The Consoles category gathers home consoles, the ones you plug into a TV set. It covers forty years of video game history, from the 1976 Fairchild Channel F — the first cartridge console — up to the Wii, taking in every major family along the way: Nintendo (NES, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, GameCube), Sega (Master System, Mega Drive, Saturn, Dreamcast), Sony (PlayStation, PlayStation 2), NEC, SNK, Atari, plus a long list of more confidential machines.
The principle is always the same: one rom folder per system under /recalbox/share/roms/, and sometimes a BIOS to provide. Cartridge consoles usually need nothing more than a single file; CD consoles (Mega-CD, PlayStation, Saturn, Dreamcast, PC Engine CD…) almost always require a BIOS and prefer the more compact .chd format, or Redump-quality .cue/.bin images. For multi-disc games, an .m3u file listing the images lets you swap discs without leaving the game.
New in Recalbox 10.1: the Epoch Cassette Vision joins the list. The Saturn gains Ymir, a modern emulator; the Dreamcast switches to flycast-next; the Neo-Geo CD is now handled by libretro-geolith; the PlayStation cores (lr-pcsx_rearmed, lr-swanstation) and lr-kronos have been updated. Netplay gains its synchronisation mode and "GameLink".
Not every console runs on every machine: the PlayStation 2, the Wii, the GameCube and the Xbox need a PC or, depending on the case, a Raspberry Pi 5. Each system page carries its own availability table, and emulator compatibility sums up the situation machine by machine.
Many consoles in this list support RetroAchievements, netplay and softpatching (translations and patches applied on the fly, without touching your files). Each system page states which emulators accept them.