Emulation accuracy: which software to use?

[spenoza]

Almost all of us have at least 1 way to play most PCE games on original hardware, but that doesn't mean emulation isn't still useful. So maybe it's time we collected our observations about the accuracy of various emulators and helped flesh out which ones are the most useful. My thoughts are below. I have not tested rigorously at all, so these are rather generalized. If you have more specific information, I would love to make a list that reflects communal knowledge instead of my own (mis?)perceptions.

I know Mednafen has the greatest accuracy, but it is the least friendly to use, and many won't touch it because of the command line.

I'm a big fan of Ootake. It's free and open source and is pretty accurate, though certainly not perfect.

I do not like Magic Engine, because not only is it closed source, the author charges money, and of the current, still-maintained emulators it has slightly lower accuracy than Ootake. It seems silly to charge money for an emulator that can't best the current free options.

BizHawk is the emulator I'm watching for the future. It uses the Mednafen core for PCE emulation, though it does sometimes pick up bugs not present in Mednafen due to it being designed specifically for the TAS crowd. The developers are pretty good about squashing bugs as they come up, though.

[GohanX]

The emulator on Retropie seems to work really well, it's based on Mednafan with the SGX compatibility removed.

[Necromancer]

If I'm emulatin' to get some screen shots or whatever, I use Magic Engine.  It's accurate enough for me, and it's so easy to use.

If I'm test driving homebrew or translation patches, I'll use mednafen.  It might not be all that user friendly, but accuracy is all that matters at that point.

[Vimtoman]

Try retroarch on the PSVIta It plays and looks great on the OLED screen.
CD's and Hucard's.

[Black Tiger]

There is a nice GUI for PC Mednafen and there is also the unofficial/stolen PCE.emu for Android.

Magic Engine is free to use for a certain period before you need to press a couple keys to save and load a state.

I haven't tried Ootake in years, but last time I did it was gaijin and user-unfriendly.

[spenoza]

Try retroarch on the PSVIta It plays and looks great on the OLED screen.
CD's and Hucards.

Why did you use an apostrophe for CDs? Apostrophes are for possessive, not for plural.

[roflmao]

On the PC I generally stick to Ootake.

But I built a little Raspberry Pi3 RetroPie thingy and that uses RetroArch, I think. It's pretty slick!

[elmer]

If I'm test driving homebrew or translation patches, I'll use mednafen.  It might not be all that user friendly, but accuracy is all that matters at that point.

Yep, Mednafen is definitely my preferred emulator.

If you really need them, there are a couple of GUI front ends for it ... but you can just drag-n-drop a .PCE (or .CUE) file onto Mednafen in explorer and it will run it, which isn't exactly hard.

Or you could just set up your Windows file associations to make it a simple double-click to run a ROM.

Yeah ... I know, people don't want to do that sort of stuff ... but the emulation-quality is worth it (IMHO).

Ootake has a couple of inaccuracies in the audio levels ... at least the version that DefleMask uses internally does, so I find that emulator hard to recommend.

[Black Tiger]

Try retroarch on the PSVIta It plays and looks great on the OLED screen.
CD's and Hucards.

Why did you use an apostrophe for CDs? Apostrophes are for possessive, not for plural.

Why did you write "1" instead of "one"? Numbers smaller than 10 are written.

[esteban]

Try retroarch on the PSVIta It plays and looks great on the OLED screen.
CD's and Hucards.

Why did you use an apostrophe for CDs? Apostrophes are for possessive, not for plural.

No, you can use apostrophes, too.

1980's *or* 1980s
VCR's *or* VCRs

Plural, motherf*cker. With apostrophes.

F*ck yes.

[lukester]

I use Mednafen, but it's via a core on OpenEmu (Mac only), which has an extremely good interface (drag and drop roms)

[SignOfZeta]

I use Mednafen for Wii. Although I'll never figure out how to run CDs in it the HuCARD emulation is good enough that I can't think of anything to complain about.

[Necromancer]

Why did you use an apostrophe for CDs? Apostrophes are for possessive, not for plural.

He's trying to use 'em all up so they don't get left behind on Ys.

[esteban]

Why did you use an apostrophe for CDs? Apostrophes are for possessive, not for plural.

He's trying to use 'em all up so they don't get left behind on Ys.

+10 points

[LowRes]

PCE.EMU for Android is pretty good.  I use it on the nvidia shield TV with a dual shock 3 controller.  Mostly use it to try out CD games before I buy but I think it's pretty accurate emulation.