Best Emulators For Pc
Luz Tonks
I need help finding the best emulators that will work for nearly every game in each emulated console? A comprehensive list would be ideal. Maybe its already listed somewhere, and I didnt look hard enough.
The container can be a .zip, .7z, or folder and placed in the mame "Roms" subfolder. You should find them in those rom sharing sites (eg. search "mame 5200"). Once it starts press the tab key to bring a menu where you can load a cartridge file. If you use Windows and MameUI64 it tells you exactly what files are missing and you can load a cartridge file through the UI. Mame Atari 2600 doesn't need any system files.
I have tried LaunchBox and the Stella and ProSystem Cores don't run correctly for me. Way to Fast or Too Slow or glitchy. I would love to have an all in one solution, but I have resigned my self to running separate emulators
It does do Jaguar. And it can run some games decently well, but not all of them. No single emulator does all Jaguar games right. I found a combination of Mame + Virtual Jaguar works, because each runs games they other doesn't, but even that won't run everything, I don't think.
So I just got into Launchbox alot and LOVE it.
I have it running more of less for all the consoles I enjoy. However, as we all know there is a lot of different emulators for all systems.
With the exception of a few systems where there is only really one (or one good one) like Citra, Cemu, RCPS3, PCSX2), the rest have a number of them. Dreamcast, SNES, NES, Genesis, N64, etc...etc..
At first I tried to force/setup LaunchBox to work with the emulator I wanted...but then it occurred to me...is there a community consensus, that after a good bit of usage now that Launchbox has been out for a while, on which specific emulator works best FOR USE WITH LAUNCHBOX.
Not which one is best 'in general'....not a 'not the easiest to work with launchbox but you should use this instead of xyz'.....
But which ones have a much better/easier/native time integrating with LaunchBox for the various systems.
Id love some responses as to what is the best with regards to Launchbox itself and why....
1. Launches seamlessly.
2. Less clutter in your emulators window in LB.
3. Doesn't require any funky extras like AHK scripts to work properly.
4. Has the best emulation for the main 8, 16 and 32 bit consoles.
There are so many reason to use it I could keep going on with other reasons but I won't, it's just so good for so many reasons that to me it makes no sense to use other emulators unless the Retroarch core itself has a significant flaw or the stand alone version has something extremely significant making it better than the relevant core.
The good news though is that those oddball systems and many "classic" computers will work with MAME, in which I recommend the stand-alone emulator rather than the Retroarch core, since it's usually more up to date and easier to work with in my opinion.
....But which ones have a much better/easier/native time integrating with LaunchBox for the various systems.
Id love some responses as to what is the best with regards to Launchbox itself and why....
Most set-up easily with Launchbox with no fuss. Add a new emulator and point LB to the .exe, make sure the associated platform of the emulator is linked to your platfrom name you entered into LB and import your roms. Some may require a certain box checked or unchecked in the manage emulators screen or maybe even a certain parameter entered. That really is it for a lot of emulators you may use.
Thought I'd throw in my thoughts here as a newbie to emulation.
I've not been on the scene that long. For no particular reason I ended up starting off with an older version of Retroarch. I found it a little cumbersome and there was no way to automatically find and download cores. I quickly discovered the latest version and haven't looked back. Emulating Sega Mega Drive, SNES, NES and PSX games is so easy and it is absolutely seamless with LB. Once you get things set up you won't look back. I quickly found myself playing old games such as Alien Storm and Altered Beast and having an absolute blast.
As for the standalone emulators, CEMU is pretty much the one to use for Wii-U and PCSX2 for anything PS2 related. MAME for your arcade stuff and Demul for Dreamcast emulation. All of these I have found to work very well when using LB as a main frontend. As Retro808 said you might want to enter some custom parameters to hide some emulator GUIs and save resources when the game loads. CEMU for example requires a '-f -g' parameter to get games running and at fullscreen. Apart from that setup for the most part is a breeze. My main issues so far have come from getting the emulators themselves to behave how I want them.
Don't tell my boss, but a PlayStation 2 JRPG almost derailed my Steam Deck review. I was prepared to put in some long gaming hours to write about gaming on the Deck, but I wasn't prepared for 15-year-old games to keep distracting me away from my Steam library. I had to tear myself away to play other games on the Steam Deck, and every time I returned to Persona 3 I got a new jolt of excitement because it just worked so damn well.
Holding down the power button on the Steam Deck brings up a small menu that includes a "Switch to desktop" option. This leaves behind the SteamOS interface and plops you down on a classic desktop running on top of Arch Linux. I started looking up terminal commands to install programs in Arch before finding out I was completely wasting my time. This desktop comes with a pre-installed app store just like macOS and Windows (except everything here is free). It's called Discover, and it's conveniently pinned to the taskbar.
Once I had my chosen emulators installed, I launched the desktop version of Steam and used the "Games > Add a non-Steam game to my library" menu to add each emulator to Steam so that I could access it from the SteamOS interface. (One note here if you're also installing Duckstation: it has two interfaces, and "DuckStationNoGUI" is the one you want to add to Steam. It's built to play nice with controllers.)
That's almost everything you have to do on the desktop. The last step is to copy over whatever games, BIOS files, memory card saves, etc. you want to use on the Steam Deck. Then you can reboot the system and jump back into SteamOS.
Once you're back in the Steam Deck's primary interface you'll find the emulators in your library, where they more or less work like any other game. Most importantly, this means they can take advantage of the Steam Deck's biggest perks:
Of the ones I installed, Duckstation and PPSSPP have controller-friendly interfaces, so I could use the D-pad and face buttons to bounce around the menus as soon as I booted them up. For Dolphin, PCSX2 and Bsnes, I launched the emulators and then customized a Steam controller profile to allow me to use mouse input to set things up. Here's my basic setup:
This lets you use the right trackpad as a mouse and the grip buttons on the back of the Steam Deck as your mouse clicks for navigating the emulator menus. And this way there's no conflict with the controller bindings you'll want to set for each emulator.
If you want to get fancy you can add a keyboard binding to the last open back grip and the left trackpad, or even configure an "action set" where you hold one button down to give a whole bunch of other buttons secondary keybinds. If you want hotkeys for saving and loading savestates to multiple slots, for example, that's doable with a little extra work.
One other thing you'll need to do in each emulator is make sure that games are set to open in fullscreen. In Dolphin, I ran into an issue where the game render window and the Dolphin menu window were fighting each other for control, leading to a really annoying flickering problem. Easily fixed: Under Config > Interface Settings, check the "Keep Window on Top" box for the render window.
Many old games can't upscale that well, though. Increased resolutions can break the cohesion of a game's art style, sometimes giving you super sharp 3D against blurry 2D backgrounds, for example. The Steam Deck's screen size and resolution is perfect for those games. In Dolphin and PCSX2 I'm running at 2X native resolution with added anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, which means games are running at about the native resolution of the 1280x800 display. The Steam Deck's GPU could probably handle running most PS2/GameCube emulation at a much higher resolution for added sharpness, but on this size screen I doubt I'd notice a substantial difference, and I'd just be burning battery life by making the GPU work harder.
On PCSX2 I put a dozen hours into Persona 3 FES, which also ran at a perfect 60 fps. Emulation, at least of these older systems, is one place where the Steam Deck's battery life is not an issue. Here's the takeaway from these two games:
If you primarily use the Steam Deck as a retro emulation machine, I'd guess that four hours of battery life is going to be your floor, with up to eight hours of battery life for even older systems or lower brightness levels. When emulating PS1 game Dr. Slump through Duckstation, the Steam Deck predicted 7:30 hours of battery life at around 60% brightness.
Based on talking to a couple Dolphin developers, I think there's a good chance Galaxy 2 isn't butting up against a raw power ceiling on the Steam Deck. Driver optimizations may be able to speed up performance enough for the game to hit a stable 60 fps, but that's going to take time.
I ran into a few other issues here and there that were simply quirks of emulation and not unique to the Steam Deck, but on the whole it's been as smooth as I could've hoped. The one emulator I didn't test is Yuzu, simply because I don't have any Switch games ripped (guess I have some jailbreaking to do). But I now have Super Nintendo, PS1, PS2, PSP, GameCube and Wii games on a portable device with the power to play (almost) all of them, and this is before emulator developers have a chance to test the Steam Deck themselves. It's a damn good start.
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