What emulators do you use?

[twaddington]

bsnes and higan are the current best emulators for SNES. I use the OpenEmu multi-frontend for macOS. These days I'm mostly playing PSX games emulated.

[E-Day]

I have a MiSTer FPGA system. I set it up but I haven't really used it yet apart from testing. I should set some time aside one day to go through and play some games on it. Something that I will never play in person because it will cost $1,000 to buy it, like Koei Flying Squadron

It was pretty easy to put together and set up following the guide on the Classic Gaming Quarterly website. The only thing I didn't get working yet was Neo Geo, but I haven't put that much effort into getting it working yet.

[NorrinRadd]

Still can't find anything to play Super Mario Kart SNES accurately. Nothing you can get world records on, anyway. BSNES is close, and I can't find Higan anywhere. But I doubt it plays smooth either.

[Sivilius]

Mednafen for most things, in particular PS1 & Saturn. Kega Fusion for Sega CD. Redream for Dreamcast. mGBA for all things Game Boy, and PPSSPP for Sony PSP. A few others here & there as well.

[CastleVanity]

Team Bizhawk, MAME/Final Burn Alpha!

[Areala]

Xbox and GameCube emulation have really come a long way in the past year. I just started messing around with both Dolphin and Xemu, and the results are honestly mind-blowing, especially from Xemu. Neither one is perfect, and my system is not bleeding edge as far as specs go (I'm rocking an nVidia GTX 1660 6GB, so I'm a few years out of date), but man is it wild seeing my computer push these systems around.

*huggles*
Areala

[KnightimeX]

Mesen for NES
SNES9X - SNES
Mame - Arcade
Fusion - Sega gen, cd, MS 
Epsxe - PS1
I have many more emulators

[bombatomba]

These days I really value the "ten-foot" experience (PC code for playing on a TV) for my emulation, so I've moved to Pegasus-FE, which allows for menuing with a controller.  Couple that with a great controller (for me an 8bitdo Pro 2) and the experience is about as perfect as I require.

But at the end of the day Pegasus-FE is nothing more than a frontend for emulation, to which I use Retroarch (another frontend for emulation) because it allows for usage of the "menu" button on my Pro 2 controller as well as unified, pre-setup controls out of the box.  As for the actual emulation cores that I use:

NES: Nestopia

Genesis - Genesis Plus GX

SNES - SNES9X and bsnes-hd beta

PSX - Beetle PSX (basically Mednafen)

PS2 - PCSX2 (this core has been running really well in Retroarch!)

PSP - PPSSPP

Gamecube - Dolphin

T-16/CD - Beetle PCE (again, Mednafen)

Atari 2600 - Stella

 

[Blake00]

I started back in the 90s so I've used a crazy amount.. some very old some new lol. This what I have these days...

SEGA
Master System + Game Gear - Dega & MEKA
Genesis/Mega Drive + 32X + CD - Gens, GensGS, & Kega Fusion

Nintendo
NES Nintendo Entertainment System - Jnes, Mesen, NEStopia, & RockNESX
Game Boy + Colour + Advance - VBAdvanceR
SNES Super Nintendo Entertainment System - ZsnesW, & Snes9x
Nintendo64 - Project64
Game Cube + Nintendo Wii - Dolphin
NintendoDS+3DS - Citra, & Desmune

SONY
PlayStation - ePSXe
PlayStation 2 - PCSX2
PlayStation Protable - PPSSPPWin

OTHER
PC DOS - D-Fend Reloaded (DosBox port)
PC Windows - VirtualBox
Amiga Computer - WinUAE
Arcade Games - MameUI32
AtariST - Steem
Commodore 64 - CCS64
Intellivision - Nostalgia
Macintosh Classic - ??Lost it, can't remember
Nokia S60 Games - Freej2me, & GameMagic
Wonder Swan - Oswan

[Juno]

Since I mostly just play GBA and DS games nowadays, mGBA and MelonDS are my two go-to emulators. For other consoles, growing up in a poor household, emulation was my primary form of gaming so I went through quite a lot. This is mostly based off rough memory.

• NES - Nestopia I believe was my main.
• SNES - Being my favorite retro console, I've used a ton. ZSNES was my childhood emulator, and I still like it the most I think. It's rough and hard to navigate, but it's also just so...warm? The dated design and snow graphics are so nice and bring back fuzzy memories. For awhile, I used Snes9x, which is solid but...boring. In recent years, I've taken up Higan to honor its late creator.
• N64 - 1964 was my main since as a kid, I thought you had to pay to use Project 64  I've barely play N64 games, despite being one of the few 'retro' (pre-PS2/Gamecube/Xbox by my standards) I actually physically grew up with (it, SNES and Atari Jaguar -- seriously), I don't have much fondness for the system, so I barely tried emulating it.
• Gamecube - Dolphin, but my PC sucks so I've only been able to play a few games on it well.
• Genesis/MegaDrive/S-CD - KEGA Fusion. Like ZSNES, I'm sure there are better emulators out there, and I've had a fair share of issues with KEGA, but it's also just really warm and fuzzy for me. Noooot sure if they exactly count, but I also had a ton of those SEGA Genesis compilation discs for PS2 growing up and played religiously.
• GB/GBC/GBA - Aside from mGBA, I grew up on VBA. Still not particularly sure what mGBA does better than VBA and VBA had more quality of life improvements so I might honestly just go back.
• DS - Aside from MelonDS, DeSmuME was my main growing up. Unlike VBA to mGBA however, DeSmuME is not great and I have no real desire to ever use it again. I've also used no$GBA a few times, mostly to bypass a gamebreaking bug that DeSmuME caused for Digimon World DS.
• PSX - ePSXe. Could not figure out how to set this up til my mid teens, lol. 
• PS2 - PCSX2. To this day, the only game I could get running reasonably well on this thing was Persona 4, but then Persona 4 got a PC release so it became irrelevant for me once again, haha.
• PSP - PPSSPP, though I tried (and failed) to use JavaPSP or whatever it was called a few times.
• WonderSwan - Oswan.
• Arcade - MAME, thought I've gotten a grand-total one one game running on it. 
• DOS - DOSbox

 

[arlinn]

I mainly use a RetroArch on my Retroid nowadays.

When I first got into emulators it was all ZSNES, Gens, and RockNES.

[CastleVanity]

13 hours ago, arlinn said:

I mainly use a RetroArch on my Retroid nowadays.

When I first got into emulators it was all ZSNES, Gens, and RockNES.

I miss the old days of emulation. The novelty of it was that it created a new nostalgia of your early child/teen/adulthood. Good times!

[Areala]

I remember discovering iNES all the way back in, what, 1996 or thereabouts and being utterly blown away that I could turn my little Toshiba laptop into a Nintendo Entertainment System. I mean, I had a vague idea that it was possible to run games previously designed for one system on another system, thanks to carts like Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits on the SNES. But I had no idea some random person in the world could just write a program on their own that would translate the ROM data from an NES cart into information that could be read and processed by a PC. Like, that was utter sorcery to my teenaged brain.

*huggles*
Areala

[arlinn]

6 minutes ago, Areala said:

...But I had no idea some random person in the world could just write a program on their own that would translate the ROM data from an NES cart into information that could be read and processed by a PC. Like, that was utter sorcery to my teenaged brain.

*huggles*
Areala

Totally agree on the sorcery bit. When I learned what save states were, I was blown away. It made so many of the more difficult NES games beatable.

[Areala]

4 hours ago, arlinn said:

Totally agree on the sorcery bit. When I learned what save states were, I was blown away. It made so many of the more difficult NES games beatable.

Believe it or not, I was aware of save states before I was aware of emulators! Naki made a piece of hardware called the Game Saver for the Super NES. It had the side effect of letting you play Japanese carts on North American SNES units without having to physically modify the console, so my brother and I bought one so we could import games if we wanted to. But the thing's primary function was to create a save state for the game you were playing so you could quick-save and quick-load on the fly and avoid having to go back to the start of the stage, or a checkpoint, or whatever. It was extremely basic, with only one state possible on the game, and it only worked as long as it was plugged into the wall (you ran the power cord into it directly, and it had its own passthrough cable that then went to the AC power port on the back of the SNES), but still. Save states in, like, 1995. 

*huggles*
Areala

[CastleVanity]

Now that i have the Retron5 it can do all of that.