Worst emulation experience(s)?

[Lady Aldia Lady Aldia]

Worst is Desmume by a loooooong shot. My shitty phone running Drastic would still outclass it by a landslide.

 

[Born To Pirate]

worst is any of the Saturn standalone emulators like Yabuse and SSF

best is PPSSPP

 

[NotReallyHere]

I don't really emulate anymore, but from my own memories...

Worst: NESticle. At the time, I really didn't like the lowbrow name and desktop icon they decided to go with. Though I did kind of like the severed hand they used in the actual interface...? As an early NES emulator, it was serviceable, though noticeably inaccurate.

Years later, I learned you could use that same program to easily edit colors and palates within NES ROMs, and save them with your custom settings! So that opened up a whole new world for me. Used it to make some alterations to Blades of Steel, so that Vancouver and Montreal were wearing jerseys in their actual color schemes

Best: Virtual PC for Macintosh. Allowed me to run Windows 98 on my college-era iMac, saving me much frustration back when Windows and Mac file integration was pretty much unheard of. Also got me used to the concept of a computer with a dual-boot OS, which I still use to this day.

Also a damn fine way to play Red Alert and Grim Fandango on a vintage Apple device, for what that's worth

 

[dkpopman]

Worst for me is either Xemu or RPCS3.

Best is Duckstation.

 

[χKai]

Worst.. Hmm. I don't remember many bad ones. Probably one of the early early NES or SNES emulators, but I couldn't tell you the name. It's not the one you're thinking of, it's more obscure.

The best ones.. NESticle and ZSnes were peak for me as a kid. Did everything I want and everything I could ever imagine but before I'd ever had the chance to do so.

 

[Deleted member 14682]

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

All the arcade emulators are dog shit. Especially MAME. Best would be Snes9x or Duckstation. With honorable mention going out to PCSX2 for emulating one of the hardest platforms recreate on PC with a great deal of accuracy and enhancements. Redream and Dolphin are both excellent emulators, but not the best.

 

[virtua_willdu]

Worst one from me: Xeina.
I tried it during early 2025 when I was seeing about one of the games I've played on the 360 and it's a slideshow with this emulator. I could have thought that it was because my main laptop isn't powerful enough since it doesn't have a GPU, that same game's PS3 version running through RPCS3 was running way better.

While I have thought that Xeina requires much more powerful hardware, my big brother's more powerful laptop running Xeina ran into crashes when he was playing Sonic Unleashed's 360 version.
It was very unoptimized at the time.

Best one(s) from me: PPSSPP and Flycast.
I've got little to say: With the right setting tweaks, you can play PSP and Dreamcast games on even low-end phone hardware from the late 2010s as long as they have 2GB or more of RAM and OpenGL ES 3.0

True story here: I recently was able to find my good old TCL A501DL and was able to play some light PSP games, though I wasn't able to play any Dreamcast games since they freeze Flycast but my dad's old Orbic Maui was more powerful and was able to play a little more heavier PSP games and medium to emulate Dreamcast games, both at near full speed.

 

[blahbleh]

Worst: yabause for android it barely runs games, it's hard to locate files manually.
Best: drastic. perfect performance on almost any device, u can even use mid flag phone from 2016 to play

 

[petran79]

worst: the Mega Drive emulator for Dreamcast. It required to burn cds at 2x speed, something my cd burner did not support. As a result I wasted dozens of CDs.

Best: Bsnes. It was a revelation overclocking the pc to 4.5 GHz to be able to play cycle accurate snes games

 

[QrtzQdrnt]

worst: Yaba Sanshiro 2/Yabause/Kronos

They're just so raw. Everything feels like it will fall apart if you press one wrong button and then when you actually get a game to work, there will be issues

best: too many to name. But I'd say it's emulators like redream, Dolphin, Drastic, mGBA, bsnes. You just shove in a game and it works and works damn well

 

[YoshifreakZX]

Best: Dolphin probably
Worst: Really want to say RetroArch, but it's my main emulator at this point so idk...
I guess I'd go with ePSXe. Never really liked using it back when that was the best option for a PSX emulator.

 

[JohnGetsuden]

The actual cores in retro arch can be very good, but the UI is complete dogshit to use. Getting auto-fire to work in arcade style games is a pain in the ass. FB-neo is a much superior choice for playing most arcade game and I've had very few issues setting up custom control schemes.

For worst emulator that I haven't seen mentioned, I would go with Mame. The UI is a mess, like retro arch and you have to keep around a 100gb worth of games that clog up your drive and the menus, just so you know the 20 or so games you actually want to play will work.

Best: Dolphin probably
Worst: Really want to say RetroArch, but it's my main emulator at this point so idk...
I guess I'd go with ePSXe. Never really liked using it back when that was the best option for a PSX emulator.

Ditto Dolphin. Even my shitty android from years ago could run most game cube games at a good speed.

 

[ChiefMcClane]

I really have not enjoyed setting up Retroarch. I run Linux Mint on my laptop, so I really appreciate how easy that EmuDeck makes it. It did almost all of the work for me, and it's pretty much just a matter of putting ROMs into the ROMS folder and then playing them.

 

[groundbeef]

Having tried many upon many on PC and Android...my least and most disliked are UNZ, Infuse and Demul. The best are definitely MAME, PPSSPP, RPCS3, Dolphin, Duckstation, Flycast and PCSX2. BTW Retroarch is NOT an emulator. It is simply a frontend. Retroarch is amazing in its coverage. I thoroughly enjoy it. There are a few forks of it that are more simple. Ludo is a good example.

There are simply too many unbelievable emulators to give just one the Gold award. In saying that, if I had a gun to my head and had to choose one I'd have to go with PPSSPP. Henrik Rydgard puts massive efforts into it. Everything about PPSSPP is professional and exquisite.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

Worst one: https://retrogametalk.com/threads/ever-used-the-boycott-advance-emulator.11457/

Best one: DraStic.

 

[Badseed Badseed]

I think the worst is RetroArch, I know everyone loves it, but a lot of people love pineapple
on pizza and that sucks ass too. FU Retroarch. The best, man thats hard ill say 3: Drastic, PPSSPP and Duckstation.

 

[pawaclutter]

I think the worst is RetroArch, I know everyone loves it, but a lot of people love pineapple
on pizza and that sucks ass too. FU Retroarch. The best, man thats hard ill say 3: Drastic, PPSSPP and Duckstation.

Retroarch + any other frontend is a godsend, tbh

Still funny to me how the best way to use retroarch is to use a frontend...for a frontend, lol

 

[Megarockman _1987 Megarockman _1987]

The worst was a web N64 emulator
The game was running at 12 fps (or less)
And the best one is PPSSPP and the emulator in SNES classic edition, it can run PSP, PSX and MAME

 

[Netra]

Ares, this dogsht don't work not matter how powerful is your hardware.

 

[Badseed Badseed]

Retroarch + any other frontend is a godsend, tbh

Still funny to me how the best way to use retroarch is to use a frontend...for a frontend, lol

 

[nathman]

Cemu. Easily. It just loves to crash. Mupen64 isn't great either.

 

[JellyjamLu]

Still Retroarch for me at the moment, though I have learned alot and seem to have a firmer grip on what to do with it these days.

The thing that annoyed me the most with it, is scaling.
having to go scroll down to "custom" for every game, stretch out the screen accordingly to fill (as I am currenly 1920x1080) and dont want to see off screen gargle pixels.

More you say? yes it's Retroarch....
For every, SINGLE, game.... I had to navigate to the quick menu > overrides > save override for this content only , save. very tedious.
THEN i noticed a bug, some config files, despite saving, were not applying my custom options.

And so... to waste even more time with something that should be literally one click imo.... I had to pull up the Mupen64-Next's config files folder within Retroarch, find the game, then add this command line:
aspect_ratio_index = "23" and then save.

Why? lol

 

[Dreamcast_best_VN_console]

The first time I tried to emulate the Sega CD was HORRIBLE. I had to install a bunch of programs to convert the bin files into god knows what other file type, realize it didn't work, then try to convert them again/into another file type.


But the funny thing is, the problem wasn't related to the game files themselves
I was just missing the bios...

 

[Kovlak]

Nothing really.

 

[Princess Viola]

Friggin MAME is the bane of my existence. Been emulating for over 20 years and yet every time I've tried to use MAME it's an exercise in frustration. People complain about how complicated RetroArch's UI is but at least I can run my damn games in the cores in that. (And also why I use FBN for my arcade games nowadays)