WORST emulator you've played on?

[RashFaustinho]

Premise: Programming an emulator is hard.
This is not to ridicule those that worked on the projects, but to share experiences and maybe admire how much we progressed since then.

I'll start:

no$GBA
Version: Some version from 2010
I've talked about this emulator in another post and remembering it gave the idea for this thread.
There weren't many emulation glitches, but oh my god the sound emulation was AWFUL.
Nintendo DS itself doesn't have an high quality sound, but somehow this emulator made it 100 times worse. It was super raspy and out of sync.
Made Pokemon Black at release date nearly unplayable for me.

PCSX2
Version: 1.6.0 or below
For the longest time, I hated this emulator due to requiring an extremely powerful machine to run it at acceptable speeds. PS2 is one my favorite consoles, but the emulation just wasn't there for me.
When I compared it to PPSSPP, which always had super low requirements, PCSX2 felt straight up unfair. Your PC had to be magnitudes more powerful than a system that was at least a decade old.
Nowdays I like PCSX2, but it took sooooo much time to have a good UI and to finally being able to hit good performance on almost all systems.
Also the plugin system was dumb. I'm glad they got rid of it in newer versions.

 

[Waffles]

I can barely have any info on it anymore (which annoys me), but... Boycott Advance.

It'd technically run a lot of games, but then it'd crash my whole system when presented with challenges such as... opening the Pokemon Center's door on Pokemon RWBY. It was maddening.

 

[middler]

Does it count if you have never been able to play on it regardless of trying? If so than the standalone MAME (current) is the winner by far. I know its because of me, I have never been able to get a configuration to run. So this isn't at all a mark against the emulator just my experience with it.

 

[Karnik]

SnemulDS, snes emulator for DS Phat/ Lite/ DSi. For every single game you have to manually adjust the priority of the 5 graphic layers and sprites, there are continuous glitches here and there when things go well, otherwise the games don't even start. Often crackling and jerky sound. Worst emulator on this console, despite being slightly improved last year by a willing and courageous coder.

 

[ATenderLad]

This is one of those topics I feel bad weighing in on, most emulators are passion projects from hobbyists at no expense to other people, feels shitty to make cracks about 'em.

Although, there was that PS2 android emulator, DamonPS2 or something? That was a fucking scam that likely just ripped off PCSX2, so no worries slagging them off.

 

[Karnik]

Although, there was that PS2 android emulator, DamonPS2 or something?

Don't worry about talking badly about it: chinese stuff! The fact that they steal other people's ideas is nothing new...

 

[RageBurner]

Besides older versions of PCSX2, which have already been mentioned (it's wonderful now), I can cite EPSXE (yes, it was the defacto option for a long time, doesn't mean usability was good) and, again purely from a usability perspective, Mednafen without a good frontend.

 

[gg-yo-g]

definitely sad rooster (happychick).
like whenever i remember i was once using THAT i get goosebumps and remember that life's not that bad really, since one uses actual emulators now

 

[Stookymalarkey]

I second Mednafen since it requires taking the time to figure out how to use on its own. The fact that there's still not an official front-end confounds me to this day.

Another one for me is ZSNES due to how inconsistent the performance could be on different games. Earthworm Jim 2 was a nightmare to play on it.

 

[RageBurner]

I second Mednafen since it requires taking the time to figure out how to use on its own. The fact that there's still not an official front-end confounds me to this day.

Another one for me is ZSNES due to how inconsistent the performance could be on different games. Earthworm Jim 2 was a nightmare to play on it.

Yeah, ZSNES' framerate was all over the place, really bad. I use SNES 9X (it continues to be updated) and it's still excellent.

 

[Cu-Neo]

The snes emulator on the ds for the R4 (snemulDS). I tried to play SMT 1 and I had to lower the graphics setting of the emulator to minimun and then the emulator crashes itself. And another one would be the majority of the old N64 emulators on portable consoles like the one on psp that have like one compatible game and the sucessor on vita is not that good either.

 

[RageBurner]

The snes emulator on the ds for the R4 (snemulDS). I tried to play SMT 1 and I had to lower the graphics setting of the emulator to minimun and then the emulator crashes itself. And another one would be the majority of the old N64 emulators on portable consoles like the one on psp that have like one compatible game and the sucessor on vita is not that good either.

Wow that's terrible. It's not like SMT is visually demanding or anything.

 

[Karnik]

Regarding zsnes I absolutely disagree. On ms-dos it was the best snes emulator available, with a great interface, and a lot of graphic and sound options, and good performance. I wonder if we're talking about the same thing. With due respect, some people speak just to say something, without knowledge of the facts and against all evidence.

 

[Cayenne]

ZSNES, Visualboy Advance (both are laggy and have awful sound emulation), WinKawaks (all right for CPS1 & 2 but I couldn't for the life of me ever get Neo-Geo to work), N64 emulators in general.

 

[Stookymalarkey]

Regarding zsnes I absolutely disagree. On ms-dos it was the best snes emulator available, with a great interface, and a lot of graphic and sound options, and good performance. I wonder if we're talking about the same thing. With due respect, some people speak just to say something, without knowledge of the facts and against all evidence.

Yes, that's the same emulator. It was ok for the time but it was known to have issues with some games, like my example of Earthworm Jim 2. The game would always freeze up at Lorenzo's Soil and couldn't be worked around.

Post automatically merged: Dec 16, 2024

ZSNES, Visualboy Advance (both are laggy and have awful sound emulation), WinKawaks (all right for CPS1 & 2 but I couldn't for the life of me ever get Neo-Geo to work), N64 emulators in general.

For N64, Simple64 has made strides to becoming a decent emulator. It's a big step up from the plug-in nightmares of old.

 

[RageBurner]

Regarding zsnes I absolutely disagree. On ms-dos it was the best snes emulator available, with a great interface, and a lot of graphic and sound options, and good performance. I wonder if we're talking about the same thing. With due respect, some people speak just to say something, without knowledge of the facts and against all evidence.

I used ZSNES since version 0.350 so I'm well aware of how it ran on DOS. That doesn't mean it could match SNES9X when ZSNES transitioned to Windows, though. Not all of it is the emulator's fault, as Windows introduces a lot of overhead, but still, from a usability sense, it is what it is.

 

[Karnik]

Ok to say that one is better than the other, but to say that Zsnes is the worst snes emulator (as the thread title asks) is clearly false. Anyway buddies like before.

 

[RageBurner]

Ok to say that one is better than the other, but to say that Zsnes is the worst snes emulator (as the thread title asks) is clearly false. Anyway buddies like before.

LOL yeah I wasn't implying that in the slightest. I guess I'm carrying the whole conversation to a more neutral angle.

 

[Yousef]

I can agree on PCSX2 1.6….. it’s shite.

 

[RageBurner]

I can agree on PCSX2 1.6….. it’s shite.

Yeah. You needed a frontend, managing per-game configs (essential for PS2) was a nightmare, it was unstable, the list goes on.

 

[Yousef]

Yeah. You needed a frontend, managing per-game configs (essential for PS2) was a nightmare, it was unstable, the list goes on.

Definition of hardware roll die. You can find WEAKER machines that run games better and you still go “ok, what am I doing wrong then?”.

 

[Lee__Kanker]

Anything nintendo made on the wii

It was the bare minimum on a machine that can do so so much more, shout out to the wiiu one that for some reason washes out all the colors
All the emus on the ps2 that for some reason output stuff at the wrong resolution with bilinear filtering on

 

[HikaruKitsune]

Pasofami and Super Pasofami.

Pasofami because it relied on split-cart format, and Super Pasofami because of how primitive it was.

 

[thecatillaccat]

I can barely have any info on it anymore (which annoys me), but... Boycott Advance.

It'd technically run a lot of games, but then it'd crash my whole system when presented with challenges such as... opening the Pokemon Center's door on Pokemon RWBY. It was maddening.

So much hate for this emulator. So. Much.

Besides older versions of PCSX2, which have already been mentioned (it's wonderful now), I can cite EPSXE (yes, it was the defacto option for a long time, doesn't mean usability was good) and, again purely from a usability perspective, Mednafen without a good frontend.

EPSXE...adequate. May it burn in the fires of obsolescence where it belongs.

For me, I gotta put this in as both an objective choice, and an emotional one. The worst and the best emulator I ever used was the OG - Nesticle. I tended toward the windows version for ease of use, even if the MS-DOS version was better in a number of ways.

This thing was unreal in 1999ish. It ran more or less everything. It had tile editing capability. Simple debugging. You could record and playback gameplay in a tidy little file called an NSF and share it for anyone else to load in and see what you did. Save states! Speed up toggles! What a concept! Amazingly ahead of its time.

BUT. The colors were outrageously wrong much of the time. The sound emulation was...usually adequate? It was buggy. It was inaccurate. It was beautiful. It was purely juvenile in both its name and presentation as well (a severed ballsack as a cursor and the about screen featuring a man made of poop wearing a crown called, fittingly, Shitman) which is a bonus or a bad thing depending on how infantile you are. I sometimes wish we could have seen what it could have become had someone not stolen the source code and released their own copy, and development was halted.

 

[Bakuma1997]

Yabause, I get it, Sega Saturn is hell to emulate, but i couldn't even get mine to play flipping Twinkle Star Sprites, a game barely demanding (It's only 60MB)
Other one must be Ootake, a Turbografx """""Emulator"""""", menu way too minimal, commands for settings, barely acurracy in BARELY DEMANDING games, and worst of all, no support for CD games, considering they are exclusives there, i call it awful and it deserves the No Reccomended in Emulation General

Fortunately as soon as i grasped Bizhawk, both of them are easly supprased and i can finally enjoy Panzer Dragoon and Gradius II