WORST emulator you've played on?

[OhhMannGoddDamm]

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.

ZSNES. I used to use it heavy on my old potato thinking it was the greatest thing ever.

 

[adecay83]

ZSNES. I used to use it heavy on my old potato thinking it was the greatest thing ever.

Same ?

 

[mqese]

ZSNES always gave me a bit a trouble, my older brother showed me snes9x a bit after that though.

 

[Zeph]

ePSXe because the UI is kinda ass and not lot of user configurations.

 

[Mopeybloke]

At any length, it was probably ZSNES. When it stopped development, it was already way worse than SNES9X, and for some reason people kept recommending for the next decade or so.

 

[rugal]

pcsx2 early version 1.2.1
it was terrible and the hight spec it needed to run game was really annoying because of that i did buy a stronger pc than i needed at the time to use pcsx2

ppsspp very early releaase version 1.2
it play most game but sometimes crashed in the middle of some games
a few game did crash alot
and every new update you did not know if the game you did play through before was going to crash or work so you did save many previous versions on pc
than the fact that version 1.9.4 could not play naruto ultimate ninja heroes but version 1.3 or 1.6.3 could play naruto games

epsxe early release
it did run all game good but many times you started a game it reset control buttons so you did need to set up controler again
and the fact that its was annoying as hell to first find plugins then get them and after that setup plugin
and you did need to check the site that there was no new plugins or a update to a plugins

and setup right plugins was hard because there was so manyu in video setup and sound setup screen and some plugins did work better on certain games
but as soon as you did change plugins you needed to changes other settings to the emulator because when you did change plugins that plugin had other settins option and different setup so it did reset all the video setting you did have before so you did need to set the up again




but today both ppsspp and pcsx2 is among the best emulator you can get and my 2 favorit emulator

 

[xRavenXP]

The worst emulators I've ever used were these:

- BoycottAdvance. I used it right at the beginning to emulate the GBA and I tried the game Bomberman Tournament, back in 2001/2002. It even ran well, but when it came time to fight enemies, I would drop a bomb and when it exploded, it would hurt my character anywhere on the screen and not just in the explosion area, and that made the game unplayable. Other games would certainly also get bugs with it.

- PSXJin: I started recording the first PS1 games with it and it was simply one of the most unstable and buggy emulators I've ever used. After Bizhawk started emulating PS1, I abandoned PSXJin forever.

- Citra: It had the potential to be good, but it had several bugs and problems, especially with the hotkeys.

- Final Burn Alpha and Final Burn Neo: These are emulators that cause some problems when using the hotkeys. For playing Arcade, I prefer Bizhawk (which uses the MAME core).

 

[hanni-ho]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Project64 yet. It's a fine emulator but it being the most annoying form of nagware I've ever used was simply atrocious.

 

[Bakuma1997]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Project64 yet. It's a fine emulator but it being the most annoying form of nagware I've ever used was simply atrocious.

Agreed, As soon as i learned about RMG i dropped that shit, helps is has a UI similar to Duckstation

 

[nimlouth]

DraStic is SO bad but it runs SO fast ?

 

[Yousef]

New answer: ps1 mini

 

[Ailuropoda Melanoleuca]

So, the way this question is worded, I have to assume it excludes emulators that were so finnicky I was *never* able to actually play anything on them? Well, that rules out the top contenders, I think.

Leaving RPCS3, I guess, simply by virtue of all the rigamarole you have to through to get games *and* updates *and* DLC working for a given game, paired with the fact that PS3 emulation is still pretty dang insufficient. There are only a handful of games "trapped" in the "PS3 jail" that I care about -- Gundam Senki and Macross 30, most notably -- neither one of which runs all that well, which is... endlessly disappointing.

 

[Skeetos]

Just about every Android emulator I've used that isn't PPSSPP or AetherSX2. It seems as if there aren't any good ones outside of those two. I see a lot of ZSNES hate. I get that, it's not the most accurate and it could be rough at times, but I have crazy nostalgia for it because it was the first emulator I ever used and I remember all of the really old Youtube let's players like ProtonJon or SirRonLionHeart using it for romhacks. Not to mention I always liked it's UI, the snowing effect or whatever it was always had a comfortable feel to it.

 

[DaveTheMan]

I don't like using XEMU not all games work and I hate that you can't change what Keys/Buttons you use to play a Game

 

[water_kooler]

SSF for the Sega Saturn messed up my laptop so bad I had to reinstall Windows. Somehow the emulator broke a lot of features, e.g. The start menu wouldn't open on my desktop, I couldn't open settings or adjust the volume.

 

[rosemarymenace]

not the outright worst, but the most disappointing, the version of the PS2 Classic emulator used on PS4
the emulator on PS3 worked great for a lot of games (notably Hot Pursuit 2 runs near flawlessly) but for some reason the version on PS4 has several regressions in terms of accuracy and performance with nearly everything I tested, I understand it's partly due to differences in the cell architecture used on the PS3 but it was still really disappointing to not be able to play a lot of PS2 games on my modded PS4 that worked just fine on PS3

 

[Zemus]

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.

Never thought I'd see Pokemon Wisteria mentioned in this day and age!

 

[Eclipse14]

Virtual Jaguar, and it's not really a contest for me.

I don't recall much about others I used prior to getting a grip on RetroArch (and later a laptop that could play 5th-Gen+ games without issue), but on that front, it's the worst by default as it's the only core I used where many of the games didn't work. Every other system covered to my interests plays all my games without issue (though Opera's savestates don't seem to work as intended, hard saving works fine), except Virtual Jaguar.

Worst part is, it's the only Jaguar core RetroArch has now.

 

[χKai]

Where the fuck to begin.
Let's start with NES. Never had a bad emulator.
NESticle, RockNESX, NEStopia, FCE-Ultra, all of them worked perfectly for me and I never had any problems.
Deimos Applications NES and Matsu Player have worked well for me on Android.
Now I mainly use Mesen.. I wonder.
IS there a bad NES emulator? If there is, I haven't used it. ?

Nope, I just can't think of one. On any console, not just NES. I guess emulators are just inherently good.

Edit: I vaguely recall having one or two bad experiences, but in retrospect it was  me that was the problem and not the emulator. I was much less experienced back then. ?

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

Nope, I just can't think of one. On any console, not just NES. I guess emulators are just inherently good.

I'm sorry

 

[tropicalavera]

When Nintendo launched their official N64 emulator as part of their Switch Online Expansion Pack service it was without a doubt the worst emulator that I'd ever interacted with. No controller pak support; serious latency; no button remapping (which is pretty vital for N64 games imo); and so so many bugs and glitches throughout. Really proving that devoted fan efforts do what Nintendon't.

 

[Bakuma1997]

I'm sorry

You cut the part where the game glitches with hyperrealistic eyes and Whatever.webp says "Larry, spell ICUP"

 

[Zerpina]

The Nintendo Switch >XD
<Sorry i hada say it>

 

[Skeetos]

I'm sorry

I've been seeing a lot of stuff on this lately. Never heard of it until recently but I think something about it that interests me is that it reformats all of the audio into MIDI format. Like why is that even a thing lol.

 

[Queltic]

no$GB was great for me back 1999, playing pokemon blue on 3x speed with gameshark and infinite master balls. lol