What are the best videogame emulators for Windows?

Best is somewhat subjective.

Accuracy. My hearing is shot and musical talents are minimal so I can't detect and would not know even if I could most of the things that the likes of the hcs forum or those doing audio plugins for music players spend time discussing. That said accuracy with the original hardware is important to a lot of ROM hackers (though at the same time I saw some rather passionate posts from N64 ROM hackers saying accuracy is no big deal) -- if I make a ROM hack it is going to work on original hardware if I can at all make it do so.
Nice looking features and TV replication ( http://bogost.com/games/a_television_simulator/ ) type things. Most old consoles are very low resolution, and even those that are not are still benefiting from a bit of a tune up. At the base level you have the likes of the sai and eagle type filters but more recently we have seen trends towards high resolution interpolation and things for those minimal 3d options 16 bit and older consoles have, and for a bit longer higher rendering res/widescreen hacks for a lot more.
Features, and whether said features might be recreated externally. Features can also be split -- I will sacrifice a lot to have 8 savestate slots in easy reach compared to one, and definitely compared to none.
Speed. Basic emulators run on just about anything still running today. Some of the higher end ones will see emulation of a machine old enough for the people that played it as kids to reasonably have grandkids of their own today grind a high end modern computer into the ground (never mind if it has to do multiple instances at once for some kind of multiplayer support).
Debug options/extra hack support. This can be anything from inaccurate hacks being supported to things like high res texture replacement. Beyond that you also have the plugin emulators. Oh and tool assisted speedruns also have their own thing.
Ease of use. Speaking of plugins there are emulators based around them (espxe being the most famous but there are others). Sometimes this makes things more complex than people care for.
Support from external tools/community. I will also bundle open source (or open source with a good license) in with this as this matters for some.
For reasons I have never quite figured out some people like those all in one emulators or emulator frontends.

All that said you said it is current year but in reality have things changed much since 2010 (possibly even 2005) give or take the systems that were not released or not emulated, and most of those only have the one emulator worth considering (know many Wii emulators that are not Dolphin?)? Assuming you are not one of the strange ones to like those all in one/frontend things anyway.

 

Probably more because there's no chance of getting a proper emulator* && decent performance on a today's computer, combined with to-date unknowns about that system (the security coprocessor F00D is still a black box, AFAIK)

* with few exceptions like CEN64 and of course whatever efforts are put in MAME, no newer system than the N64 has an actual low level emulator, which emulates the system - they're generally high level emulators which are more about running software without terrible interest in accuracy, than machine-readable education about the system (as a rule of thumb, if it has "plugins" and/or hardware accelerated graphics, it's at least in part an HLE)

Anyway, if you want a fairly unbiased list of emulators for a given platform (and general information, and "downloads", ...) go look up the Emulation General Wiki!

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As for FAST6191's claim that "emulation hasn't changed much since 2005" how much it's true depends on the point of view - while by that year Nesticle was known as inaccurate it was still noteworthy (same issue not much later for ZSNES and the original VisualBoyAdvance), but it took many years for better replacements to be made and widely appreciated~ - on the other hand huge progress was made (though for the most part evolutionary and not revolutionary)


~ the NES scene in particular has had "too many choices" over time, not helped of course by the fact that "NES emulator" in practice means CPU + PPU + 100s of mappers/PCBs + 10s of rather creatively implemented accessories, and SNES isn't too much better;
looking at the DS, NO$GBA went from an inaccurate and expensive emulator to a free-donations-encouraged piece of software of reasonable quality, and in fact the only somewhat working attempt at DSi emulation; mGBA became an excellent GBA solution still improving to date, etc

 

This is my current list of favorite emulators (I took it from my discord)

PCSX2 (PS2 Emulator, Developer Builds):
https://buildbot.orphis.net/pcsx2/

PPSSPP (PSP Emulator):
https://www.ppsspp.org/downloads.html

ePSXe (PSX Emulator):
http://www.epsxe.com/download.php

RPCS3 (PS3 Emulator):
https://rpcs3.net/

DeSmuME (DS Emulator):
http://desmume.org/

Cemu (Wii U Emulator):
https://cemu.info/

Dolphin (Gamecube and Wii Emulator):
https://dolphin-emu.org/

Nestopia (NES Emulator):
Nestopia - NES/Famicom Emulator

Snes9x (SNES Emulator, Snes9x 2010 is preffered version):
http://www.snes9x.com/

Project 64 (N64 Emulator):
https://www.pj64-emu.com/

VBA-M (GBA Emulator, supports .gba, .gbc, & .gb):
https://vba-m.com/

Citra (3DS Emulator):
https://citra-emu.org/

Bluestacks (Android Emulator):
https://www.bluestacks.com/

 

I was thinking more if I busted out an image of my 2005 era machine do I just update all those emulators to current versions (or current forked version/clear and present successor fork -- stick its name in a search engine and it will be the thing that comes up sort of deal) and call it a day.

2005 might have been somewhat hyperbolic (FCUEX for instance did not exist, even if the forks it combined to create itself probably did. By 2010 though...), and there was a lot of interesting happenings in the years since (even more if you count the console happenings, phone/tablet happenings, and the likes of the raspberry pi), but looking at what I was using back then I probably would do well enough for most purposes as a few things that stalled out during that time came back and are arguably the best choices again (EPSXE and PJ64 for instance - pSX was pretty good with only epsxe doing better if you could get the 9000 plugins and settings thereof to go together but since it came back I am not really considering pSX any more). If I am interested in the crazy emulator level rather than graphical level upscaling then maybe but generally usable by mortals

Did the VBA family line fall that much out of fashion? I like mgba and the technical discussions the author made were great reading and all but with the exceptions of the Shrek films and maybe the classic nes stuff (which had patches if you cared) is there all that much in it? The games will play, the main features are there and it is reasonable to use.

Likewise I don't think I would have known no$gba as expensive and inaccurate -- I have certainly always relied on its accuracy when dealing with edge cases in ROM hacks and the like for the GBA. DS wise then once it surpassed ensata (for others playing along that was the leaked emulator Nintendo made for its SDK, was never more than "get a few screenshots" but was the "leader" for a hot moment) then it was usually pretty neck and neck with desmume for most of my purposes.

I will give that I might get some odd looks for sticking with kega fusion (don't know if Stevesnake has done much recently) but at the same time I don't know if there is a winner here -- I usually grab one every year or so to make a cheat or hack for someone and it is all a bit meh.

 

I only really used the original, but I remember VBA-M being inferior in ram editing/vram viewer features around the turn of the decade (as did every non-Windows version of the original VBA, which completely lacked them) so I didn't give it much attention back then, some years later we got nearly perfect hardware virtualization on 3DS, and by the time I started looking back into GBA-on-PC then mGBA was the new entry with great focus on accuracy and emulation of novelty accessories but also most of VBA's features (and a proper installer), so I went with it and never looked back

 

That's the official website of mGBA, yep

 

people would lose their fuck seeing others suggesting desmume tbh, but, i'm not one of those people

here's a custom build of desmume that has upscaling and AA, better than the recent builds of desmume with upscaling because you can have both screens at a different size, so games with a minimap can have a smaller screen than the main screen
most recent build is from 2015 though so it's outdated as shit, maybe there's a source code somewhere that someone can port to more recent builds
http://shikaver01.webcrow.jp/desmume_x432r/index.html

 

I use the build with upscaling myself, but what other ds emulator for windows is the one people recommend?

 

There's the Blast Em Emulator
https://www.retrodev.com/blastem/

 

May I ask why the 2010 version is preferred? It's based off an old core and is not as accurate/fast as the base 1.60 version. Unless your hardware is weak, there's no reason to use it, like Android or the Wii/Wii U sure.

Blast 'Em is nice, and the only emulator to run the Titan Mega Overdrive 2 demo perfectly.

 

you quoted the entire post but never said which one was "the 2010" version

edit: nevermind i'm dumb, i had to re-read op like 8 times to notice what "the 2010 version" was


to add something more competent to the mix, there's bizhawk that's kind of a mostly all in one emulator, sorta like what retroarch wants to be but without having to download 786 different cores

 

Snes9x 2002/2010, etc are really only designed for older/weak machines and really don't need to be used. Snes9x 1.60 vanilla isn't even that demanding. You don't have to download all the cores for RetroArch, you can download what you want.

 

Just what I use, tbh I don't remember the exact reason but it's never let me down