WORST emulator you've played on?

[WerewolfJones]

It’s RetroArch. I was fine with it until I didn’t play games for a while due to work. I came back to it, and suddenly it couldn’t find any of my game directory files, even though they hadn’t moved at all. I stopped using it after that. A shame.

 

[Perseonn]

Retroarch, hands down.

• The UI uses XMB-like interface, which is already a headache.
• Hierarchy what hierarchy
• Select Core
• Want visual enhancement? Enjoy menu hell without clear hierarchy!
• How do I manage my PS1 memory cards? *Evil shrug*

I'd rather use ZNES.

 

[Reysot]

ndsoid, n64oid, gbaoid psxoid,and the oid series of emulator on android in general, even back in the day was unstable and slow, alleast wasnt adware.

for example between n64 oid and the release of m64 AE by paulscode isnt more that 6 months.
same with ndsoid and drastic.

and even today still there is a lot of emulator, bugged, bad optimizated and fully loaded with adware on the playstore.

an other story i used the first vesion of citra, back in the day, you need a 3ds for decryption of roms, thats was a wild time

 

[Sangan]

i was surprised at how garbage the Switch N64 emu was, considering its behind 2 paywalls you would expect it to be decent at the very least but it lags almost as much as that janky emu i have on my OG Xbox

 

[marky]

J2ME Loader

As far as I know this is the only JAVA game emulator for Android. But the way the controls work in non-touch games and the glitches in many titles and the need to set the resolution and control scheme for each game separately make this whole emulator average.
It's also average for playing more dynamic titles.

 

[DjQuick2008]

N64 emulators have been the one ive had trouble with mainly. All of my retrobat hard drives are easy as pie to use and the customisation is easy to follow. Bezels, Resolutions, shaders. Although the latest retrobat drive i got seems to have N64 configured properly even plays WCW and no mercy properly.

 

[Karnik 2.0: reboot]

MeBoy for s40 keypad phones: graphics okay, but terrible sound; jerky and out of sync. ??‍

 

[J.F.C]

SNES Station probably.
It isn't that bad an emulator for the PS2 but a lot of games experience slowdown and there are better options nowadays. The menu music is fucking great though.

 

[chxshire22]

using it rn on my psp.

i hate u gpsp kai. the game sometimes breaks (hamtaro) and lags like crazy in summon night 2. summon night 2 is my fav gba game. unforgivable

 

[Battle Cossack!]

MeBoy on BlackBerry Bold
Back then, I though a Blackberry phone would have enough power to run Game Boy games. Oh boy, how wrong i was back then.
The games ran poorly and I didn't understand the controls.

 

[newageretrohippie]

Retroarch, hands down.

• The UI uses XMB-like interface, which is already a headache.
• Hierarchy what hierarchy
• Select Core
• Want visual enhancement? Enjoy menu hell without clear hierarchy!
• How do I manage my PS1 memory cards? *Evil shrug*

I'd rather use ZNES.

I would agree with this. Retroarch can be ok if it's obscured by a better interface, but you still usually have to schlogg thru those horrible menus for something anyway. The default settings are never what you want... and even after screwing around endlessly, it's never really what you want either... just... MAYBE closer to what you want (which is to be playing on mednafen or an FPGA or real hardware).

 

[NatalieZaki]

an DS Android emulator that showed ads every time I opened the settings. I think it was just a Drastic fork, but instead of using the actual Drastic emulator, I used that one. So many Android emulators back then just gave you ads all the time.

 

[newageretrohippie]

an DS Android emulator that showed ads every time I opened the settings. I think it was just a Drastic fork, but instead of using the actual Drastic emulator, I used that one. So many Android emulators back then just gave you ads all the time.

the play store is kind of a cesspool. I stick to Aurora for play store stuff (you can search by no-paid/no-GSF/no-ads. No login required, and there is on-demand tracker profiles for any app).

I use F-Droid for stuff that's on there (and isn't totally gimped...).

Of course, github is also good if you already know what you are looking for. I think all of the ".EMU" series is available open source and ad-free.

For stuff you just can't get anywhere else, "apkpure.com" has never done me wrong either... but i'm not exactly sure why i would or wouldn't trust them, but like i said... they've never done me wrong.

 

[bonbonprince]

MAME... the least intuitive emulator ever!
Once I got FB Neo on my hands, never looked back

 

[haikujess]

That one NES emulator that uses Generic MIDI instead of NES sounds

 

[newageretrohippie]

That one NES emulator that uses Generic MIDI instead of NES sounds

oh yeah that was, iNES, right...?

i remember i downloaded a Japanese general MIDI rompler/wavetable that installed as a MIDI device in windows, and it was kind of cool in a way. it made playing NES games kind of like playing PC games (where the quality of the sound was directly related to the quality of your computer soundcard setup). I thought it was more fun to mess with that stuff than it was to play the actual emulator. haha

My mom made me uninstall the wavetable device because she saw one of the demo songs that came with it was called "T. K. Eats my Shxxrts" and she didn't like that for some reason... I was reallly annoyed.

Also, i believe the developer of iNES created the .nes file format which was certainly a non-trivial task that most folks take for granted these days!

 

[BunnyLain]

I think it was called Fusion or something?
It was for sega games but it couldn't handle anything the genesis was good at, so all the scrolling became static and nothing worked at all.

 

[SpectreOverflow]

Phoenix, an emulator primarily targeting emulation of the 3DO and Atari Jaguar. I don't know if it's a me problem, but I could never, ever get it to work properly, and when it did, it was VERY slow. 4DO is usually my go-to for 3DO emulation, and it works just fine.

 

[DJPlace]

i can't recall any but i know of an old school one that i had a love/hate relationship with. any one recall NESTOPIA?

 

[ItsMeNauval]

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.

For me,i just hate "Damonps2" for mobile,like i mean its need really a powerful phone and the performance aren't that so smooth only around 30-35 and,the settings to go clothes perfomance need to pay but i don't buy it cause everyone says that "Damonps2" the premium version is worse than the basic,developer don't give a f##k about their emulator...only care about money,no patch to fixing it at all,i suggest to download "AetherSX2" for someone who want play ps 2 games on mobile, don't play on "Damonps2"

 

[Max]

Gensoid on android, the damn thing can't even run Sonic properly