Go to drinkag1.com/modernvintagegamer to get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 and 5 AG1 travel packs with your first purchase. Thanks to AG1 for sponsoring today's video!
Hello MVG I LOVE EMULATORS... For the last 17 years they have been my main gaming experience ... so many titles so many systems... no dlcs no moneygrabs... just eternal fun... But at this point many of them literally require a computer science degree to get stuff running...at least for me... I dont even bother with shaders or upscaling since most of the time stuff just barely runs on my laptop from the get go anyways... This is the very aspect of emulation i would improve if i could... Some emulators do have descriptions for the different options in the settingd but even those require a certain amount of knowledge at this point... You may think after 17 years i would be an expert but the truth is the emulators that run without issue and dont require maintanance are the ones i use most i dont want to waste times in the settings i could be playing... ...i will usually try a few emulators with different options and settings read a few comments watch a few videos and if i still cant get it running it will disappear in some folder until next year... if i really want to play a title badly i will try it with new updates or even a new emulator again with videos and comments... For emulators i want to load a game set a few control settings or controllers and get to play... i really wonder if an emulation specific AI could be used as some kind of a "setup assistent" for emulators to let anyone have the best possible experience on their specific devices... I dont know if you ever bothered to look at this but it would mean alot to me an people like me who only do emulation gaming these days...
@@flintfrommother3gaming Agree, has been proven that many don't need supplements and are only peeing them out or damaging their bodies. Hopefully MVG could look up more info up about this to form a more properly informed opinion, because many people frown on this. Idk, maybe he already did this and came to this conclusion, but taking money from these kind of sponsors, just makes him sound less reliable, just like many TH-camrs that take money from gray market game selling sites, coin marketplaces, VPNs etc.
The GUI update for PCSX2 has got to be the single greatest update for any emulator in history, since it corrects the biggest flaw with the emulator being that you weren't able to set per-game configs previously which made switching back-and-forth between different games and updating the emulator a huge, tedious hassle. If you happen to come across this comment then thank you Stenzek!!!!
Setting up an 8-player Halo match between two computers on Xemu using virtual networking with minimal effort and having the game Just Work Perfectly was one of the best moments in emulation I've had in a long time.
I wich they are still update on windows 7, but since this emulator is open source, it will be still a big plus on this emulator. Same goes on Duckstation. The new UI on PCSX2 used the Duckstation gui, made by stenzek, which is for my eyes great and better than the old UI.
@@ChaoticKrisis I still switch between PCSX2 1.6 for a small handful of games. I can't get Tomb Raider Anniversary or Legends to run right on the 1.7 Night build. Upscale and run it thru 1.6 and it plays fine.
the whole concept of an emulator is still so amazing. being able to run console specific code on a totally different machine, sometimes just about flawlessly and with significant improvements
For me it's the preservation of games as a medium. There are so many games that get stuck every generation and left behind. These games would be lost to history were it not for emulation. And emulation will be the key factor that helps to fight against games as services, subscription models and removal of ownership in the coming years. Want to play your old classic games? Only if you pay for a subscription that Nintendo lets you pay monthly. OR just emulate it and run it yourself (often better).
It’s not an amazing concept. It’s how a computer works. ALL CPU operations are nothing more emulation/simulation that are translated in huge numbers that are added rapidly. ALL CPU calculations are simply adding numbers really really fast.
@@Patrick-y4d1ztechnically paying for the subscription and playing it there is also emulation. I think you mean unofficial emulation over offical emulation.
Stenzek really pushed PSX and PS2 emulation to another level. Formally worked on Duckstation and now joined the team on PCSX2 which really woke up PS2 emulation.
What I like about emulator videos is finding out what games are stuck on a particular console. That also makes me curious to try it on the original console.
Here's an important one for the Nintendo DS. It's the 1 true sequel to Chibi-Robo for Game Cube. It was only released in Japan, but now there's an english translation version. I can't recommend it enough. ♥ Title: "Okaeri! Chibi-Robo! - Happy Rich Oosouji!" For me, I use DeSmuME for pc, and Drastic for my tablet. 😌👌🏻 Here's another one: "Magician's Quest - Mysterious Times" (Also a DS title) It's literally Animal Crossing, but you're a wizard who goes to a wizard school. Bonus, you can even get married! Last one: "Okamiden" The sequel to Okami. Let me know if you want more recommendations 😁✌🏻
@@CapnRetro Question, what's the best emulator for the DS with upscaling? I want to show my friend KH 358/2 days, as the cutscene movies aren't shit compared to playing through the story, but dear lord, in modern times it NEEDS upscaling filters....and XP and item hacks post game because dear lord THE GRIND for levels and extra Thundaga spells post game.
@@empoleonmaster6709 I don't personally know for sure, so i asked ai. Here's what it said: "When it comes to emulators for the ds with upscaling, there are a fw options you can consider. One of the popular choices ia DeSmuME. It allows you to upscale the graphics, providing a better visual experience. Another option is MelonDS, which has a feature called "HQ2x/3x" that enhances the graphivcs as well. Both emulators have their own strengths, so you can try them out and see which one suits your needs best." I tried melonds before, but I always ditch it for DeeSmuME. But it might work for you.
I started emulating back in 97 with ZSnes 0.4.3. It was amazing that I could play snes games on my 233Mhz Pentium 2 pc. Of course, the frame rate wasn't that great and the sound if you could even get it to work was stuttery. It's crazy to see how far emulation has come.
I started back around 97, too. As a Mac user the library of games was super limited, but all of a sudden I could play the back catalog of NES, SNES, and Genesis and not long after even play Playstation 1 with Connectix Virtual Game Station (with real games only, though, it didn't support ISOs nor do I think I could've downloaded them with dial up).
@@nunyabusiness896 That was what was so great about emulating back then. You could download the whole game in a couple of hours on a 26.4Kbps dial-up connection. It's crazy cause now if I'm not downloading faster than 5MBs I get irritated.
I never could beat Chrono Trigger in time when I was renting it (the next person would overwrite my saves), but I did manage to beat it via ZSNES on a keyboard 😂
RPCS3 is an amazing feat of engineering, but so are all the other emus on the list. Let's hope emulation continues to evolve the way it has, game preservation will be even more important in the near future.
@@HUYI1 No you don't. I have mid level gaming laptop with an AMD R7 3800H that plays most games I tested at 1080p/1440p with 30 fps or 60 fps depending on the game.
@@HUYI1 No you don't. You just need a decent CPU. I've messed around with swapping my 3090 out for my 1080, and have found very little difference in performance.
When I first delved into emulation in the early 2000s, my young high school mind would’ve never imagined the landscape we have now - excellent handhelds that can play GameCube in your pocket, the Steam Deck, playing PS2 games at 4K and beyond. Absolutely mind blowing.
Shoutouts to Emudeck for making setting all this stuff up super easy on the Steam Deck. I just got mine a couple weeks ago and there's a quick setup wizard and an easy tool to import your rom library and make it all available (and very customizable) via Game Mode. Definitely worth checking out.
Yeah thank god for Emudeck. The biggest problem with the Steam Deck is that a lot of simple stuff like installing anything outside of Steam kind of requires basic Linux knowledge and a lot of people like myself didn't use anything other than Windows until they got a Deck.
RPCS3 is ridiculously impressive considering the PS3 has such a weird and confusing architecture. Ryujinx is also my personal pick for Switch emulation on Windows, it's just more accurate.
The choice of Yuzu vs Ryujinx usually comes around to what video card you have. Supposedly, Yuzu plays better with AMD drivers while Ryujinx does with Nvidia.
My hopes for emulation in 2024: - More improvements for Xemu, RPCS3, Xenia, Vita3K, Yuzu, Ryujinx & PS4-based emulators - Emulator support for ARM-powered Windows PC - Stratos (formerly Skyline) to be optimized for Mali GPU drivers since Yuzu for Android is optimized for Adreno GPU drivers - Higher compatability when emulating PC games prior to Windows 7 era on Android - Improvements for playability for PS2-based Play emulator on Android etc
The biggest hurdle in emulation for me was always the convenience factor. Getting a steam deck this year and going through all of the setup with that which was a breeze completely changed the game for me. I had done plenty of emulation in the past on PC as well, but steam Deck support from the community is insane.
Same here, the Deck is a game-changer (heh). When I used EmuDeck, I felt like saying "...that's it? That's the setup for all my emulators? I thought that setting them up would take all night!"
While I agree some emulators could be "fiddly", the convenience is overwhelming because your whole library can just be in a single folder vs. combing through shelves looking for a game and having to wait for it to load, etc. vs. jumping to a save state.
@@MusicFromAnotherTime Yeah, Emudeck was a huge convenience factor for me too. I hope that Emudeck for Windows will be just as significant of a leap too.
My favorites are definitely PCSX2 & PPSSPP, I have revisited many nostalgic games using these. And compatibility is great on both of them, at least so far , every game I have tried has worked on them.
@@nathangraves1069 The funniest thing with some old games is that the PS2 version on an emulator is easier to get running than the native PC version. One such game for me was "Total Overdose". If some old PC games aren't that popular, and someone hasn't made patches for them, then they don't really want to run on my Windows 11 PC.
vita3k's progress is really something to behold, i remember watching a couple videos about it back when it only ran persona 4 golden and a couple of other minor titles, and then i kinda forgot about it, only to look back and find it now runs a little over 2000 titles. i've been using it myself to play gravity rush these past few days, it runs really well, with the exception of some slowdown on some bossfights where alot of stuff gets destroyed or thrown around at once, but it's still completely playable. it does have a pretty major weak point right now though (at least on PC) which is the controller options, as far as i know there's no way to set up macros for the touch screen or tilt controls, which makes some actions like sliding on gravity rush just not possible on PC, though that in no way takes away from how impressive the emulator is, i'm excited to see how it'll develop further.
@@dragonandavatarfan8865 oh no, the mouse works for the touch screen, it's just that you can't do touch more than one place in the screen at once with it, which some games require you to do. as for the tilt controls, i haven't been able to find anything about binding or enabling them in the settings, it's possible that they're currently just not implemented or somewhere obscure like the debugging options.
@@y0mgi3d not sure about wiimotes, but i can see tilt controls working on the mobile build, and to be fair you'd probably want to emulate the vita on something with a touch screen anyways, i just do it on PC because my phone can't handle vita3k. while not having tilt controls in a game like gravity rush isn't a deal breaker, it definitely could impact compatibility in some other titles. since the emulator is still experimental this is probably something that will get looked into in the future though.
I feel like once again the steam deck may be the only viable option for those enhanced inputs using the two touchpads. Of course that won’t feel 100% 1:1 with vita back touch estate, but it’s the best we got
One thing to note about the PCSX2 emulator is that its the first emulator for the developers of said emulator to add RetroAchievements support into a build. Gets more eyes on the emulator while also having more people actually wanting to play through an entire game on said emulator.
@@voteDC Achievements have encouraged me to play more games than I used to in previous generations. Also gets me to play games I never would have and get more enjoyment out of them. Always 100%d games before achievements, just gives me another reason to play more games than just playing the same 5 games over and over again.
@@dude-zr8gi See I don't get why achievements matter. If the game is good then you'd be playing it anyway. It seems more to me that achievements get people to play games they don't enjoy because the value of getting an achievement is the most important thing for them. If seeing that achievement pop up is what gives people happiness, then who am I to want to stop them. I do still find it sad that people won't give older games a chance unless there are achievements.
Ryujinx is my personal pick in relation to Switch emulation, because I think a person from early 2010s would go mad if I told them it is possible to emulate Red Dead Redemption not just on any PC, but on a MacBook. The Mac ARM64 port is an absolute delight, and short of being in direct possession of a Switch (or owning Steam Deck), I can enjoy game on a go via the rather thin productivity tier package that is the modern MacBook Air.
PCSX2 has to be one of the most improved emulators of this decade. We went from needing 8th gen intel @ stock resolution, to only needing 6th gen intel. 8th Gen intel can pump out 3x resolution without even breaking a sweat. You can pick up 8th Gen intel systems for less than $100... it is crazy how good their team has pushed the platform.
@@jong2359 What are you talking about? My CPU is an i5 3570. But graphics card I have a 6700XT. I can easily run God of War 2 at 6x resolution (4k) at 60 fps without any issue.
@@GreatKeny alright, so you have a graphics card that is worth 3x the amount of the computer it is in, sue me. I still said WITH GRAPHICS CARD, which my example excluded.
honestly my favourite part of emulation this year has to be me discovering what retro achievements was and getting it linked up with the playstation emulators. i beat spyro 1 and started going through medievil and it sure does add a new reason to play through a game to the end.
I love emulation. It has led to me needing so many hard drives! Too many full catalogues. I will never play everything but I collect it all anyways. It's an interesting addiction haha
RPCS3 has been my emulator of the year. Ive been able to play elder scrolls Oblivion on the steam deck OLED at 60fps, giving me the best "vanilla" Oblivion experience since the PS3 has better textures, normal maps and distant LODs than both vanilla PC and 360 and also loads faster than the Xbox 360 version. On RPCS3, it feels good, looks good and runs like a dream on steam deck
Hmmm interesting, I never thought of doing that but it might be a great way to experience oblivion for the first time. I started a playthrough with the pc version on steam deck and while it's fairly playable the lack of controller support kind of hurts the experience.
22:55 Thank you for telling me about DuckStation . I only remembered that I used Bleem! and Connectix VGS as PS1 emulator in my childhood days 😂. Decades have past
Something I would love to see and this world most likely have to become a video series of sorts. But a video going over the Emulators available for each system starting from the 80s to the modern day. With pros and cons for each emulators if there are multiple for one system that are widely used etc.
There are many more games running on Ryujinx at release than on Yuzu. With Yuzu there are often graphics errors with new games. Yuzu's focus is on commercialization while Ryujinx's focus is on compatibility. It also happens more often that emulation solutions are simply transferred from Ryujinx to Yuzu and then sold behind the playwall. The solution for the graphics errors in red dead redemption was simply taken from Ryujinx.
Speaking about making a game feel remastered, I think HD texture packs are a great option. Both projects that remake the textures by hand and those that use AI upscaling. Some games work better than others with AI upscaling and quality can vary by texture, but generally it adds detail into the game while remaining pretty faithful to the original artstyle. Of course doing it by hand by a skilled team will always be better but we're talking about thousands upon thousands of games that need HD texture packs and the man hours just don't make sense to do all of them by hand. One main problem with HD textures is the fact that textures are usually dumped by the emulator as the game is being played, which means you need to complete the whole game, being meticulous to go everywhere, do everything, and load every texture to be dumped as best you can. Then at that point it's pretty trivial to run the images through an AI upscaler, but you already played the whole game and you're unlikely to want to play it again in its entirety just to enjoy the textures. I think what we need is AI upscaling built-in to the emulator, so as soon as the texture is loaded it can be automatically upscaled and replaced. Then people don't have to go through the whole process above or distribute copyrighted content online when sharing their packs.
At some point I compared Yuzu and Ryujinx on several games and Ryujinx turned out to be the best (I was using Yuzu before) but it was like a year ago so I wonder how things are between those two right now. I simply have no beef against Ryujinx so that's why I stuck with it through TotK.
Things haven't changed much. Ryujinx is far and away the most accurate of the two, and scales better with better hardware. Yuzu is really hacky, which is why it tends to have higher performance further down the hardware stack. A lot of issues present in Yuzu are often absent in Ryujinx due to the accuracy difference. I'd say if you have at least a modern, mid-tier PC Ryujinx is the better of the two. But, if you have something closer to entry level, Yuzu is definitely a better option. You have your blow trading between the two. And, Ryujinx just performs better with AMD GPUs; as a whole it seems. So that's another thing to consider.
Looking forward to Xenia improving. I’ve played through the original Fable (Anniversary, to be specific) several times on PC and have been itching to try Fable 2 and 3 on PC And before someone mentions it, I know Fable 3 has a PC version, but not only is it delisted from Steam but supposedly has tons of issues running on modern Windows
I played 3 recently on pc native and had no problems Iirc those bugs arent there anymore since the game got rereleased on windows store And about fable 2 its playable with Xenia but the experience isnt great even with a 4090 and 13900ks and all the necessary xenia canary patches
It’s like you read my mind, recently I started messing around with emulation on my Steam Deck mainly been playing PS2. I had an itch to play through God of War, and seeing GOW running on my SD upscaled, just made me smile a ridiculously happy. I used to try and collect retro games and systems. But it really doesn’t make sense, I’ve been come a fan of emulation. SO thank you for making this video. Oh I should try 3D Dot Hero on RPCS3. Great little love letter to LOZ fans, never got to finish it on my PS3.
I have recently played Resident Evil Outbreak online Co-op multiplayer using PCSX2, and it was so awesome that I could hop online using that emulator and still find quite a few players in several different lobbies. I was surprised how many PS2 games are still online overall.
im quite glad rpcs3 exists. being able to replay my games from my youth was pretty great. i missed little big planed quite a bit since it must have been like 10 years since i played it.
I used to want a Switch. Then I downloaded Ryujinx. My mid-range PC is now a Switch that works about 5x better than a real one (not even an exaggeration for some titles) and I can play with a far superior DualSense. It's not like I would have ever used the portability, it's just not how I play games.
Yh I normally find that the only reason to have the device is playing online but I really dislike the online and even if it’s decent for some games barely any of my friends own a switch and if they do don’t pay the online membership.
One thing that I'd like to highlight is how quite a lot of these now has a good Flatpak port, which makes it very easy to use on Linux and Steam Deck. The ecosystem there overall has improved a lot too, with even Lutris gaining more integration with Flatpak and now able to launch games with existing Flatpak runners. It's a great time to be a gamer on Linux
While I suppose it's not exactly impressive in the same way the emulators mentioned in the video are, BigPEmu the Atari Jaguar emulator is moving at an incredible pace considering how the console's emulation development languished for decades. Not only did it launch with 100% retail game compatibility, it rapidly added support for the Jaguar CD (IIRC completely unemulated until BigPEmu did it) and the Jaguar VR headset (an unreleased peripheral that _definitely_ wasn't emulated before BigPEmu), and the scripting module system seems to be utterly insane for enhancement and modding opportunities; the demo scripts provided with the emulator allow running Cybermorph in HD and with anti-aliasing, and playing Alien vs. Predator as I shit you not _a 32-player multiplayer game online._ I'd really love to see the developer look into doing some of the other consoles he mentioned as being interested in, especially the Sega Saturn.
Fantastic video! I'm on PC and the 2 I use most are *Ryujinx* and *Cemu* . The game compatibility of Ryujinx has made it a go-to for me - also that it's easy to setup portably and update.👍 What Cemu does on Xenoblade X with a decent system cannot be overstated. Absolutely showstopping!😍👏
This year I've definitely been impressed with the improvements made to RPCS3, DuckStation, PCSX2, and Citra. When i first installed Citra about a year or two ago, i had a major issue with the Fire Emblem games where it was like watching a slide show and the audio was really bad. No adjustment of settings could fix it. I tried it again a few months ago and suddenly it was flawless. Kudos to the Citra team. I'm really looking forward to RPCSX, the PS4 emulator from the RPCS3 team or at least a creator of it. Shame its being initially built on Linux instead of Windows so it'll probably be an even longer wait for me. But there are a lot of PS4 games that likely won't be ported to PC by Sony like The Order: 1886, Until Dawn, The Last Guardian, Gravity Rush 2, or the Uncharted HD Collection which does look better than the emulated PS3 versions. Xbox One emulation would also be nice to see as I dont expect Halo 5 or a select few other games to be brought to PC. I will say though that i feel the eighth generation will be the last where emulation is truly necessary. With Sony and Microsoft comitting to PC ports of their first party portfolio and far less devs making pure console exclusives, the need to preserve the one or two exclusives is less pressing. Nintendo though will likely remain necessary as i dont see them branching to PC any time soon. But with more and more mandatory NVIDIA features Switch 2 emulation might become more difficult for those on AMD hardware or at least GPU's.
Ps2 was the system that was the vast majority of my ganing childhood. So to have my ps2 collection avaliable in a portable fashion on deck as well as a dedicated home theater pc setup with modern controllers is a happiness i cant describe. Thank you pcsx2, happy gaming.
My first time emulating games was from 2009. I emulated ps1 games on my galaxy tab playing ff9 and chrono cross. Two of my favourite jrpg ever and what made me felt in love with the genre.
I really love the way new emulators are shaping of. Xemu is becoming really great. I just wish they implement the way to list all games on the emulator itself like pcsx2 did. Or even implement the menu of the og Xbox. But this is just a really minor thing.
The shift to QT on PCSX2 was phenomenal, it went from one of the clunkest messy emulators around to one of thee best experiences in emulation... and the fact that it brings us the ps2 library in the process... I seriously can't get over it's transformation, Paired with Duckstation you turn your PC into a dangerous nostaligia machine... The original xbox and ps3 emulators are coming along great, there is serious potential there. The emulation scene is one of my favourite places on the internet, truly amazing people...
I'm so glad that the Vita finally has a working emulator. People really need to discover the great games on that underrated and overhated handheld console.
This was a great episode👍🏻 I use emulation on devices like Miyoo Mini or Anbernic RG353m. The emulation app I use the most is Adrenaline on my PS Vita and Vita TV. For me this is a very good way to play PS1 and PSP games at home or on the go😁
I don't have Yuzu but I do have Duckstation and PCSX2. those emulators are amazing and quite frankly, I'm glad I downloaded Duckstation over ePSXe. One thing about those emulators is that you need the bios otherwise they won't work. I think with Yuzu you need a Nintendo Switch product key. I may be wrong though because of later updates. One emulator I also like is Cemu. I also tried out Xemu but I would rather play those games on an original Xbox. But PCSX2 is hands down a great emulator and for sure Duckstation.
I still love the days of Nesticle and other early emulators. You'd see jumps in emulation every month and keep your eyes glued to the news sites for the next big update. We got Nam 1795 emulated for the Neo Geo, then it felt like every week there would be a new game supported. Then we got Samurai shodown 2, and everyone would cheer!
You said you cant play mgs4 on steam deck with playable performance, however with specific settings, patches, and overclocking it actually is possible to get a close to native experience, which to be clear isnt really acceptable by modern standards i get that, but to say its unplayable on steam deck isnt necessarily true
I started using duckstation recently to play my physical ps1 library on my pc and I love that I can do it with duckstation it does have audio and visual issues running straight off the disc but loading it all into ram at the start no issues whatsoever and it's great
emulation is the way forward for preservation of some of great games and combining it with the ease of the steam deck I'm having a blast with a huge library of modern and old games in the palm of my hands. Honestly can't wait for steam deck 2 to finally have a portable ps3 library in 2 years
thanks for showing the 'diff' of each emulator. kinda reminds me of the early emulation days seeing things like sound emulation getting better, or transparency effects being implemented properly as each emulator got updated lol.
I think it was about 5 years ago I tried PCSX2 and stopped because of all the emulation issues and just lack of overall polish and for a while it looked like that was it. Then a couple of years ago things started to change rapidly and last year I gave the nightly builds ago. It was good but still had issues, my settings wouldn't save and the new UI was not long released and had some bugs. This year however I gave it a go again and my god has it come a long way, I went from playing PS2 games on my launch PS3 to transferring all my saves over and converting them back to the PS2 format so I could use PCSX2 and it has been my main way of playing PS2 since. Constant updates and a super polished experience. The UI is great, The compatibility and performance is amazing and all the options it gives you is just incredible. Even having separate settings per game. Super useful. The people working on it and that dev that came in deserve a lot of praise. As a fun fact the guy responsible for the UI in PCSX2 is also responsible for the same UI on duckstation.
Frankly, I like all the options, but I prefer the original aspect ratios and resolutions. It's a personal preference. I recently played KOTOR in 2K, but something was missing. I can't put my finger on it, but the whole thing felt grating somehow. After listening to a friend of mine, I uninstalled all the resolution mods and booted up the original version with slight mods, and it was better for me. The jaggies and warped aspect ratio hid the imperfections, made the bland environments look unique, and added some charm to it. That's my opinion.
Honestly been using many emulators this year but for some reason the most fun I had was with the frontend Retroarch. Mainly for the CRT shaders. Just seems to have renewed that nostalgia magic for me.
I'd like to mention Mesen. It was initially a NES/SNES emulator, but it recently added support for GB/C and even PC Engine. With time, it could probably become the easiest and most convenient PCE emulator around. Plus it has lots of debug tools for each system.
Fantastic list & truly a showcase of some incredibly talented coders throughout the users. I would personally also add Citra to this list as the premiere 3DS emulator.
citra has surprisingly weak performance for a 3ds emulation and some forks even dramatically outperform it. Though i'm hopeful now that development on it has picked up pace again after a long pause. We'll hopefully see it in a much better place for next years best of list.
DuckStation is so great! I used to have so many issues with other PSX emulators in the past, but DuckStation just works. The UI is nice, and I guess it's a common feature nowadays, but the auto-update feature in the software itself is such an improvement for the UX. I know Dolphin has had it for some time, but moving to DuckStation from previous emulators and being able to update it with such ease (similar to how the UX is for most paid applications) blew my mind. Together with Dolphin, it's my favorite emulator.
Don't sleep on Flycast. It is now head and tails superior to Redream graphically, is free (as opposed to Redream asking for $5), and even runs Arcade Naomi games well. And it does a far better job running arcade games than Demul ever could.
Simple64 deserves a mention, IMHO. The maintainer managed to bring together (and update) the best recent developments in the N64 emulation "scene". It's all packaged in a simple emulator.
I had no idea that PCSX2 had such a major update, I'd been using version 1.6.0 for the majority of the year and most games were running "good enough" because of how awkward it was to change settings. The newest version is a tremendous improvement in just about every aspect.
Worth mentioning is melonDS. Desmume was a long time the only stable DS Emulator, but also didn't got Updates in the last Years. melonDS has now more functionality and stable as Desmume.
I would put my vote in for Ryujinx over Yuzu for a very similar reason: they are also branching out to new platforms, just different ones from Yuzu. In particular for me, Ryujinx now fully supports macOS, and the REALLY neat thing is that it is taking full advantage of the ARM based chips in the latest Macs to be able to NATIVELY run switch code rather than having to translate the Switch's ARM syscalls to x86. It's insane how good the performance is and it really shows that the Ryujinx team has put a lot of effort into supporting macOS by taking advantage of the strengths of modern Macs
I'm a huge fan of Ryujinx because it allows for local multiplayer with hacked Switch consoles but Yuzu is just as important. Still need to rip one stack of my PS1 games with 50% being done but Duckstation really seems cool. Seeing Vita3k makes me always wish I was into the Vita but Sony totally botched that system for Europe.
Thank yoy MVG. Emulation is my gaming life. I have over 21,000 pieces of software and over 30 computers and consoles in emulation form i have 2 dedicated 4tb drives for my emulation software and hardware apps and they are not even hald full. Thats whst I love about older gsmes. Thry tale up very little space in capacity.but can give hours of entertainment. My favourite consoles are the PS2 (in which I use PCSX2,) and Redream for the Dreamcast.
I LOVE this format. Feel free to upload more stuff like this at this length any time :). I used to watch Simply Austin for emu updates and now I need to fill that void!
Ryuijinx is by far the best one, albeit I lost some compatibility over the year. Xenia and XEMU are great. RPCS3 is not bad also, it had some good progress on performance but it's still got a long, long way to go.
@@Woodzta Honestly, XEMU is ahead of RPCS3, it just has god awful performance in a lot of titles and it's a bit unstable but you can technically play 84% of the entire library. I think it just needs more mature code to bring more stability and performance. Xenia is definitely behind both though, it could use some love from the community.
I agree on the Ryujinx part. The Other part, however, is far from true. Xenia has a LONG was to go compared to RPCS3 (XEMU is getting close though I'll give it that).
@@Manic_PanicNah, even many of the 29% of RPCS3's "ingame" list are playable but have other performance issues. RPCS3 is a far more complete and feature rich emulator at this stage compared to Xemu.
@@Woodzta Wrong, Xenia runs most games with 100% compatibility, and those that run with bugs at least run at 100%. RPCS3 can only run HD re-releases at 100% speed and without issues. Other native PS3 games it will run terribly with some sort of bugs. RPCS3 is highly dependent on whether you have the CPU with AVX512 instructions. Which can give you up to 25% boost in performance. Given that most people nowadays use AMD, most people can't utilize that advantage. Also those games that do run well, still have minor bugs and require significant tinkering in the options. RPCS3 does offer more features, and is much easier to use. I'll give you that. The game installation feature is a life saver.
I think you should be more specific about specs: beefy, mid, low-end pc is not a good reference in the present, it'll be horrible even in the really near future. Obviously even the emulators will change, but a more strictly frame of reference "in the moment" is beneficial to fix where we are.
Nice to see these emulators get the attention they deserve in this round up video and I completely agree with everything said. I've been on a MASSIVE emulation kick this year. I had only dabbled before but this year I got fully obsessed with it. Specs: 6700k @ 4.5 all cores and 1080ti OC'd with GPU Tweak. PS1: Used to use PCSXR but I've since swapped to Duckstation as the GUI is way better and the same as PCSX2 Nightly. Games run very well, I just need to work on getting my saves transferred now. PS2: I use PCSX2 nightly. I used to use the stable version but then swapped to Nightly because of the improvements you get from it. I've been cataloguing my game disks into my ROM collection and I've transferred most of my game saves over. It's been an insane trip down memory lane to play my old PS2 game saves again on a emulator. I've also recently got a Sinden lightgun so I can play Time Crisis again. Games for the most part have run flawless and it's been so much fun playing my PS2 games in 4K60. PS3: Been using RPCS3 however it's a bit of a struggle on my current rig. I've mainly been focusing on PCSX2 but once I get my new rig I'll spend more time with RPCS3. I've got my saves transferred but getting them to work will take a little more work as I'll have to modify them all to make them compatible. PSP: Been using PPSSPP for awhile now and works very well. The saves transfer process was a simple drag and drop from my PSP memory card. Games run very well now., They used to struggle with some games but the improvements have made a huge difference. Xbox 360: Only dabbled a little with Xenia as it is currently the best way to emulate Red Dead Redemption on PC. It plays fairly well but my PC struggles with it. Wii U: Been using Cemu and runs BoTW very smoothly. I've played the game from start to finish. Switch: Tried both Ryujinx and YuZu with YuZu being the best for me performance wise. Been playing ToTK and it runs very well although does struggle a little on my PC. I'll likely give Vita 3K a go soon and i'm looking forward to see how the PS4 emulators progress in the future.
Why are we not talking bout BigPEmu? We've never been able to emulate Jaguar CD before, and then out of nowhere comes the entire library. It's astonishing, it's unbelievable.
Yuzu's android development is very fast, true. The NCE update doubled performance for a lot of devices. v155 which came out 48 hours ago has a 25% performance boost over the NCE update from 2 weeks ago.
Do you plan on making a part 2 of this? There has been a lot of improvements for PPSSPP, Citra and certainly for classic consoles, such as 3DO (Opera), Saturn (Mednafen/Beettle), Dolphin, FBNEO, MAME, BSNES (widescreen) Genesis Plus GX (MD+ and even Wide), DOSBox Pure and more. For instance, on Opera (3DO), we can run the best and original version of Road Rash (1994) in a steady 30 FPS, it was the weakest port in performance, but it's now fixed with overclocking the CPU. Same goes for Genesis Plus GX Road Rash titles which received enhanced patches and benefit from overclocking the CPU and supports MD+, there's a lot to explore with these emulators.
Dolphin still remains as the greatest emulator out there in my opinion, now only due to the fact of how far it's come since the early stages of development many years ago, but also because of the ways it can breath so much live into GC and Wii games whether by simple resolution and visual tweaks or through the massive texture packs and game-changing patches/updates made by people in the community (Luigi's Mansion and Sonic Riders being good examples of such) which manage to give official remasters of recent time a run for their buck. I know these kinds of doings exist in other emulators and are done by their own communities, but Dolphin just does it in such a way that makes me genuinely impressed.
When you’re talking about emulators letting you play games in a way they were never intended to be run, you failed to mention that you can play Dolphin games (GC & Wii) in actual 3D. With the popularity of the Meta Quest 3, it’s definitely worth taking a look at. It is amazing to play some of those games in 3D on a virtual IMAX sized screen.
I'm kind of thinking out loud here and perhaps I'm talking out of my backside, but I've had a concern niggling at me regarding the emulation scene. I notice that many videos/discussions seem to place heavy emphasis on the ways in which emulators can be used to enhance games. I'm worried that this will sway emulator developers to prioritise enhancements on the most popular games rather than striving for 100% compatibility and adding more games to the Perfect category of their compatibility lists. I'm hugely grateful to the talented people who have dedicated their time and effort bringing us these emulators and perhaps I'm off the mark, it's just that for me the preservation aspect of emulation is more important than seeing how modern these old games can be made to look. To me enhancements are the cherry on top. I just hope their main concern is getting the cake right.
my favorite thing about emulation scene nowadays is it's all opensource, it's not that long ago that many projects were distributed as executables only and invariably the projects would die when the authors got bored leaving all the effort to be reduced to zero, such waste
I really like retroarch. It's not an emulater as such, but more of a frontend, but it works flawlessly on my PS Classic (which is a pretty good and cheap way into emulation of classic systems). And funny enough, it supports xmb UI, which fits nicely on a Sony console. Too bad PS Classic never got the love from the developers it deserved.
One issue I have with Retroarch is its clunky method for playlists where you have the choice of having Retroarch search a directory and match known roms in its database or just chuck everything into the playlist without linking ones that would match its database. It would also be nice if one could drag and drop games between playlists along with saving and loading playlists to files as music players do for music so if you accidentally remove a game from a playlist you could just restore a backup. Having sub playlists like virtual machine manages have would be nice so you could have a playlist for a console then within that subplaylists so organize your games within it. Lastly Retroarch does not make it easy to assign mouse as a controller for example using your mouse as a paddle controller like the stand alone Stella emulator allows for, in Retroarch you have to trick retroarch into thinking your mouse is a joystick.
There's an RPCS3 CPU tierlist out there, that's a great resource to figure out where your system lands. I run a Ryzen R7 5700X, it's A tier and I get pretty good performance, and that's a sub $200 8 core CPU. You'll get the best performance with Intel 12th and 13th gen, the 13600KF is a $250 gaming and productivity monster and you can run it with DDR4 memory if you wanna save some cash. Tons of great, cheap options for building a PC that has emulation potential, ESPECIALLY with modern Vulcan compatibility - means you don't have to give money to Nvidia XD I use a RX 6650 XT and that's a great budget 8GB card, Intel ARC A750 and A770 are amazing value for money as well. This year may have been crap for PC optimization of AAA titles, but emulation has just been going from strength to strength!
Agreed, no wonder why i got a gtx 1650 laptop to avoid the unoptimized aaa gaming and focusing for easier run games aka emualtion. RPCS3 works on a i5 6500 btw with few exclusive games fine. "means you don't have to give money to Nvidia" lmao, everything thats bad are good ones for my eyes
@@AntiGrieferGames really? recommending an at best, D tier processor? yikes, i'd hate to see how badly that performs. the i5 6500 isn't even listed, the i5 6600k is listed at D tier, seems like especially on a laptop it'd perform even worse :( there's no way you'll get any of the really challenging stuff running on a setup like that, sorry you're stuck with such crappy parts :(
Over this last year, I discovered the puNES emulator. I really like its interface and plethora of visual options to get games looking how you remember. I know it’s cheesy, but I really like the fake analog TV snow on the program’s display before starting a ROM. I’m also thankful they didn’t include the obnoxious static that goes along with the snow :P
I'm kind of sad there has not been a really good, user friendly and stable Saturn emulator. I know there is Mednafen and Khronos, but they still feel a bit hacky. RPCS3 and PCSX2 have been the primary choices of cool emulators over the past year for me. Duckstation is still the most used, but that has been rock solid for a few years now.
Not to get your hopes up, but Rich Whitehouse; the developer of the surprisingly very good and rapidly progressing Atari Jaguar emulator BigPEmu is considering taking a look into the Saturn.
@@crimson-foxtwitch2581 I've found that the available frontends for Mednafen were janky and weren't very user-friendly, but it's been a couple years and I think I only tried like, two? If you got a recommendation, I'd appreciate hearing it as much as the OP would.
@@crimson-foxtwitch2581 Will try to remember it next time I feel like exploring TurboGrafx/PC Engine emulation, or if/when I get into Saturn emulation.
Go to drinkag1.com/modernvintagegamer to get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 and 5 AG1 travel packs with your first purchase. Thanks to AG1 for sponsoring today's video!
I don't know you but I don't think it's moral selling supplement products even if it's just a sponsorship considering how many of them are scams.
I would like to tall about the emulators made for the PSP. Like genesis emulator, GBA and stuff. i play my psp daily and mostly emulators on it,
Hello MVG
I LOVE EMULATORS...
For the last 17 years they have been my main gaming experience ...
so many titles so many systems...
no dlcs no moneygrabs...
just eternal fun...
But at this point many of them literally require a computer science degree to get stuff running...at least for me...
I dont even bother with shaders or upscaling since most of the time stuff just barely runs on my laptop from the get go anyways...
This is the very aspect of emulation i would improve if i could...
Some emulators do have descriptions for the different options in the settingd but even those require a certain amount of knowledge at this point...
You may think after 17 years i would be an expert but the truth is the emulators that run without issue and dont require maintanance are the ones i use most i dont want to waste times in the settings i could be playing...
...i will usually try a few emulators with different options and settings read a few comments watch a few videos and if i still cant get it running it will disappear in some folder until next year...
if i really want to play a title badly i will try it with new updates or even a new emulator again with videos and comments...
For emulators i want to load a game set a few control settings or controllers and get to play...
i really wonder if an emulation specific AI could be used as some kind of a "setup assistent" for emulators to let anyone have the best possible experience on their specific devices...
I dont know if you ever bothered to look at this but it would mean alot to me an people like me who only do emulation gaming these days...
Good to see a proper update about performance o the major emulators. Reminded me that Simply Austin's comeback never materialized.
@@flintfrommother3gaming Agree, has been proven that many don't need supplements and are only peeing them out or damaging their bodies. Hopefully MVG could look up more info up about this to form a more properly informed opinion, because many people frown on this. Idk, maybe he already did this and came to this conclusion, but taking money from these kind of sponsors, just makes him sound less reliable, just like many TH-camrs that take money from gray market game selling sites, coin marketplaces, VPNs etc.
The GUI update for PCSX2 has got to be the single greatest update for any emulator in history, since it corrects the biggest flaw with the emulator being that you weren't able to set per-game configs previously which made switching back-and-forth between different games and updating the emulator a huge, tedious hassle. If you happen to come across this comment then thank you Stenzek!!!!
Yea half the updates for the emulator is removibg/streamlining the decades of jank it accumulated lol
Ever since it was rewritten, it still does not support guitar hero controller mode, unlike the old version
It also has great achievement support.
@@Grishanof At-least the old version's still there for that specific purpose.
@@chemergency true. Still, the new version is much faster on same hardware, GH1 is barely playable in some scenes.
Setting up an 8-player Halo match between two computers on Xemu using virtual networking with minimal effort and having the game Just Work Perfectly was one of the best moments in emulation I've had in a long time.
that sounds like it could be a great how to: youtube video that you should make!
PCSX2 1.7 night builds have been a Godsend for PS2 emulation. The new builds runs so much better and always getting updated.
And vulkan ❤
And the UI is so much nicer, with no mess of plugins that are all over the place
Although I will say I do miss the shader plugin, wish that the qt build was could run the old shaders
I wich they are still update on windows 7, but since this emulator is open source, it will be still a big plus on this emulator. Same goes on Duckstation. The new UI on PCSX2 used the Duckstation gui, made by stenzek, which is for my eyes great and better than the old UI.
@@ChaoticKrisis I still switch between PCSX2 1.6 for a small handful of games. I can't get Tomb Raider Anniversary or Legends to run right on the 1.7 Night build. Upscale and run it thru 1.6 and it plays fine.
the whole concept of an emulator is still so amazing. being able to run console specific code on a totally different machine, sometimes just about flawlessly and with significant improvements
For me it's the preservation of games as a medium. There are so many games that get stuck every generation and left behind. These games would be lost to history were it not for emulation.
And emulation will be the key factor that helps to fight against games as services, subscription models and removal of ownership in the coming years.
Want to play your old classic games? Only if you pay for a subscription that Nintendo lets you pay monthly. OR just emulate it and run it yourself (often better).
It’s not an amazing concept. It’s how a computer works. ALL CPU operations are nothing more emulation/simulation that are translated in huge numbers that are added rapidly. ALL CPU calculations are simply adding numbers really really fast.
@@darinherrick9224 oh yea? Prove it, I don’t believe you. Prove that it’s not amazing. And prove that computers are adding numbers really fast
@@Patrick-y4d1ztechnically paying for the subscription and playing it there is also emulation. I think you mean unofficial emulation over offical emulation.
@@ryanimateon😂😂😂
Rip Yuzu
well that sucks
I don't have any android phone atm but it seems suyu will continue where yuzu left off, including android builds from what i read.
Ryujinx
You should make a video about Ryujinx. If you want tho
@@Frostbite1090 rip suyu lol
Stenzek really pushed PSX and PS2 emulation to another level. Formally worked on Duckstation and now joined the team on PCSX2 which really woke up PS2 emulation.
Any future progress on Android?
@@villagioAzalea Play!/purei ps2 emulator probably has potential. It's multiplatform with a android port. Updates are slow though
@@villagioAzalea aethersx2 emulator PS2 on android
What I like about emulator videos is finding out what games are stuck on a particular console. That also makes me curious to try it on the original console.
being able to play stuff like bust a groove, eternal darkness and jet set radio future is basically why i love emulation so much.
Here's an important one for the Nintendo DS. It's the 1 true sequel to Chibi-Robo for Game Cube. It was only released in Japan, but now there's an english translation version. I can't recommend it enough. ♥
Title: "Okaeri! Chibi-Robo! - Happy Rich Oosouji!"
For me, I use DeSmuME for pc, and Drastic for my tablet. 😌👌🏻
Here's another one: "Magician's Quest - Mysterious Times" (Also a DS title)
It's literally Animal Crossing, but you're a wizard who goes to a wizard school. Bonus, you can even get married!
Last one: "Okamiden"
The sequel to Okami.
Let me know if you want more recommendations 😁✌🏻
@@CapnRetro Question, what's the best emulator for the DS with upscaling? I want to show my friend KH 358/2 days, as the cutscene movies aren't shit compared to playing through the story, but dear lord, in modern times it NEEDS upscaling filters....and XP and item hacks post game because dear lord THE GRIND for levels and extra Thundaga spells post game.
@@empoleonmaster6709 I don't personally know for sure, so i asked ai. Here's what it said: "When it comes to emulators for the ds with upscaling, there are a fw options you can consider. One of the popular choices ia DeSmuME. It allows you to upscale the graphics, providing a better visual experience. Another option is MelonDS, which has a feature called "HQ2x/3x" that enhances the graphivcs as well. Both emulators have their own strengths, so you can try them out and see which one suits your needs best."
I tried melonds before, but I always ditch it for DeeSmuME. But it might work for you.
I just want to be able to play Infamous 1 and 2 in high resolution and smooth framerates...
I started emulating back in 97 with ZSnes 0.4.3. It was amazing that I could play snes games on my 233Mhz Pentium 2 pc. Of course, the frame rate wasn't that great and the sound if you could even get it to work was stuttery. It's crazy to see how far emulation has come.
I started back around 97, too. As a Mac user the library of games was super limited, but all of a sudden I could play the back catalog of NES, SNES, and Genesis and not long after even play Playstation 1 with Connectix Virtual Game Station (with real games only, though, it didn't support ISOs nor do I think I could've downloaded them with dial up).
@@nunyabusiness896 That was what was so great about emulating back then. You could download the whole game in a couple of hours on a 26.4Kbps dial-up connection. It's crazy cause now if I'm not downloading faster than 5MBs I get irritated.
Damn znes been around that long
it had DOS releases lol@@razorbackroar
I never could beat Chrono Trigger in time when I was renting it (the next person would overwrite my saves), but I did manage to beat it via ZSNES on a keyboard 😂
RPCS3 is an amazing feat of engineering, but so are all the other emus on the list. Let's hope emulation continues to evolve the way it has, game preservation will be even more important in the near future.
you need a quantum computer for it to run in an acceptable manner, wouldn't bother with it LOL
@@HUYI1 No you don't. I have mid level gaming laptop with an AMD R7 3800H that plays most games I tested at 1080p/1440p with 30 fps or 60 fps depending on the game.
@@HUYI1 No you don't. You just need a decent CPU.
I've messed around with swapping my 3090 out for my 1080, and have found very little difference in performance.
@@bluetooth2677Yea, try running something like MGS 4. I have a 3070ti which should be more than enough but...
@@HUYI1 There are vids. of ETA Prime running Skate at 60 FPS on a 5700G. Yeah no.
When I first delved into emulation in the early 2000s, my young high school mind would’ve never imagined the landscape we have now - excellent handhelds that can play GameCube in your pocket, the Steam Deck, playing PS2 games at 4K and beyond. Absolutely mind blowing.
Shoutouts to Emudeck for making setting all this stuff up super easy on the Steam Deck. I just got mine a couple weeks ago and there's a quick setup wizard and an easy tool to import your rom library and make it all available (and very customizable) via Game Mode. Definitely worth checking out.
Yeah thank god for Emudeck. The biggest problem with the Steam Deck is that a lot of simple stuff like installing anything outside of Steam kind of requires basic Linux knowledge and a lot of people like myself didn't use anything other than Windows until they got a Deck.
Being able to install and run just 1 frontend and have all those emulators just ready to go... Magical.
RPCS3 is ridiculously impressive considering the PS3 has such a weird and confusing architecture. Ryujinx is also my personal pick for Switch emulation on Windows, it's just more accurate.
you're kapping thinking ryujinx is better
Lmao when I played Bayonetta 1 on ryujinx in some places it run with 1 fps but yuzu got stable 60 fps,also yuzu don't crash as ryujinx!!!
Yuzu has been so much better this year for me. The development flurry after ToTK and Mario Wonder came out were amazing.
@@retrogamer847I have yet to have ryujinx crash in me and I use it a lot
The choice of Yuzu vs Ryujinx usually comes around to what video card you have. Supposedly, Yuzu plays better with AMD drivers while Ryujinx does with Nvidia.
My hopes for emulation in 2024:
- More improvements for Xemu, RPCS3, Xenia, Vita3K, Yuzu, Ryujinx & PS4-based emulators
- Emulator support for ARM-powered Windows PC
- Stratos (formerly Skyline) to be optimized for Mali GPU drivers since Yuzu for Android is optimized for Adreno GPU drivers
- Higher compatability when emulating PC games prior to Windows 7 era on Android
- Improvements for playability for PS2-based Play emulator on Android etc
Good picks
RPCS3 Needs Multiplayer network support for GTA Online
The biggest hurdle in emulation for me was always the convenience factor. Getting a steam deck this year and going through all of the setup with that which was a breeze completely changed the game for me. I had done plenty of emulation in the past on PC as well, but steam Deck support from the community is insane.
Do you use emu deck or any of those emulation launcher script things?
@@alexanderkarren6455 emu deck with a little extra configuring but not much honestly.
Same here, the Deck is a game-changer (heh). When I used EmuDeck, I felt like saying "...that's it? That's the setup for all my emulators? I thought that setting them up would take all night!"
While I agree some emulators could be "fiddly", the convenience is overwhelming because your whole library can just be in a single folder vs. combing through shelves looking for a game and having to wait for it to load, etc. vs. jumping to a save state.
@@MusicFromAnotherTime
Yeah, Emudeck was a huge convenience factor for me too.
I hope that Emudeck for Windows will be just as significant of a leap too.
would love to see you doing an interview with the RPCS3 team..
Good idea . I may do this next year
@@ModernVintageGamer will look forward to that one..
My favorites are definitely PCSX2 & PPSSPP, I have revisited many nostalgic games using these. And compatibility is great on both of them, at least so far , every game I have tried has worked on them.
love those 2 emulators, playing on my steam deck a psp game like resistance : retribution or onimusha on pcsx2 is awesome !!
Or, as I like to call it, PSPSPS 😅
@@Daniel_Richards when you start the emulator your cat will come and lay on your lap
@@nathangraves1069 The funniest thing with some old games is that the PS2 version on an emulator is easier to get running than the native PC version. One such game for me was "Total Overdose". If some old PC games aren't that popular, and someone hasn't made patches for them, then they don't really want to run on my Windows 11 PC.
vita3k's progress is really something to behold, i remember watching a couple videos about it back when it only ran persona 4 golden and a couple of other minor titles, and then i kinda forgot about it, only to look back and find it now runs a little over 2000 titles.
i've been using it myself to play gravity rush these past few days, it runs really well, with the exception of some slowdown on some bossfights where alot of stuff gets destroyed or thrown around at once, but it's still completely playable.
it does have a pretty major weak point right now though (at least on PC) which is the controller options, as far as i know there's no way to set up macros for the touch screen or tilt controls, which makes some actions like sliding on gravity rush just not possible on PC, though that in no way takes away from how impressive the emulator is, i'm excited to see how it'll develop further.
Is it not possible to set up the mouse as the touch screen and tilt controls option?!
@@dragonandavatarfan8865 oh no, the mouse works for the touch screen, it's just that you can't do touch more than one place in the screen at once with it, which some games require you to do.
as for the tilt controls, i haven't been able to find anything about binding or enabling them in the settings, it's possible that they're currently just not implemented or somewhere obscure like the debugging options.
@@ZeroWaveZ For tilt controls, wouldn't it be possible to use wiimotes or a smartphone?
@@y0mgi3d not sure about wiimotes, but i can see tilt controls working on the mobile build, and to be fair you'd probably want to emulate the vita on something with a touch screen anyways, i just do it on PC because my phone can't handle vita3k. while not having tilt controls in a game like gravity rush isn't a deal breaker, it definitely could impact compatibility in some other titles. since the emulator is still experimental this is probably something that will get looked into in the future though.
I feel like once again the steam deck may be the only viable option for those enhanced inputs using the two touchpads. Of course that won’t feel 100% 1:1 with vita back touch estate, but it’s the best we got
One thing to note about the PCSX2 emulator is that its the first emulator for the developers of said emulator to add RetroAchievements support into a build. Gets more eyes on the emulator while also having more people actually wanting to play through an entire game on said emulator.
I do find it kind of sad that people won't play through a game unless it has achievements.
@@voteDC Achievements have encouraged me to play more games than I used to in previous generations. Also gets me to play games I never would have and get more enjoyment out of them. Always 100%d games before achievements, just gives me another reason to play more games than just playing the same 5 games over and over again.
i like retroachivement support cause it challenges me to go beyond just 100% completion
me after just finding out there's RA support, I'm just blasting thru ps2 games rn
@@dude-zr8gi See I don't get why achievements matter. If the game is good then you'd be playing it anyway. It seems more to me that achievements get people to play games they don't enjoy because the value of getting an achievement is the most important thing for them.
If seeing that achievement pop up is what gives people happiness, then who am I to want to stop them. I do still find it sad that people won't give older games a chance unless there are achievements.
Ryujinx is my personal pick in relation to Switch emulation, because I think a person from early 2010s would go mad if I told them it is possible to emulate Red Dead Redemption not just on any PC, but on a MacBook. The Mac ARM64 port is an absolute delight, and short of being in direct possession of a Switch (or owning Steam Deck), I can enjoy game on a go via the rather thin productivity tier package that is the modern MacBook Air.
Game awards: 🥱
Emulator Awards: 🤯
PCSX2 has to be one of the most improved emulators of this decade. We went from needing 8th gen intel @ stock resolution, to only needing 6th gen intel. 8th Gen intel can pump out 3x resolution without even breaking a sweat. You can pick up 8th Gen intel systems for less than $100... it is crazy how good their team has pushed the platform.
What are you talking about. My 3rd gen Intel runs PCSX2 perfectly fine.
@@GreatKeny with graphics card at 1x resolution, sure.
@@jong2359 What are you talking about? My CPU is an i5 3570. But graphics card I have a 6700XT. I can easily run God of War 2 at 6x resolution (4k) at 60 fps without any issue.
@@GreatKeny alright, so you have a graphics card that is worth 3x the amount of the computer it is in, sue me. I still said WITH GRAPHICS CARD, which my example excluded.
honestly my favourite part of emulation this year has to be me discovering what retro achievements was and getting it linked up with the playstation emulators. i beat spyro 1 and started going through medievil and it sure does add a new reason to play through a game to the end.
I love emulation. It has led to me needing so many hard drives! Too many full catalogues. I will never play everything but I collect it all anyways. It's an interesting addiction haha
A fellow pokerom collector 😀
@@MarkColemanRules haha yes indeed. One must simply catch 'em all.
Chad data hoarder
You mean linux iso files. And games you own. ;)
@@veneratedmortal4369 So very many Linux ISOs.
RPCS3 has been my emulator of the year. Ive been able to play elder scrolls Oblivion on the steam deck OLED at 60fps, giving me the best "vanilla" Oblivion experience since the PS3 has better textures, normal maps and distant LODs than both vanilla PC and 360 and also loads faster than the Xbox 360 version. On RPCS3, it feels good, looks good and runs like a dream on steam deck
not to mention controller support!
Hmmm interesting, I never thought of doing that but it might be a great way to experience oblivion for the first time. I started a playthrough with the pc version on steam deck and while it's fairly playable the lack of controller support kind of hurts the experience.
@John-PaulHunt-wy7lf Killzone 2 and 3 definitely made my Ryzen 5700X cry.
RCPS3 has come SO FAR since I first used it a decade ago! I'm blown away
RIP Yuzu and Citra
22:55 Thank you for telling me about DuckStation . I only remembered that I used Bleem! and Connectix VGS as PS1 emulator in my childhood days 😂. Decades have past
Something I would love to see and this world most likely have to become a video series of sorts. But a video going over the Emulators available for each system starting from the 80s to the modern day. With pros and cons for each emulators if there are multiple for one system that are widely used etc.
Great video as always! Love the callout for Vita3k's compatibility growing!
Thank you legend
There are many more games running on Ryujinx at release than on Yuzu. With Yuzu there are often graphics errors with new games. Yuzu's focus is on commercialization while Ryujinx's focus is on compatibility. It also happens more often that emulation solutions are simply transferred from Ryujinx to Yuzu and then sold behind the playwall. The solution for the graphics errors in red dead redemption was simply taken from Ryujinx.
Both are great, some games run better on yuzu some on Ryujinx. Have both installed and use them interchangeably!
@@fumeiusrDo you know if it's possible to use the same save on both?
I always have trouble transferring saves.
@@elimalinsky7069 Right click on the title and open the save directory, then just copy all the contents to the other emulator
@@fumeiusr Thanks.
It also takes way more system resources to use ryujinx where yuzu runs the same games docked at 60 no issues
Speaking about making a game feel remastered, I think HD texture packs are a great option. Both projects that remake the textures by hand and those that use AI upscaling. Some games work better than others with AI upscaling and quality can vary by texture, but generally it adds detail into the game while remaining pretty faithful to the original artstyle. Of course doing it by hand by a skilled team will always be better but we're talking about thousands upon thousands of games that need HD texture packs and the man hours just don't make sense to do all of them by hand.
One main problem with HD textures is the fact that textures are usually dumped by the emulator as the game is being played, which means you need to complete the whole game, being meticulous to go everywhere, do everything, and load every texture to be dumped as best you can. Then at that point it's pretty trivial to run the images through an AI upscaler, but you already played the whole game and you're unlikely to want to play it again in its entirety just to enjoy the textures.
I think what we need is AI upscaling built-in to the emulator, so as soon as the texture is loaded it can be automatically upscaled and replaced. Then people don't have to go through the whole process above or distribute copyrighted content online when sharing their packs.
At some point I compared Yuzu and Ryujinx on several games and Ryujinx turned out to be the best (I was using Yuzu before) but it was like a year ago so I wonder how things are between those two right now. I simply have no beef against Ryujinx so that's why I stuck with it through TotK.
Ryujinx is way more accurate and stable, so unless you run on a 2010 intel iGPU, use Ryujinx.
@@elimalinsky7069 Not much for reading comprehension are you? They were specifically saying that a 2010 iGPU wouldn't run ryujinx.
Things haven't changed much. Ryujinx is far and away the most accurate of the two, and scales better with better hardware. Yuzu is really hacky, which is why it tends to have higher performance further down the hardware stack. A lot of issues present in Yuzu are often absent in Ryujinx due to the accuracy difference.
I'd say if you have at least a modern, mid-tier PC Ryujinx is the better of the two. But, if you have something closer to entry level, Yuzu is definitely a better option. You have your blow trading between the two.
And, Ryujinx just performs better with AMD GPUs; as a whole it seems. So that's another thing to consider.
That and mods and cheats are far easier to use.
@@AhPookguess i'll use Ryujinx after getting my graphics card
Looking forward to Xenia improving. I’ve played through the original Fable (Anniversary, to be specific) several times on PC and have been itching to try Fable 2 and 3 on PC
And before someone mentions it, I know Fable 3 has a PC version, but not only is it delisted from Steam but supposedly has tons of issues running on modern Windows
I played 3 recently on pc native and had no problems
Iirc those bugs arent there anymore since the game got rereleased on windows store
And about fable 2 its playable with Xenia but the experience isnt great even with a 4090 and 13900ks and all the necessary xenia canary patches
It’s like you read my mind, recently I started messing around with emulation on my Steam Deck mainly been playing PS2. I had an itch to play through God of War, and seeing GOW running on my SD upscaled, just made me smile a ridiculously happy. I used to try and collect retro games and systems. But it really doesn’t make sense, I’ve been come a fan of emulation. SO thank you for making this video. Oh I should try 3D Dot Hero on RPCS3. Great little love letter to LOZ fans, never got to finish it on my PS3.
I have recently played Resident Evil Outbreak online Co-op multiplayer using PCSX2, and it was so awesome that I could hop online using that emulator and still find quite a few players in several different lobbies. I was surprised how many PS2 games are still online overall.
im quite glad rpcs3 exists.
being able to replay my games from my youth was pretty great.
i missed little big planed quite a bit since it must have been like 10 years since i played it.
*Nintendo was Here*
c&d
Always pirate Nintendo
😢
I used to want a Switch. Then I downloaded Ryujinx. My mid-range PC is now a Switch that works about 5x better than a real one (not even an exaggeration for some titles) and I can play with a far superior DualSense. It's not like I would have ever used the portability, it's just not how I play games.
Yh I normally find that the only reason to have the device is playing online but I really dislike the online and even if it’s decent for some games barely any of my friends own a switch and if they do don’t pay the online membership.
One thing that I'd like to highlight is how quite a lot of these now has a good Flatpak port, which makes it very easy to use on Linux and Steam Deck. The ecosystem there overall has improved a lot too, with even Lutris gaining more integration with Flatpak and now able to launch games with existing Flatpak runners. It's a great time to be a gamer on Linux
While I suppose it's not exactly impressive in the same way the emulators mentioned in the video are, BigPEmu the Atari Jaguar emulator is moving at an incredible pace considering how the console's emulation development languished for decades.
Not only did it launch with 100% retail game compatibility, it rapidly added support for the Jaguar CD (IIRC completely unemulated until BigPEmu did it) and the Jaguar VR headset (an unreleased peripheral that _definitely_ wasn't emulated before BigPEmu), and the scripting module system seems to be utterly insane for enhancement and modding opportunities; the demo scripts provided with the emulator allow running Cybermorph in HD and with anti-aliasing, and playing Alien vs. Predator as I shit you not _a 32-player multiplayer game online._
I'd really love to see the developer look into doing some of the other consoles he mentioned as being interested in, especially the Sega Saturn.
Amazing video MVG :) This month I finally played Tokyo Jungle in RPCS3, and it's incredible!Being a ferocious Pomeranian dog is something to try once.
Fantastic video!
I'm on PC and the 2 I use most are *Ryujinx* and *Cemu* .
The game compatibility of Ryujinx has made it a go-to for me - also that it's easy to setup portably and update.👍
What Cemu does on Xenoblade X with a decent system cannot be overstated. Absolutely showstopping!😍👏
For me and in no particular order
- Yuzu (switch)
- Ryujinx (switch)
- Cemu (WiiU)
- Citra (3DS)
- Dolphin (Gamecube & wii)
- Duckstation (psx)
- RPCS3 (PS3)
- RPCSX2 (PS2)
- Xenia (Xbox 360)
- Xemu (Xbox)
- Redream (Dreamcast)
- Vita3k (Vita)
- PPSSPP (PSP)
- Retroarch (Multi)
- Mame (Arcade)
This year I've definitely been impressed with the improvements made to RPCS3, DuckStation, PCSX2, and Citra. When i first installed Citra about a year or two ago, i had a major issue with the Fire Emblem games where it was like watching a slide show and the audio was really bad. No adjustment of settings could fix it. I tried it again a few months ago and suddenly it was flawless. Kudos to the Citra team. I'm really looking forward to RPCSX, the PS4 emulator from the RPCS3 team or at least a creator of it. Shame its being initially built on Linux instead of Windows so it'll probably be an even longer wait for me. But there are a lot of PS4 games that likely won't be ported to PC by Sony like The Order: 1886, Until Dawn, The Last Guardian, Gravity Rush 2, or the Uncharted HD Collection which does look better than the emulated PS3 versions. Xbox One emulation would also be nice to see as I dont expect Halo 5 or a select few other games to be brought to PC. I will say though that i feel the eighth generation will be the last where emulation is truly necessary. With Sony and Microsoft comitting to PC ports of their first party portfolio and far less devs making pure console exclusives, the need to preserve the one or two exclusives is less pressing. Nintendo though will likely remain necessary as i dont see them branching to PC any time soon. But with more and more mandatory NVIDIA features Switch 2 emulation might become more difficult for those on AMD hardware or at least GPU's.
Ps2 was the system that was the vast majority of my ganing childhood. So to have my ps2 collection avaliable in a portable fashion on deck as well as a dedicated home theater pc setup with modern controllers is a happiness i cant describe. Thank you pcsx2, happy gaming.
I will never stop thanking the developers of emulators! You guys are preserving art and i love you 😍
My first time emulating games was from 2009. I emulated ps1 games on my galaxy tab playing ff9 and chrono cross. Two of my favourite jrpg ever and what made me felt in love with the genre.
I really love the way new emulators are shaping of. Xemu is becoming really great. I just wish they implement the way to list all games on the emulator itself like pcsx2 did. Or even implement the menu of the og Xbox. But this is just a really minor thing.
you have to put the menu into the harddrive manually because they can't legally distribute it
The shift to QT on PCSX2 was phenomenal, it went from one of the clunkest messy emulators around to one of thee best experiences in emulation... and the fact that it brings us the ps2 library in the process... I seriously can't get over it's transformation, Paired with Duckstation you turn your PC into a dangerous nostaligia machine...
The original xbox and ps3 emulators are coming along great, there is serious potential there.
The emulation scene is one of my favourite places on the internet, truly amazing people...
I'm so glad that the Vita finally has a working emulator. People really need to discover the great games on that underrated and overhated handheld console.
Fax
This was a great episode👍🏻
I use emulation on devices like Miyoo Mini or Anbernic RG353m.
The emulation app I use the most is Adrenaline on my PS Vita and Vita TV. For me this is a very good way to play PS1 and PSP games at home or on the go😁
Suprised that BigPEmu didn't make the list. Awesome Jaguar emulator.
Oh I’m aware of it . I haven’t had the chance to look at it yet
Well, this video is gonna need an update. RIP Yuzu.
I don't have Yuzu but I do have Duckstation and PCSX2. those emulators are amazing and quite frankly, I'm glad I downloaded Duckstation over ePSXe. One thing about those emulators is that you need the bios otherwise they won't work. I think with Yuzu you need a Nintendo Switch product key. I may be wrong though because of later updates. One emulator I also like is Cemu. I also tried out Xemu but I would rather play those games on an original Xbox. But PCSX2 is hands down a great emulator and for sure Duckstation.
I still love the days of Nesticle and other early emulators. You'd see jumps in emulation every month and keep your eyes glued to the news sites for the next big update. We got Nam 1795 emulated for the Neo Geo, then it felt like every week there would be a new game supported. Then we got Samurai shodown 2, and everyone would cheer!
You said you cant play mgs4 on steam deck with playable performance, however with specific settings, patches, and overclocking it actually is possible to get a close to native experience, which to be clear isnt really acceptable by modern standards i get that, but to say its unplayable on steam deck isnt necessarily true
I started using duckstation recently to play my physical ps1 library on my pc and I love that I can do it with duckstation it does have audio and visual issues running straight off the disc but loading it all into ram at the start no issues whatsoever and it's great
emulation is the way forward for preservation of some of great games and combining it with the ease of the steam deck I'm having a blast with a huge library of modern and old games in the palm of my hands. Honestly can't wait for steam deck 2 to finally have a portable ps3 library in 2 years
thanks for showing the 'diff' of each emulator. kinda reminds me of the early emulation days seeing things like sound emulation getting better, or transparency effects being implemented properly as each emulator got updated lol.
I think it was about 5 years ago I tried PCSX2 and stopped because of all the emulation issues and just lack of overall polish and for a while it looked like that was it. Then a couple of years ago things started to change rapidly and last year I gave the nightly builds ago. It was good but still had issues, my settings wouldn't save and the new UI was not long released and had some bugs. This year however I gave it a go again and my god has it come a long way, I went from playing PS2 games on my launch PS3 to transferring all my saves over and converting them back to the PS2 format so I could use PCSX2 and it has been my main way of playing PS2 since. Constant updates and a super polished experience. The UI is great, The compatibility and performance is amazing and all the options it gives you is just incredible. Even having separate settings per game. Super useful. The people working on it and that dev that came in deserve a lot of praise. As a fun fact the guy responsible for the UI in PCSX2 is also responsible for the same UI on duckstation.
Frankly, I like all the options, but I prefer the original aspect ratios and resolutions. It's a personal preference. I recently played KOTOR in 2K, but something was missing. I can't put my finger on it, but the whole thing felt grating somehow. After listening to a friend of mine, I uninstalled all the resolution mods and booted up the original version with slight mods, and it was better for me. The jaggies and warped aspect ratio hid the imperfections, made the bland environments look unique, and added some charm to it. That's my opinion.
Honestly been using many emulators this year but for some reason the most fun I had was with the frontend Retroarch. Mainly for the CRT shaders. Just seems to have renewed that nostalgia magic for me.
I'd like to mention Mesen. It was initially a NES/SNES emulator, but it recently added support for GB/C and even PC Engine. With time, it could probably become the easiest and most convenient PCE emulator around. Plus it has lots of debug tools for each system.
Fantastic list & truly a showcase of some incredibly talented coders throughout the users. I would personally also add Citra to this list as the premiere 3DS emulator.
citra has surprisingly weak performance for a 3ds emulation and some forks even dramatically outperform it. Though i'm hopeful now that development on it has picked up pace again after a long pause. We'll hopefully see it in a much better place for next years best of list.
I used PCSX2 recently, and was shocked at how much it improved since the last time I used it
DuckStation is so great! I used to have so many issues with other PSX emulators in the past, but DuckStation just works. The UI is nice, and I guess it's a common feature nowadays, but the auto-update feature in the software itself is such an improvement for the UX. I know Dolphin has had it for some time, but moving to DuckStation from previous emulators and being able to update it with such ease (similar to how the UX is for most paid applications) blew my mind. Together with Dolphin, it's my favorite emulator.
Don't sleep on Flycast. It is now head and tails superior to Redream graphically, is free (as opposed to Redream asking for $5), and even runs Arcade Naomi games well. And it does a far better job running arcade games than Demul ever could.
Flycast also now has NAOMI 2 support and ***rollback netcode netplay.***
Simple64 deserves a mention, IMHO. The maintainer managed to bring together (and update) the best recent developments in the N64 emulation "scene". It's all packaged in a simple emulator.
I had no idea that PCSX2 had such a major update, I'd been using version 1.6.0 for the majority of the year and most games were running "good enough" because of how awkward it was to change settings. The newest version is a tremendous improvement in just about every aspect.
Been ryujinx and it is an amazing achievement , I did wonder how Sega Saturn emulation was coming along
yabause on retroarch seems to do well for me
mednafen standalone aswell. But coudnt get to work on lower end machines.
Worth mentioning is melonDS. Desmume was a long time the only stable DS Emulator, but also didn't got Updates in the last Years. melonDS has now more functionality and stable as Desmume.
Yes, but there are some games that still don't work well with melonDS and with Desmume they do.
I would put my vote in for Ryujinx over Yuzu for a very similar reason: they are also branching out to new platforms, just different ones from Yuzu. In particular for me, Ryujinx now fully supports macOS, and the REALLY neat thing is that it is taking full advantage of the ARM based chips in the latest Macs to be able to NATIVELY run switch code rather than having to translate the Switch's ARM syscalls to x86. It's insane how good the performance is and it really shows that the Ryujinx team has put a lot of effort into supporting macOS by taking advantage of the strengths of modern Macs
I mean Yuzu did that on Android too.
Yep, I just am from an Apple family so I don’t have a PC or Android, so Ryujinx is usable for me and Yuzu is not.
It's such a great time to be a retro gamer and it'll only get better from here
RIP Yuzu
I do most of my emulation through my Vita 2000 FFX edition. I love being able to take so many systems on the go.
I'm a huge fan of Ryujinx because it allows for local multiplayer with hacked Switch consoles but Yuzu is just as important.
Still need to rip one stack of my PS1 games with 50% being done but Duckstation really seems cool.
Seeing Vita3k makes me always wish I was into the Vita but Sony totally botched that system for Europe.
I am still amazed PS3 emulation is even possible. When my PS3 dies (and when my second PS3 dies) I could keep playing all my games with 0 issue.
Thank yoy MVG. Emulation is my gaming life. I have over 21,000 pieces of software and over 30 computers and consoles in emulation form i have 2 dedicated 4tb drives for my emulation software and hardware apps and they are not even hald full. Thats whst I love about older gsmes. Thry tale up very little space in capacity.but can give hours of entertainment. My favourite consoles are the PS2 (in which I use PCSX2,) and Redream for the Dreamcast.
I LOVE this format. Feel free to upload more stuff like this at this length any time :). I used to watch Simply Austin for emu updates and now I need to fill that void!
The redream emulator for dreamcast games is absolutely incredible. 💯
Ryuijinx is by far the best one, albeit I lost some compatibility over the year.
Xenia and XEMU are great. RPCS3 is not bad also, it had some good progress on performance but it's still got a long, long way to go.
RPCS3 is much further ahead than both Xenia and Xemu right now. Not sure if you were implying otherwise.
@@Woodzta Honestly, XEMU is ahead of RPCS3, it just has god awful performance in a lot of titles and it's a bit unstable but you can technically play 84% of the entire library. I think it just needs more mature code to bring more stability and performance.
Xenia is definitely behind both though, it could use some love from the community.
I agree on the Ryujinx part. The Other part, however, is far from true. Xenia has a LONG was to go compared to RPCS3 (XEMU is getting close though I'll give it that).
@@Manic_PanicNah, even many of the 29% of RPCS3's "ingame" list are playable but have other performance issues. RPCS3 is a far more complete and feature rich emulator at this stage compared to Xemu.
@@Woodzta Wrong, Xenia runs most games with 100% compatibility, and those that run with bugs at least run at 100%.
RPCS3 can only run HD re-releases at 100% speed and without issues. Other native PS3 games it will run terribly with some sort of bugs. RPCS3 is highly dependent on whether you have the CPU with AVX512 instructions. Which can give you up to 25% boost in performance. Given that most people nowadays use AMD, most people can't utilize that advantage. Also those games that do run well, still have minor bugs and require significant tinkering in the options.
RPCS3 does offer more features, and is much easier to use. I'll give you that. The game installation feature is a life saver.
I think you should be more specific about specs: beefy, mid, low-end pc is not a good reference in the present, it'll be horrible even in the really near future. Obviously even the emulators will change, but a more strictly frame of reference "in the moment" is beneficial to fix where we are.
Nice to see these emulators get the attention they deserve in this round up video and I completely agree with everything said. I've been on a MASSIVE emulation kick this year. I had only dabbled before but this year I got fully obsessed with it. Specs: 6700k @ 4.5 all cores and 1080ti OC'd with GPU Tweak.
PS1: Used to use PCSXR but I've since swapped to Duckstation as the GUI is way better and the same as PCSX2 Nightly. Games run very well, I just need to work on getting my saves transferred now.
PS2: I use PCSX2 nightly. I used to use the stable version but then swapped to Nightly because of the improvements you get from it. I've been cataloguing my game disks into my ROM collection and I've transferred most of my game saves over. It's been an insane trip down memory lane to play my old PS2 game saves again on a emulator. I've also recently got a Sinden lightgun so I can play Time Crisis again. Games for the most part have run flawless and it's been so much fun playing my PS2 games in 4K60.
PS3: Been using RPCS3 however it's a bit of a struggle on my current rig. I've mainly been focusing on PCSX2 but once I get my new rig I'll spend more time with RPCS3. I've got my saves transferred but getting them to work will take a little more work as I'll have to modify them all to make them compatible.
PSP: Been using PPSSPP for awhile now and works very well. The saves transfer process was a simple drag and drop from my PSP memory card. Games run very well now., They used to struggle with some games but the improvements have made a huge difference.
Xbox 360: Only dabbled a little with Xenia as it is currently the best way to emulate Red Dead Redemption on PC. It plays fairly well but my PC struggles with it.
Wii U: Been using Cemu and runs BoTW very smoothly. I've played the game from start to finish.
Switch: Tried both Ryujinx and YuZu with YuZu being the best for me performance wise. Been playing ToTK and it runs very well although does struggle a little on my PC.
I'll likely give Vita 3K a go soon and i'm looking forward to see how the PS4 emulators progress in the future.
I love these kinds of videos, even tho I prefer Ryujinx to Yuzu they're both excellent for Switch. I got these running on the Ally, they run great :3
Why are we not talking bout BigPEmu?
We've never been able to emulate Jaguar CD before, and then out of nowhere comes the entire library.
It's astonishing, it's unbelievable.
Since the jaguar is not a very good console so there isn't much interest on it's emulation but bigpemu is sure one of the best emus this year
Yuzu's android development is very fast, true. The NCE update doubled performance for a lot of devices. v155 which came out 48 hours ago has a 25% performance boost over the NCE update from 2 weeks ago.
Yuzu on Nintendo switch with android would be wild
cant wait to test it around and watching it progress when my Ayn odin 2 arrives next week
I'm not sure how much it's improved this year, but I've also been using Citra to emulate 3ds games a lot lately
Do you plan on making a part 2 of this? There has been a lot of improvements for PPSSPP, Citra and certainly for classic consoles, such as 3DO (Opera), Saturn (Mednafen/Beettle), Dolphin, FBNEO, MAME, BSNES (widescreen) Genesis Plus GX (MD+ and even Wide), DOSBox Pure and more.
For instance, on Opera (3DO), we can run the best and original version of Road Rash (1994) in a steady 30 FPS, it was the weakest port in performance, but it's now fixed with overclocking the CPU. Same goes for Genesis Plus GX Road Rash titles which received enhanced patches and benefit from overclocking the CPU and supports MD+, there's a lot to explore with these emulators.
Dolphin still remains as the greatest emulator out there in my opinion, now only due to the fact of how far it's come since the early stages of development many years ago, but also because of the ways it can breath so much live into GC and Wii games whether by simple resolution and visual tweaks or through the massive texture packs and game-changing patches/updates made by people in the community (Luigi's Mansion and Sonic Riders being good examples of such) which manage to give official remasters of recent time a run for their buck. I know these kinds of doings exist in other emulators and are done by their own communities, but Dolphin just does it in such a way that makes me genuinely impressed.
Switch emulation is absolutely incredible, can't wait for Strato to come out sometime before the end of the year!
Whats strato?
@@plazzy9911 Looked it up, mobile Switch emulator that is mostly a fork of Skyline with some code from Ryujinx and yuzu
@@plazzy9911Its a switch emulator for android, formerly known as Skyline which performs much better than Yuzu android
I just installed vita3k on my retroid pocket 3+ and i am super impressed. Super nice playing MK 9 and street fighter x Tekken.
When you’re talking about emulators letting you play games in a way they were never intended to be run, you failed to mention that you can play Dolphin games (GC & Wii) in actual 3D. With the popularity of the Meta Quest 3, it’s definitely worth taking a look at. It is amazing to play some of those games in 3D on a virtual IMAX sized screen.
Yeah I loved to do that in Bigscreen VR
@@RetroSmoo Just now figuring out how to play 3DS games in 3D now. Looks promising.
I'm kind of thinking out loud here and perhaps I'm talking out of my backside, but I've had a concern niggling at me regarding the emulation scene. I notice that many videos/discussions seem to place heavy emphasis on the ways in which emulators can be used to enhance games. I'm worried that this will sway emulator developers to prioritise enhancements on the most popular games rather than striving for 100% compatibility and adding more games to the Perfect category of their compatibility lists.
I'm hugely grateful to the talented people who have dedicated their time and effort bringing us these emulators and perhaps I'm off the mark, it's just that for me the preservation aspect of emulation is more important than seeing how modern these old games can be made to look. To me enhancements are the cherry on top. I just hope their main concern is getting the cake right.
Showcasing yuzu but not ryujinx which is way more accurate and has more compatiblity is insane. They're always getting shafted by big youtubers.
my favorite thing about emulation scene nowadays is it's all opensource, it's not that long ago that many projects were distributed as executables only and invariably the projects would die when the authors got bored leaving all the effort to be reduced to zero, such waste
I really like retroarch. It's not an emulater as such, but more of a frontend, but it works flawlessly on my PS Classic (which is a pretty good and cheap way into emulation of classic systems). And funny enough, it supports xmb UI, which fits nicely on a Sony console.
Too bad PS Classic never got the love from the developers it deserved.
One issue I have with Retroarch is its clunky method for playlists where you have the choice of having Retroarch search a directory and match known roms in its database or just chuck everything into the playlist without linking ones that would match its database. It would also be nice if one could drag and drop games between playlists along with saving and loading playlists to files as music players do for music so if you accidentally remove a game from a playlist you could just restore a backup. Having sub playlists like virtual machine manages have would be nice so you could have a playlist for a console then within that subplaylists so organize your games within it. Lastly Retroarch does not make it easy to assign mouse as a controller for example using your mouse as a paddle controller like the stand alone Stella emulator allows for, in Retroarch you have to trick retroarch into thinking your mouse is a joystick.
I love using RetroArch on my pc and my phone etc and love to use the CRT shaders and bezels
No matter what computer system we have, no matter where we go, no matter who we are, emulation will always be around to welcome us.
There's an RPCS3 CPU tierlist out there, that's a great resource to figure out where your system lands. I run a Ryzen R7 5700X, it's A tier and I get pretty good performance, and that's a sub $200 8 core CPU. You'll get the best performance with Intel 12th and 13th gen, the 13600KF is a $250 gaming and productivity monster and you can run it with DDR4 memory if you wanna save some cash. Tons of great, cheap options for building a PC that has emulation potential, ESPECIALLY with modern Vulcan compatibility - means you don't have to give money to Nvidia XD I use a RX 6650 XT and that's a great budget 8GB card, Intel ARC A750 and A770 are amazing value for money as well. This year may have been crap for PC optimization of AAA titles, but emulation has just been going from strength to strength!
Agreed, no wonder why i got a gtx 1650 laptop to avoid the unoptimized aaa gaming and focusing for easier run games aka emualtion.
RPCS3 works on a i5 6500 btw with few exclusive games fine.
"means you don't have to give money to Nvidia" lmao, everything thats bad are good ones for my eyes
@@AntiGrieferGames really? recommending an at best, D tier processor? yikes, i'd hate to see how badly that performs. the i5 6500 isn't even listed, the i5 6600k is listed at D tier, seems like especially on a laptop it'd perform even worse :( there's no way you'll get any of the really challenging stuff running on a setup like that, sorry you're stuck with such crappy parts :(
@@anarchicnerd666 Is for benchmark purposes, not for generally usage
Over this last year, I discovered the puNES emulator. I really like its interface and plethora of visual options to get games looking how you remember.
I know it’s cheesy, but I really like the fake analog TV snow on the program’s display before starting a ROM. I’m also thankful they didn’t include the obnoxious static that goes along with the snow :P
I'm kind of sad there has not been a really good, user friendly and stable Saturn emulator. I know there is Mednafen and Khronos, but they still feel a bit hacky.
RPCS3 and PCSX2 have been the primary choices of cool emulators over the past year for me. Duckstation is still the most used, but that has been rock solid for a few years now.
Not to get your hopes up, but Rich Whitehouse; the developer of the surprisingly very good and rapidly progressing Atari Jaguar emulator BigPEmu is considering taking a look into the Saturn.
Mednafen has many front-end UIs you can download to use the emulator with a GUI rather than command-line.
@@crimson-foxtwitch2581 I've found that the available frontends for Mednafen were janky and weren't very user-friendly, but it's been a couple years and I think I only tried like, two?
If you got a recommendation, I'd appreciate hearing it as much as the OP would.
@@LonelySpaceDetective Mednaffe is worth a look
@@crimson-foxtwitch2581 Will try to remember it next time I feel like exploring TurboGrafx/PC Engine emulation, or if/when I get into Saturn emulation.