Worst emulation experience(s)?

[bliss_freak]

I remember trying to emulate Dreamcast on a fairly weak laptop in the early 2010s and having all sorts of slow-down and constant rendering issues with transparency, which made certain areas in games with a lot of water unplayable.

 

[m5m5h]

I remember trying to emulate Dreamcast on a fairly weak laptop in the early 2010s and having all sorts of slow-down and constant rendering issues with transparency, which made certain areas in games with a lot of water unplayable.

there's a certain mission in driv3r you cannot pass it because it glitches with pcsx2 emulator till this day this mission piss me off so much

 

[Maresia]

Emulating NES and Sega Master System on original PS1 hardware:
View attachment 130993
However, the disc was still useful since you can access all the ROMs on PC and play them on a proper emulator.

I had one of those too. At the time I didn't have a PC so that was the only way I had to play older systems. The NES emulator was playable for some games, I remember beating Rockamn 4 on it.

The sound in the Master System emulator was horrible, but at least you were able to turn it off.

.

 

[R66-Y]

My old laptop trying to run Super Smash bros Melee in the Dolphin emulator

 

[Ikagura]

My old laptop trying to run Super Smash bros Melee in the Dolphin emulator

Which model? I played on an old Compaq Pressario and while it was slown-mon I still ended up appreciating it.

 

[cjl8336 cjl8336]

early days of CPS-2 emulation, getting kawaks to run was a pain in 2006
I finally got sega saturn games to run with bizhawk after years of fussing with mednafen's command line interface
The worst one by far was final burn alpha - that POS software never worked for me, but good old MAME always does the job

 

[secreto7]

early days of CPS-2 emulation, getting kawaks to run was a pain in 2006
I finally got sega saturn games to run with bizhawk after years of fussing with mednafen's command line interface
The worst one by far was final burn alpha - that POS software never worked for me, but good old MAME always does the job

How odd, maybe it was due to the types of arcade roms you had?
Since most arcade roms are made specifically to work on MAME and the MAME specification for the files change over time, and the other arcade emulators might have diverged on the type of rom they worked with?

 

[spins]

trying to play last bible iii in ZSNES
not sure why but as soon as you go outside in the game the graphics stop to freak out
later I learned that not only is ZSNES inaccurate but it also has unpatched security flaws...

 

[MasterEn]

i guess i have been pretty lucky with emulating games. i mostly have dealt with lag when emulating games. the worst time that i had was trying to play yugioh forbidden memories on a psx emulator. nothing i did got me past a copyright protection screen.
fortunately, duckstation has no problems running the game.

 

[QrtzQdrnt]

tried to play Sega GT using xemu but my laptop is too weak for it so the game just became a lime green mess of jumbled graphics the moment i tried to start a race
then i got a 360 and played it through the backwards compat and for whatever reason i found it less interesting than other racing games i've played

another bad experience i had is because i didnt have a controller at the time, but i played Ratchet & Clank on PCSX2 using the keyboard. it was horrible LMAO

 

[Aunt Sarah]

Xemu and Xenia. The vast majority of games their compat lists claim are playable have very serious graphics and audio glitches that ruin the experience. Not much has improved since I first tried them.

 

[Tronky.it]

While I'll always be grateful to all the developers of retro console emulators who allow us to relive and preserve the great masterpieces of the past, personally speaking, I haven't had a great experience with...

1) Xenia, but it's unfair to say it's a bad emulator, given that it was developed recently compared to other emulators we know today and still has a long way to go (at least the games start; I finished the Family Guy game on it in local multiplayer).
2) DesMuMe, turbo mode is difficult to manage—sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't—as are the shaders and save states.
3) PCSX2 stable version, I much prefer the nightly version, which is easier to manage and allows you to see the games you have available with the covers.
4) MAME. Not having an arcade in the city where I live, I'd like to at least try some old arcade games like Punch-Out! or Lupin III The Shooting, and instead I find myself with an emulator that asks you to waste half an hour of time DURING THE GAME to set the right settings otherwise it either doesn't start or doesn't work during gameplay.

Lately with VBA and Project64 I'm having some issues of optimization

I use mGBA for GBA games, try it, it's better than VBA in my opinion.
Nothing to say about Project64, having only tried it once a while ago to run Bad Fur Day and Mario 64, which worked very well.

 

[Ikagura]

Xemu and Xenia. The vast majority of games their compat lists claim are playable have very serious graphics and audio glitches that ruin the experience. Not much has improved since I first tried them.

1) Xenia, but it's unfair to say it's a bad emulator, given that it was developed recently and still has a long way to go (at least the games start; I finished the Family Guy game on it in local multiplayer).

Try Xenia Canary.

2) DesMuMe, turbo mode is difficult to manage—sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't—as are the shaders and save states.

I feel that MelonDS is the better one.

3) PCSX2 stable version, I much prefer the nightly version, which is easier to manage and allows you to see the games you have available with the covers.

Same, the 1.7.x was much better than the 1.6.x branch.

4) MAME. Not having an arcade in the city where I live, I'd like to at least try some old arcade games like Punch-Out! or Lupin III The Shooting, and instead I find myself with an emulator that asks you to waste half an hour of time DURING THE GAME to set the right settings otherwise it either doesn't start or doesn't work during gameplay.

I have 0 idea why even with the rom they say "missing file" for me... I also hate the filtering by default for games.

I am glad Final Burn Neo is there.

 

[Tronky.it]

I feel that MelonDS is the better one.

I've been using it for a year now, and I haven't missed an update! I'd love to know how to play it online, but I'll settle for that anyway, xD
What I'd like to see in modern emulators, however, is the ability to view my games with their covers or box art or whatever, without having to download programs like Launchbox or Playnite. PCSX2, Ryujinx, Duckstation—those are a step ahead, thanks to that single feature.

 

[Ikagura]

I've been using it for a year now, and I haven't missed an update! I'd love to know how to play it online, but I'll settle for that anyway, xD

I liked using DesMuMe HD to make 3D games better looking on a big screen but it was based on an older build so it didn't work the best...

MelonDS having internal upscaling is one of my favourite thing.

What I'd like to see in modern emulators, however, is the ability to view my games with their covers or box art or whatever, without having to download programs like Launchbox or Playnite. PCSX2, Ryujinx, Duckstation—those are a step ahead, thanks to that single feature.

Absolutely, it makes it easier to get to play a game when the list gets longer. I also appreciate when they show the amount of time and the last time you've launched this game.

 

[Judier]

Maybe the SNES on PC. I don't know about any of you but I do feel like it was a chore to setup. Now I believe I can do that for sure cause I have a controller, but beforehand I only had a keyboard. Now it's much easier for me.

 

[UndeadKnight]

I remember Demons Souls being a little annoying to set up 10 years ago on PS3 emulation. Don't know how it is now because my gaming PC died.

N64 has always been god-awful.

PCSX2 used to be absolutely terrible, every game needed its own micro settings to get working right, and even then most games were glitchy, or unplayable. Didnt stop me from playing games though, you just learn to adapt and use your IQ to figure things out. Young people don't really have to deal with this kind of technical stuff anymore, makes sense that PC technical literacy has massively dropped in the last 15 years. Nowadays zoomers don't even know what a Rom or a rar file are.

 

[Ikagura]

I remember Demons Souls being a little annoying to set up 10 years ago on PS3 emulation. Don't know how it is now because my gaming PC died.

It has improved thankfully.

N64 has always been god-awful.

Not anymore thanks to newer emulators.

PCSX2 used to be absolutely terrible, every game needed its own micro settings to get working right, and even then most games were glitchy, or unplayable.

Long ago I've done FFX and MGS2 but I agree that it's finally viable since a few years ago.

 

[SpikeSlania]

Well I have a very recent experience for worst emulator experience. I been tinkering with a Retroid Pocket 6 and while setting up Retro Arch while following along with a youtube guide (Retro Game Corps) he mentioned if I wanted a more accurate SNES representation to go with the BSNES core while he said most people should just stick with the snes9x so of course I went with BSNES and lets say that was a mistake. First I tried turning on black frame insertion while using it and it just did not like that at all. Eventually I gave up on that and tried playing some Super Mario World and it decided to crash/freeze on me 2 levels into a play through. Needlessly to say I have since removed that as a core and stuck to snes9x which has no issues with black frame insertion and/or crashes.

 

[ichigoww]

Just a few stories on my end:
As a kid I remember trying to emulate N64 with project64 on a super weak pc and it ran horribly, same story with NDS and no$gba couple of years later. I think I wasn't able to emulate 5th gen properly until like 2010, and even then it was at very low settings

Years ago I ran into a softlock in Mario & Luigi Superstar saga for the gba using vba, this was hours into the game. I think I ended up figuring out what happened, but I almost lost a lot of progress back then because of it

Last year I tried to emulate 3d Dot Game Heroes on rpcs3 but wasn't able to because of constant crashes. Apparently it only works with very specific builds of the emulator, and I prefer to play other stuff right now instead of setting that up

 

[Tronky.it]

Needlessly to say I have since removed that as a core and stuck to snes9x which has no issues with black frame insertion and/or crashes

Snes9X is better than Bsnes, in my opinion, even though it's been a while since its last update...

 

[Inventory]

Simple. Worst emulator of any console you have tried and best one, and why it was the Best or worst.

 

[Tonberry]

Worst: PCSX2
Best: PCSX2

 

[PlainnameWTF]

The worst emulator I could think of is the .emu oned from Android. It struggle a lot with them. Some are fine and some are a pain in the ass on how they work. I tried the MD.emu as I had issues running Sega CD games there as the tracks must be formatted to WAV files as the emulator doesn't support the MP3 ones.

And the best emulator for me is the PCSX2. I used to have a PS2 and enjoyed the games. The emulator works like a charm. When I still had my PC working back in 2016, I was goofing around with the emulator and import saves to the virtual memory cards with an iso file I created and running ULaunch ELF there. And when I return to PCSX2, I'm surprised of the improvements it got when I was missing out. I even got a DualSense controller that my uncle found on the street and borrowed my cousin's PC to play NFS Hot Pursuit 2 and it gave me nostalgia and remember how amazing it felt playing the game with an actual PlayStation controller with vibration functions enabled

 

[GeoHikari]

The worst emulator who I consider is Yabause, the Sega Saturn famous emulator. In the period who I wanted to play Saturn games on my PC, I have many difficulties to install the necessary plugins as well the control mapping and video adjustments. Maybe others hate this emulator.

And the best emulator who I like a lot is mGBA. It's very easy to use and have a full support for GB and GBC games. Thanks with mGBA, I played some of best games of the portable.