March 28, 2024, 03:50:01 pm

Preferred emulators

Started by Bry89, January 22, 2018, 01:40:26 am

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Bry89

For those that fancy playing games on an emulator, what do you use? For me, here are the select few that I've made use of when I used to do emulation gaming myself years back (though may get back to it again some day, when I'm not too busy with real-life things):


  • FCEUltra - The NES emulator I used most often, and one of the best I had used.
  • VirtuaNES - Another NES emulator, but this seemed better for the following reasons: the ability to quick save/load during gameplay and, has support for unusual mappers each time it is updated, mostly for these weird bootleg games floating about. I think I can recall a Chinese version of this too.
  • VisualBoyAdvance - Pretty much everyone uses for all Gameboy systems, and was the second most-used of all.
  • Kega Fusion - Good support for all of Sega's systems, from the MegaDrive/Genesis to the Master System. It is one emulator I would highly recommend.
  • Snes9X - It might not be the best of all SNES emulators but, I felt more comfortable with it. People said that ZSNES was better but, I had a hard time trying to even load a ROM with it.
  • Stella - An Atari 2600 emulator which works smoothly but is entirely minimal (as in, no menu bar at the top). I remember having to press a certain key just to go back to the ROM loading window.


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One time, I also made use of online emulators which may not be the best thing in the world but, I still have fond memories playing Super Bomberman 3 under SnesBox :P
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smeghead


P

It was a long time ago I actually played emulators for fun (except Super Famicom Mini Classic and some Virtual Console games) so I don't know what emulators are good now days for playing, but I do know some emulators that are good:

Famicom/NES:

Mesen
My new favourite Famicom/NES emulator. It got almost all functions that I use in other emulators and it's one of the most accurate and it has many functions to simulate different versions of Famicom, NES and famiclones. I've helped with some of the features myself (by discussion and testing, I haven't done any programming). It's the most promising Famicom emulator now and probably the best choice for both playing games and developing Famicom games with.

FCEUX
A fork of FCEUltra with lots of useful debugging tools (our own UglyJoe has contributed to some things on it). I don't recommend it for playing games with, not that it's very bad it's just that there are much better emulators nowdays. It was my emulator of choice for development before Mesen emerged and I still use it on my laptop. Mesen's problem is that it may be very slow on older computers and it starts very slow on my laptop.

Nintendulator
Just like Mesen it's cycle-accurate. It was the emulator of choice when you wanted accuracy before Mesen emerged, now I think Mesen is generally more useful. Still it's a great and accurate Famicom emulator.


Game Boy:

BGB
My favourite GB, SGB and GBC emulator. It's accurate and has lots of features including linking (Pokemon works) and great debug tools. I recommend it for both playing games with and for developing GB or GBC games with. I just wish it was open source.


Super Famicom/NES:

bsnes-plus
A fork of bsnes which is the most accurate SFC emulator there is and supports all games including things like Satellaview and Sufami Turbo. It has a great debugger besides being cycle accurate so I'd recommend it for both playing games with and for development. I'd recommend the main branch of bsnes instead but it's now a multi-system emulator called higan and is quite annoying to set up. Also I don't know if it has any debugging tools. I don't recommend ZSNES or Snes9x anymore. ZSNES is very inaccurate and many games won't work as they should while Snes9x has a weird interface and crashes a lot, besides not being very accurate.

no$sns
I only use it because of it's great debugging tools (like all no$ emulators tend to have). It's not very good for playing games with or accuracy.


PC-Engine:

Mednafen
The only accurate emulator there is it seems. Actually I don't like it much at all since it's a pain to use but as it's the only accurate PC-Engine emulator and has good debugging tools I use it for development purposes. I used to use Magicengine for playing games with, and although it has a great interface it's just too inaccurate and doesn't have any debugging tools either, so I can't recommend it anymore unles for playing some games with. Another is Ootake but it also has big problems with accuracy.


Arcade:

MAME
The emulator of choice for most arcade systems. It's a huge multi-system emulator that supports tons of arcade systems with the aim of accuracy and documenting the hardware as a goal. It's sister project MESS which does the same thing but with computers, consoles and pretty many other systems that doesn't classify as arcade machines has recently merged with MAME so now it's no longer a multi-system arcade emulator anymore but a humongous multi-system emulator.


Gamecube & Wii:

Dolphin
Probably the best emulator for a modern home console system. It's highly dependant on high level emulation though so don't expect any cycle accuracy and it also requires a good modern computer.


DOS:

Dosbox
The easiest way to run many DOS-only programs and games. Very useful to have.

smeghead

Quote from: P on January 23, 2018, 05:29:19 am

DOS:

Dosbox
The easiest way to run many DOS-only programs and games. Very useful to have.


8)