'Best' emulators to user for every platform in LB

[snoopybooh]

Hi guys! I've already made a decent library in LB and now I would like to discuss with all of you which emulator is the best one for it's relative platform. Personally I switched to Retroarch cores for every platform that can be emulated through RA cores. It's not about real accurancy of the emulators, but about convenience in having the same options and more options in a good emulator. At first I hated RA, but now I realized that it's very convenient since by way of the examples I can use shaders for every platform, cheats, I can exit from RA with the controller and so on.

Here's the emulators or RA cores I've chosed for my platforms:

Turbografx-16 - During 'all of life' I've been using Magic Engine (it worked flawlessly), but due to limited graphics option and outdated GUI I've switched to Medanafen_supegrafx core

Snes - I've been in love with Znes, but just like above: outdated and limited graphic options. Now I'm using snes9x_libretro core

Genesis - genesis_plus_gx_libretro - I've been surprised on how genesis emu-scene is quite dead...standalone emulators are so outdated...

Gamegear- picodrive_libretro

NeoGeo CPS1-2 - fbalpha2012_neogeo_libretro core

3D arcades - I actually have no options...so I must use standalone emulators such as Demul, model2, model3

Wii - Dolphin seems to be the best (maybe the only) choice. Does it also works for GC?

Nintendo DS - DSemume was a good emulator, but now I switched to his relative RA core: desmume_libretro.dll

N64 - I'm not actually that sure about N64 best emu or core. It's quite impressive how N64 emulation it's far from being real perfect. I was using project64, but now I switched off (once again) to RA cores such as mupen64plus_libretro and glupen64_libretro. The last one seems to be quite fast although mupen is the main choice for now. Since I know very little about N64 emulation, can you guys reccomend the best core or tweaks?

Mame - I'm using Mame64 'till now, but I'll be switching to any RA Mame core due to the limited option of Mame itself. Any good core to suggest?

Commodore Amiga - I still need to setup this platform, but I've always used WinUAE. However I think it's more convenient to use the relative RA core. Do you agree?

 

 

[DOS76]

For the most part the list looks fine for SNES you may want to use one of the bsnes cores accuracy or balance just since they are much more accurate then the snes9x. The standalone version of Desmume  is usually recommended but if you want to use RA for ease of use it isn't really an issue.

As to MAME how do you see MAME as having limited options I find it to be full of options and am more impressed by it the more I learn new things about. I'm hoping they improve their software list capabilities and that some day MAME may be the only emulator that you need.

[SentaiBrad]

MAME is full of options, but not all of them may be accessible by a UI. I updated our default list that I am trying to get Jason to update as well, but it's taking some time.

[Zombeaver]

On 12/23/2016 at 7:43 AM, snoopybooh said:

Turbografx-16 - During 'all of life' I've been using Magic Engine (it worked flawlessly), but due to limited graphics option and outdated GUI I've switched to Medanafen_supegrafx core

Snes - I've been in love with Znes, but just like above: outdated and limited graphic options. Now I'm using snes9x_libretro core

Genesis - genesis_plus_gx_libretro - I've been surprised on how genesis emu-scene is quite dead...standalone emulators are so outdated...

Gamegear- picodrive_libretro

NeoGeo CPS1-2 - fbalpha2012_neogeo_libretro core

3D arcades - I actually have no options...so I must use standalone emulators such as Demul, model2, model3

Wii - Dolphin seems to be the best (maybe the only) choice. Does it also works for GC?

Nintendo DS - DSemume was a good emulator, but now I switched to his relative RA core: desmume_libretro.dll

N64 - I'm not actually that sure about N64 best emu or core. It's quite impressive how N64 emulation it's far from being real perfect. I was using project64, but now I switched off (once again) to RA cores such as mupen64plus_libretro and glupen64_libretro. The last one seems to be quite fast although mupen is the main choice for now. Since I know very little about N64 emulation, can you guys reccomend the best core or tweaks?

Mame - I'm using Mame64 'till now, but I'll be switching to any RA Mame core due to the limited option of Mame itself. Any good core to suggest?

Commodore Amiga - I still need to setup this platform, but I've always used WinUAE. However I think it's more convenient to use the relative RA core. Do you agree?

Turbografx-16: I believe I use Mednafen PCE Fast but supergrafx should be fine too.

SNES: snes9x is fine in most cases; and leagues beyond ZSNES. If we're talking "best" though you're better off with bsnes accuracy or balanced.

Genesis: Yep

Gamegear: Yep

NeoGeo CPS1-2: FBA is fine but there are a number of options here. MAME works as well.

3D Arcades: In general, yes. In some cases MAME will work as well.

Wii - Dolphin: Yep and yes it works for GC.

Nintendo DS: The Retroarch Desmume core actually has a few problems not present in the standalone Desmume - primarily in the sound department. Quite a few games have distorted, static-y audio in the Retroarch core but sound just fine in standalone.

N64: This one's debatable. I use mupen64plus in RA as well, but that's primarily because I prefer RA usage over the standalone options for N64, and not necessarily because the emulation is better.

MAME: You've got a lot of options for MAME. I've used MAMEUI for a long time, but MAME's gotten quite a bit better in RA, just recently in fact.

Commodore Amiga: I'd recommend FS-UAE. I've got a tutorial video for that here.

[Lordmonkus]

GLupeN64 is in my personal experience the best N64 emulation right now. Project64 is pretty good and so is Mupen64 but GLupeN64 edges it out with better compatibility in my testing and of course your mileage may vary depending on the games you test with. GLupeN64 also supports the GlideN64 plugin texture packs which is a nice bonus.

As far as Mame is concerned the git build of the 180 core that Zombeaver linked to is very nice and well worth using but I think I would still stick with the stand alone version of Mame. I certainly would advise using the stand alone Mame over the current official Mame cores in Retroarch.

[snoopybooh]

Thanks for your feedback guys!

On 27/12/2016 at 9:24 PM, Zombeaver said:

Commodore Amiga: I'd recommend FS-UAE. I've got a tutorial video for that here.

I used to use Winuae since it was the most accurate and "friendly" Amiga emulator in the past, but gosh...how things have changed! That FS-UAE is the bomb. Auto-configured games, awesome UI, super-user friendly, best video options (in fact I didn't need to setup anything and the games displayed correctly in fullscreen), in-game menu (that you can access easily with an Xbox360controller and save states with no issue) and so on. It can even provide a full Amiga DB with pics so that you can look all different Amiga games (very useful since I have a bunch of games which I don't know how they were called). Really thanks for the suggestion, it's definitely the ultimate Amiga emulator!

 

On 28/12/2016 at 0:14 AM, lordmonkus said:

GLupeN64 is in my personal experience the best N64 emulation right now.

I agree although I'm not a N64 fan and just use that system to emulate must-have N64 games as Mario64 and so on. However I got the feeling that GLupeN64 was a quite fast and nice emulator for N64.

 

How about the Dreamcast and Saturn scene? I use Demul for DC although is pretty sad how the dreamcast scene emulation is quite dead. Is that another Dreamcast emulator worth to try? About Saturn is Yababuse the only way to emulate this system? Actually I didn' try yet, but I'm about to test the Saturn emulation scene so any suggestion is accepted

 

[DOS76]

Either the Mednafen Saturn or the RetroArch Mednafen Saturn core is your best bet. Yabause isn't really a good choice.

[Zombeaver]

1 hour ago, snoopybooh said:

I used to use Winuae since it was the most accurate and "friendly" Amiga emulator in the past, but gosh...how things have changed! That FS-UAE is the bomb. Auto-configured games, awesome UI, super-user friendly, best video options (in fact I didn't need to setup anything and the games displayed correctly in fullscreen), in-game menu (that you can access easily with an Xbox360controller and save states with no issue) and so on. It can even provide a full Amiga DB with pics so that you can look all different Amiga games (very useful since I have a bunch of games which I don't know how they were called). Really thanks for the suggestion, it's definitely the ultimate Amiga emulator!

Yep! FS-UAE has some really great and user-friendly features.

1 hour ago, snoopybooh said:

How about the Dreamcast and Saturn scene? I use Demul for DC although is pretty sad how the dreamcast scene emulation is quite dead. Is that another Dreamcast emulator worth to try? About Saturn is Yababuse the only way to emulate this system? Actually I didn' try yet, but I'm about to test the Saturn emulation scene so any suggestion is accepted

Demul is still currently the best option for DC. It's not exactly true that the scene is dead, development is just very slow and the Demul team isn't very responsive to the community (probably due at least partially to a language barrier - the team is Russian). They released an (admittedly not super significant) update in August. I'm hoping that at some point down the road the Mednafen team will tackle DC...that'd be awesome.

For Saturn, Mednafen is definitely your best bet. It's easy to setup and it consistently "just works". There are still a few outstanding compatibility issues here and there but they're relatively minor. The Mednafen_Saturn core in RA doesn't currently support the 3D Pad (analog) but standalone does. The significance of that depends on the game. For things like Nights Into Dreams and Burning Rangers you'll want to use the 3D Pad but in a lot of stuff I think you can get away without it.