Best Emulator, a List of All the Best Emulators

This guide is meant to promote the best emulators, and get new people into emulation. These emulators are named the best emulators because they are all easy to use and highly compatible. While this may seem like lots of fun to some, others complain that it's piracy, and to bring up a topic like this is socially taboo in some forums.

[jack_burt0n]

I vote for winkawaks and Final Burn Alpha not been updated in a while but for neogeo aes, mvs, cps1, cps2 emulation on pc its what i use on me netbook, and cps2psp and mvs2psp on a hacked psp are definitive.

[romalias2]

Thanks I will add them now ;) I had forgotten about the arcade emulators...

[Yi-Long]

... as soon as I have a FullHD plasma set up, my plan is to build the ultimate mediacenter with a nice quality PC, which will have everything, including lots of emulators with my favourite classic games.

So this article should be very helpfull, cause I don't have a clue as to how to really build the ultimate mediacenter, but this should at least help me sort out the whole emulator stuff :)

[Skizelli]

Gens has been dead for quite some time now. There's been several forks based on the source code, but the best one by far is Gens/GS. It aims to clean up the source code, combine features from various forks, and improve portability to other platforms. You can find it here: http://segaretro.org/Gens/G...

[The Great Melon]

No mention of PCSX2? I enjoy upping the resolution of my PS2 games on it.

[ChronoJoe]

Article isn't legal, with links to roms that Nintendo have a problem with being distributed.

Just saying, probably shouldn't be on N4G. Not sure what the kind of policy is around here, with most roms, publishers don't care - but Nintendo 100% do. Most legitimate rom websites removed the roms published by Nintendo.

[xino]

Emulators are programs that allows commercial or home made games to run, it is not law breaking.

but talking about roms is illegal.

This article is not talking about roms, but talking about emulators.

[branchedout]

"**** as it is an open source project, and you may download ROMS (remember ROMs are the games you play on an emulator) from ********.
"

With links to said site. Yeah. Second page.

[ChronoJoe]

Links to the roms are also there. Most tutorials of this nature, do not include means of acquiring any potentially copyrighted content. The emulators themselves are provided which is fine, those are shareware/freeware but the roms whose links were provided are not...

Not that it's hard to find them on google, but you don't link them.

[Theonik]

Ok from a quick inspection of the list.
You are missing:
NullDC for Dreamcast and Naomi arcade units.
Mame for general arcades
Dolphin for Wii. Gamecube and the Nintedo/Sega/Namco Triforce arcade unit.
PCSX2 best for PS2.
Tons of other platforms. Your picks are pretty much justified otherwise though.

@HolyOrangeCows
I didn't find it hard at all. Took me 5 minutes if i'm honest. Other emulators though take a lot more effort.

[SaiyanFury]

I guess emulators are a point of personal taste for people. I find the best SEGA emulator to be KEGA Fusion. It accurately emulates Master System, Game Gear, Genesis, 32X and SEGA CD. It has a plethora of features and has a great array of functions. For NES, I prefer NEStopia. I've tried NESticle but found it's Game Genie function didn't work properly. Maybe it's just me but I could never get the function working for some reason. In NEStopia, I have no troubles. Agreed on ePSXe, and Project 64. I don't play DS games, but I find VisualBoy Advance to be the best GBA emulator. Just personal opinions. If listed emulators work best for the author, more power to him. :)

[HolyOrangeCows]

EPSXe is incredibly confusing to setup.

[TheDeadMetalhead]

But once you figure it out, it works great.

[The_Zeitgeist]

Just google "how to set up EPSXe" its easy once you find a decent guide.

[xino]

Visual Boy Advance, best for GBA!

Winkawaks best for CPS1,CPS2, and other fighting games.

Neo-Final Burn Alpha is now best for online fighting games and online emulator since you get less lag

Mame best for all arcades.

[Theonik]

For Mame it really depends on the unit. For now Mame doesn't have good support for a lot of Sega systems although they added the Naomi finally but the framerate is still horrible. In general Mame is the best though, in 3D units is where it fails.

[Yi-Long]

... that can really play the Street Fighter games (Alpha 3, SF3, Marvel vs Capcom 2) perfectly yet!?

[Theonik]

NullDC should run the Dreamcast versions of these games fine. On a decent rig.

[SaiyanFury]

I just tested Street Fighter Alpha 3 on my PC with MAME and it ran perfectly. I assume the other games, save SF3 would run just fine.

[Skizelli]

SF3 runs fine. It just has a minor transparency issue. I've only noticed it on one particular fighter's moves.

[xino]

Neo Final Burn Alpha can play SF3 perfectly and supports online.

CPS3 can play SF3 but doesn't support online play

Winkawaks, MAME, Nebula, FinalBurn alpha can play all SF Alpha games

no news on MvC2.
anyway why are you being cheap on MvC2? it's on Xbox Live/PSN for god sake. Fact is, you get better connection on consoles:/

[Magna Farta]

NESticle hasn't been updated in OVER 10 YEARS!!!

They are correct about GENS
Project64 has long been dying.

I have emulators for every pre-PS1 system on my gamecube through SD Media Launcher, playing the oldies on a computer screen just didn't feel right

[Theonik]

Project 64 is not really dead. Been using the 1.7 beta for some time now. It should release eventually. Problem is that most those devs have real lives so they only dedicate their spare time on the projects. You're right about NESticle, been looking for a good alternative tbh.

[Skizelli]

Nestopia: http://nestopia.sourceforge...
FCEUX: http://fceux.com/web/home.h...
RockNES: http://rocknes.kinox.org/

They're all good. I prefer Nestopia.

[rambler]

no$gba is horrible, this guy is wrong.

[Gue1]

N4G promoting piracy, nice!

[Stempel]

did you even read the article?

[romalias2]

I deliberately avoided anything newer then 7 years old for copy write purposes. While Nintendo has renewed some of their copy writes, they have not renewed them all, and many of the old Nintendo games aren't even owned by Nintendo. Short of a DMCA take down order on the host Emuparadise for the games they are completely legal.

Also My choice in No$GBA is due to the fact that it is multi purposed and can play NDS games as well as GBA ;)

[romalias2]

Yi long yes there is. NullDC can play naomi hardware based games, as well as Dreamcast games.

[neogeo]

You forgot the king of all (Dolphin) I own every emu ever made and dolphin is by far! the best ever made. It runs Wii and gamcube games in HD 1080p looking jaw dropping and running perfectly! Got to have a dual core or better. Also it gets updated almost ever hour on the hour.

[lightningsax]

Wow. I can't believe we ever lived without a badly written article about a mixture of sorta-new and really, really, really old emulators. Who does that? I haven't heard the name NESticle in years, and it sure hasn't changed.

And yeah, the guy really tries to cover his butt about it being legal, but he then provides links to sites that offer the ROMs. That in itself may still be fine-ish, I guess, but it's asking for trouble. He could have just as easily said "I cannot provide a link to the ROMs, but there are very easy ways to find them." read: Google it. There. No crazy paragraph about "copy write" law needed.

I'm off to find a chimpanzee to proofread this article. I'm too tired to do it myself.

[Basjohn]

DeSmume is MILES ahead of No$gba.

Additonally No$gba's author started DEMANDING donations for new versions of his emulator, but then immediately vanished after receiving those donations. There hasn't been a new version for years.

DeSmume on the other hand improves every day with new svns being released and I actually haven't found a game it cannot play (and play better than no$) right now.

Its support for DS savestates is another thing no$ cannot boast about.

So yeah, in short: Author of article is completely wrong on that point.

[Skizelli]

I'm waiting for a DS emulator that can run UMK3. Neither DeSmume or iDeaS emulates it correctly.