Best Windows emulators for various platforms

[Mikerochip]

Originally Posted by Ian

Kega Fusion - Megadrive
Project64 - N64

Not in it's wildest dreams is Kega Fusion the best Windows Mega Drive emulator!


BlastEm is.

Or at the very least, it's a tie (at best), between BlastEm and GensPlus GX!


Kega Fusion is a total dog when it comes to controllers, on modern windows.
Definitely used to be the go to emulator, but, those days are long gone!


And yeah, there's loads of ways of fixing it's problems (WinXP compatibility fixes most of them, but not the controller problem) But, out of the box, Kega is firmly in third place these days.
(Mostly with regard to either supporting all games, or running demos, GensPlusGX or BlastEm will run anything you throw at them. Kega will not.)



(Though, for 32X, it's still pretty much the only choice!)

[Ian]

Originally Posted by Mikerochip

Not in it's wildest dreams is Kega Fusion the best Windows Mega Drive emulator!


BlastEm is.

Or at the very least, it's a tie (at best), between BlastEm and GensPlus GX!

Snippy snip snip

(Though, for 32X, it's still pretty much the only choice!)

And they you go. Try emulating 32x cd stuff in ANYTHING else.

You can avoid most of the crap by setting it up in launch box anyway

[Mikerochip]

Well, it's Kega Fusion's biggest problem is it can't be used to map inputs from gamepads any more. Well, not properly.

Use a keyboard (plug out the joypads etc beforehand) or iPac or whatever, and it'll be ok, but for controllers, it's unusable.

It really is the only choice for 32x. But that's not really useful if I can't play the thing!!

(Saying that, I still have it set up, I just don't play 32x anymore)

And GensPlusGX plays the MegaCD fine so, it's just the handful of 32x things that doesn't work. (And it's 32x emulation is by no means perfect, it's just much better than Picodrive)

[Retro-Nerd]

Well, it's Kega Fusion's biggest problem is it can't be used to map inputs from gamepads any more. Well, not properly.

Gamepad mapping works perfectly fine for me under Windows 10.

[Ian]

Yeah also never had a problem mapping my xbox for pc controller

[chip]

At the moment i don't emulate BBC Micro and Apple 2 computers ..... are they important too ?

[chip]

Well, i checked by myself

Games for BBC Micro and Apple 2 don't seem nothing of special

Actually i tried a lot of those for both the machine and nothing good is coming out

[Anubis]

Originally Posted by chip

Well, i checked by myself

Games for BBC Micro and Apple 2 don't seem nothing of special

Actually i tried a lot of those for both the machine and nothing good is coming out

That is just plain blasphemy!!!

BBC Micro is where Elite originated from, by far best version for Home computers and thanks to good processor in BBC, bit faster then rest of the home computer market.

AS for Sega CD emulation, even my RG350P emulated Sega CD rom.

Here is how it looks...

[ Show youtube player ]

I should probably write small review of the unit... as it seems perfect for fast emulation on the go.

[chip]

This is not what i experienced looking the BBC Micro games actually

[roondar]

Regarding C64 emulation using Vice: last time I checked them (admittedly a while back), the GTK/SDL replacements for the old WinVICE emulator had some issues regarding keeping a smooth & non-tearing frame rate on Windows.

Has that been fixed yet?

And if not, are there other good alternatives apart from the earlier mentioned "Denise"?

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Anubis

AS for Sega CD emulation, even my RG350P emulated Sega CD rom.

Here is how it looks...

[ Show youtube player ]

I should probably write small review of the unit... as it seems perfect for fast emulation on the go.

Looks good, I assume that right stick does not bother when you are using the action buttons because it is sunk in deep enough. I have been eying devices like this to replace my rather pointless 3DS, but most are so restricted in the hardware that they even fail to emulate all SNES games at full framerate.

[dreadnought]

Apple 2 was one of the pioneering home computers and has some of the most important early games in its library. Of course they're not on Amiga's, or even C64's gfx/sfx level but that's rather obvious.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Apple 2 was one of the pioneering home computers and has some of the most important early games in its library. Of course they're not on Amiga's, or even C64's gfx/sfx level but that's rather obvious.

Prince of Persia springs to mind as a good example of an Apple 2 original which had a large impact.
Edit: there's obviously many, many more - this is just the first game that popped up in my mind

[Retro-Nerd]

Originally Posted by roondar

Regarding C64 emulation using Vice: last time I checked them (admittedly a while back), the GTK/SDL replacements for the old WinVICE emulator had some issues regarding keeping a smooth & non-tearing frame rate on Windows.

Has that been fixed yet?

And if not, are there other good alternatives apart from the earlier mentioned "Denise"?

Vice GTK is fixed now, it has a 50fps menu option too. Denise, Hoxs64 and micro64 are smooth in 50fps too.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

Vice GTK is fixed now, it has a 50fps menu option too. Denise, Hoxs64 and micro64 are smooth in 50fps too.

Good to hear, as I always rather liked Vice and it was a bit of a bummer. I'll be sure to check out the others too. Can't have too many C64 emulators

[Anubis]

Emulator mentioned here, Denise, looks good and promising.

Only problem I had with WinVice emulators was how they handle ZIP archives. All other emulators seem to handle archives better than WinVice.

Originally Posted by gimbal

Looks good, I assume that right stick does not bother when you are using the action buttons because it is sunk in deep enough. I have been eying devices like this to replace my rather pointless 3DS, but most are so restricted in the hardware that they even fail to emulate all SNES games at full framerate.

Not at all, stick is to low and buttons just feel at right place. Originally I was after GB, GBC, NES, SMS, MD and SNES emulation only, was thinking that GBA would be too slow on board like this, but to my surprise, emulator is well optimized and GBA emulation runs smooth and well even for faster game as Metroid. I tried 2 psx titles and I was surprised with that one as well. It works well enough, and finally handheld with both R1 and R2 and L1 and L2 buttons.

[Retroplay]

Originally Posted by Anubis

Only problem I had with WinVice emulators was how they handle ZIP archives. All other emulators seem to handle archives better than WinVice.

Download unzip from here:
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/unzip.htm

Copy unzip.exe to somewhere in your Windows path, that's it.

[SquawkBox]

Originally Posted by chip

At the moment i don't emulate BBC Micro and Apple 2 computers ..... are they important too ?

On Apple II(GS), you may be interested in first occurrence of Prince Of Persia and Karateka (same author). The latter, a basic yet atmospheric beat them all (well, beat'em one by one) has been converted / ported by Meynaf from the ST version, so now we can enjoy it on the miggy. Apple II was never considered a gaming platform though, at least in terms of cult following (my cousin used to work on that peculiar machine to graduate, but since I was a toddler when he played Karateka before my eyes, I didn't care to ask him if he could get hold of additional games). I think the SNES borrowed from Apple CPU architecture for its main processor, but that's about it. I am not saying you won't find any interesting game for the Apple II besides those two, just that better versions exist elsewhere. IIRC, KEGS is the emulator of choice for that platform.

[SquawkBox]

About the CPC, as a fan of Caprice32, for quite some time, I was reluctant to move on to CPCE. Well, CPCE is the emulator of choice when it comes to Gamebase CPC of course and I cannot complain. Yet, I was hoping for an updated version of Caprice32 which didn't show up (someone did manage to tweak old stable version of it to offer a CD based CPC solution, but it seems it didn't quite raise much interest)... until recently. Here is Caprice32 reborn, a project initiated by ColinPitrat. Please fans of the CPC feel free to give it a try, too busy right now with some other stuff.

[chip]

I personally use WinCPC ..... i find it a good emulator