Favourite Emulators?

[Touko White]

A little debate about your favourite emulators.

You can kill me for liking NO$GBA more than a pair of VBA-M/DeSmuME but oh well, I feel it's partly open source because the dev is releasing all his research to the public anyway.

NES - FCEUX
Works for most games I've played rather well and has some great settings, open source and also extremely portable it seems.

While Nestopia UE is slightly more accurate I found FCEUX is easier to set up and get going.

SNES - ZMZ
ZSNES interface (which looks damn amazing and retro, which I love), but you can run the Snes9x or higan cores on it. Snes9x is my favourite emulator for SNES due to its playability/compatibility and speed in general.

Only thing that is hard is movie recording, but if you have Windows 10, use the Xbox app for a good result as seen here: Kaizo Mario World 3 Stages 1 & 2 by Luigi_Fan

N64 - Mupen64
Mainly for its portability, I've played only a few N64 games (mostly early releases) and they were playable in Mupen64 rather well, I never owned an N64 so can't really say much about it. I do wish it supported cheat codes though. Also you could check out mupen64plus but I don't know how to use the command line myself, which is why I don't use it, but there are front-ends for it, but Python failed to install on this machine for some reason -.-

Game Boy Advance/DS - NO$GBA
While it is closed source, the documentation for the GBA/DS on GBATEK is a must-read for any home brewer IMO, it's also probably one of the best feats of closed source software ever made. The sound isn't that great, but one thing I do appreciate is that unlike other GBA emulators, NO$GBA emulates the backlight properly from the GBA SP, meaning games don't look over-saturated like they do in VBA-M.

The debugger also looks extensive to me.

CPS1/CPS2/NeoGeo - Kawaks
I've used this emulator only for Super Street Fighter II and it works pretty good, although there are a few problems with things like getting rid of the scan-lines was a big pain for me. MAME is a pain to set up so this is an easier option for people ^^

 

[Deleted User]

PPSSPP ~ I used to really love this PSP emulator because it ran every single game, app, and homebrew I ever tried through it without any issues, and I don't think there's ever been a time when something I have tried to play through it has been incompatable!
There's also an upscaling feature which is my most favourite part of the emulator, as it makes me feel as if I'm playing an actual PC game!

PCSX2 ~ Although it took me a while to set up the best settings, I had a blast playing one or two games on this PS2 emulator (and at full speed too!). To this day, I still enjoy playing games like Parappa the Rapper 2 through it when I get the chance sometimes!

And last, but by no means the least, Dolphin Emulator ~ Possibly one of the most famous Wii and GC emulators out there, it also incorporates the Wii menu and GameCube startup screen, as well as support for many homebrews out there!
And although I sometimes don't get the best performance, it's feature-rich and contains many enhancements such as stereoscopic 3D, screen filters, and NetPlay support.

Some other emulators I additionally enjoy are PCSX, mGBA, gPSP, PocketSNES, VBA GX, MAME, and M2Emulator (I just love playing Sonic the Fighters on my PC!)

 

[Touko White]

@Voxel wasn't PPSSPP developed by some of the members of the Dolphin Emulator team, if I'm right?

Heck yeah, PCSX2 and exPSE or whatever it was called (the really good PS1 emulator) were great too, though I barely tried them, they worked well.

 

[Deleted User]

@Voxel wasn't PPSSPP developed by some of the members of the Dolphin Emulator team, if I'm right?

I think Neobrain added/fixed a few things in PPSSPP, as well as being one of the authors of Dolphin. I'm not aware of anyone else who did work on both emulators, but I wasn't even aware that they did in the first place lol; I just looked it up now.

 

[Touko White]

I think Neobrain added/fixed a few things in PPSSPP, as well as being one of the authors of Dolphin. I'm not aware of anyone else who did work on both emulators, but I wasn't even aware that they did in the first place lol; I just looked it up now.

I was likely getting confused with the Oculus Rift VR ports since they were ported by the same team

 

[Deleted User]

I was likely getting confused with the Oculus Rift VR ports since they were ported by the same team

Oh, nice! To be honest, I was never even aware the Oculus Rift already had emulators! Perhaps I have just been living under a rock for a while... Do you know a good list of emulators already ported to the Rift at all? I just tried google, but all I got were the emulators themselves. Could certainly-well drive me to buy a Rift when they come down in price!

 

[Touko White]

I only managed to find https://dolphinvr.wordpress.com/ so far.

 

[QuarkTheAwesome]

Call me biased, but I like LiteNES's simplicity. Fitting a NES emulator into so few lines of code really impresses me.

Speaking of underpowred emulators, SNEMulDS is amazing. I powered through the first chunk of Super Mario World on it today (VD4 foils me again!) and it was great. While it has its charms (blind Morton fights are always good) it works well enough and it's certainly worth the space on your flashcart. The DS's buttons are nice and line up 1:1 with a SNES controller.

From now on, I'll call you "biased". Is this okay?

 

[Flame]

VBA-M on PC for GBA games.

gPSP on the PSP for GBA games.

mGBA on Vita for GBA games.



yep GBA games.

 

[Kira "Bugs Bunny" Yamato]

PPSSPP is a beaut. Only problem I have with it is with save states. Sometimes it crashes when saving them, sometimes it writes them incorrectly and can't load them. But trying it out for the first time was still amazing.

Aside from that, mGBA is really solid. Not really a whole lot to say there. I'll still be using BGB for GB/GBC for the foreseeable future though.

 

[DinohScene]

Actually, I don't really have any fav emulators.
Mostly because I own the original hardware and games that I do want to have emulated, I just get any emulator available on said platform.

 

[Sonic Angel Knight]

Are you asking about a PC? Or a console?