Worst emulation experience(s)?

[Ikagura]

Rosalie's Mupen GUI may be your solution

Mupen Parallel Launcher is good as well.

 

[Sanomoe]

Playing Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin in the NO$GBA, when DesMuMe used to be slow on my PC, sometimes when you used a Dual Crush (in my case, Thousand Blades), it could crash the game, and corrupt your save, which happened to me once

 

[Yousef Yousef]

Driver 3, the goat of unplayable ps2 ISOs.

 

[Boo Man]

Driver 3, the goat of unplayable ps2 ISOs.

Stuntman is another one
its a really good game on ps2 but runs like arse on emulators for some reason :(

 

[WokiBakoki]

Simply ePSXe... Absolute abhorrent garbage. Duckstation is a miracle that I am so very grateful for after being stuck with such an obnoxiously obtuse emulator for PS1 games for years. Why was the aspect ratio giving me shit!? 4:3, how hard can it be! Whoever made ePSXe will surely face damnation in the next life.

 

[strawberry29]

wii on the dolphin emulator, man i screamed in agony for 100 years and still it's difficult to get it to work, the controls were very hard to get especially the montion control

 

[tonyhoro]

I was always an Retroarch apologist, but I've faced so many problems with it over the years, and with the recent released Tico for the Switch, which does basically the same, I see no reason for RA to still have that AWFUL system menu.

And I'm not even talking about cores and content labelling, I'm talking about you not being able to save your configuration if there's a rom already loaded, or the fact that you can't configure each core without loading a rom.

Its cumbersome and not user focused at all and it's been enough years since its initial release that we can't apologize the team anymore for not fixing the basics.

 

[Zlomek_553txt]

ShadPS4. I have never had that many issues setting up an emulator before i stumbled upon it. To be honest, I needed it only to run Future Tone to compare it to my Megamix on switch. For some reason, I couldn't get the European version to work [might just be my skill issue lol], thus ended up with the JP one. After making the game at least run, I wanted to use my PSP [fusa] as a gamepad since I got used to playing rhythm games on it. Shad did not even recognize it as an controller, so I had to take multiple other steps. At the very least my Future Tone is fully set up now, but that was my worst experience. Might be also because I personally prefer playing on a real hardware rather than emulating.

 

[Jestermaxxing]

Ps3 and snes emulators back in the zsnes days that were not zsnes.

 

[moon200218]

MAME pretty much, having to find the specific files ... i might as well make the game myself and play that

 

[FateLanegod]

I have tried Xemu, and you know what?
With recent 0.8 releases the performance is just awful, virtually 5 FPS. And Vulkan support was broken probably since the beginning.
But surprisingly, late 0.7 version works for me like a charm, looking good almost always at 60 FPS.
I wonder, is that because of newer heavier libraries, Qemu or now more accurate emulation put in place?

 

[Moosterious]

Trying to get the MicroSD card set up for my handheld :P

Not only was it my 1st time setting a MicroSD card up for emulating, I also did so on a linux computer (I suck at linux)
I struggled with everything from the partitions on the card to the roms themselves.

In the end it was all well worth. I love playing games on my rg28xx !

 

[DieDieDanmakuDoll]

PC-98 emulation never ends up working out for me I rage quit everytime

 

[Tsukishima]

PC-98 emulation never ends up working out for me I rage quit everytime

I share your sympathies. It annoys me so much too since it looks like such a interesting library of games.

Otherwise for me it's N64 emulators, and I still think Dolphin to this day is just strange. I find that a lot of emulators i tend to love, like Duckstation and PCXS2 manage to generally run all of your games with barely any stress tests or just messing around with settings just to get one specific title to run that feels more or less like a native experience.

I feel like all of my attempts to play Lost Kingdoms II on Dolphin in particular always has something noticeably off in emulation that makes me not as gripped as I always think I will be.

 

[werewolfx]

*sips tea* trying to emulate GBA games back when those emulators just came out.

HO BOY!

 

[daido]

Anything and everything arcade is a nightmare for me. Think I got Dodonpachi working once, that was fun while it lasted.

I’mprobably hamstringing myself using Emudeck primarily, but also I guess I’m not especially motivated at this point. I have so many good shmups I have only begun to scratch the surface of that won’t take hours to fiddle with.

 

[Deean]

Symbian emulation

 

[Tsukishima]

Dolphin for the most cases of earlier builds, around 7-10 years ago was an absolute nightmare for me. i had to almost rework graphics and emulation settings for if not every single game. I remember my earliest experiences with Path of Radiance on my old hand me down laptop I used it had these damned squares and rectangles on every character's eyes and mouths in portraits, likely because it was the 'animated parts'.

It was absolute bliss when we figured it out, but me and a friend was trying to get Dolphin VR to work back when that was experimental for things like F-Zero GX and Luigi's Mansion with the FPO mod! It was INSANELY fun, but boy, those three to so hours was the absolute worst.

 

[Mpampakas]

A professional clown recommended me a hardware emulator (for snes i think) and my amateur clown ass didn't realize until my pc was cooking for a freaken snes game

 

[Feitang]

When the buttons for your controller arent recognized by the emulater no matter how much mapping you do. all those emulaters, all those games, all you hear is the intro music to every game because you cant move or do anything.

I end up having to use my keyboard which is wierd when playing a fighting game that requires a joystick. Early Project 64 is one i remember being notorious for not recognizing inputs and i'd have to switch the plugin to another one.

 

[Adrastia]

Saturn. I felt sooooo accomplished when I got SSF to work. An honorable mention to Dreamcast as the only emulator I could get to work properly was nullDC. And that took some fiddling.

I just got RE Outbreak to work on PCSX2 without any major problems. But since I have a potatotop I had to fiddle with some settings before it ran at the proper speed without everyone sounding like they were being spaghettified through a black hole. Although the distorted voices did add to the atmosphere.

 

[Spyrone]

Anything involving Xbox emulators. Even the Xbox 360s built-in emulator lacks support for a lot of games.

 

[Ikagura]

When the buttons for your controller arent recognized by the emulater no matter how much mapping you do. all those emulaters, all those games, all you hear is the intro music to every game because you cant move or do anything.

I end up having to use my keyboard which is wierd when playing a fighting game that requires a joystick. Early Project 64 is one i remember being notorious for not recognizing inputs and i'd have to switch the plugin to another one.

That was my issue with NullDC unti I saw that there was a plugin for the gamepad...

I don't get why emulators couldn't natively recognise Xinput gamepads.

Bless FlyCast.

 

[seaglass]

It's probably a skill issue on my part, but RetroArch constantly resetting the Sega layout binds on my 8bitdo Saturn-style controller drives me absolutely insane. It's like they're trying to punish me for using an accurate controller instead of a generic 4-button one.