable, so there's that caveat as well. Unless I can get a great deal, I think squeezing a few more years out of this old 24" workhorse with MX might be the better path forward. Id hate to drop a couple hundred on an iseries Intel taped together PITA imac and have it break.
