I noticed some graphical artifacts with Castlevania III running in Mesen. I thought it might be a rom with a bad header, so I switched to the NES 2.0 romset, but same effect (it’s mostly around the whip, but also other graphics glitches). I have used Mesen because I read it is an accurate emulator… so I’m wondering if anyone else has experience with this? Is it emulator settings I can change? Thanks for the help.
If it wasn’t one of the Castlevania games I would probably just move along. 
can you post a screenshot?
Hmm… I’m not sure how well it will capture but let me see what I can do.
It’s kind of hard to tell in a still shot. I have it circled. Imagine that little glitch flashing up and down the whip. It also happens in enemies etc, sometimes.
I finally got around to trying to reproduce this and wasn’t able to make it happen. Are you running Castlevania 3 USA? I thought rewind or runahead might be involved but I didn’t have any issues with them on, either.
Yeah, it’s Castlevania 3 USA… I tried from two different romsets, the normal and nes 2.0 sets. I thought it might be because I had the HD texture options on without having any texture packs, so I turned that off also, but it didn’t affect it.
hmm, i guess the next thing to try would be fresh configs, both for RA and core options.
Yeah, I hate to get too crazy with it since it’s only the one game. A rom header problem or something like that would have made sense in the situation… but I might try to delete the core config and if it doesn’t work try another core. I’ve been using Mesen for a while so I’m not even sure what the state of the others is like.
I tried the Nestopia core and didn’t see the issue, so assumed it is Mesen… so took your advice and deleted the Mesen.opt and .cfg and played through the first stage of the game with the defaults and didn’t see the issue at all. Wondering if it could be a palette issue? I think I had changed it from the default before.
Thanks for taking the time to answer questions… I know this was a pretty fringe issue.
Hmm, I don’t know how a palette would cause it, but i guess anything is possible 
Knowing that it’s a core option narrows it down enough that I can try some more on my end.
I’m not sure that it was a palette issue, that was just a blind guess. It could have been another option. I can’t remember, but I think I had the overclocking on with the old .opt, but I don’t remember glitches with other games.
Oh yeah, overclocking is a very likely culprit.
It is because of the remove sprite limit setting. A shame because IMO, is an almost necessary feature for the NES. The Nestopia UE core don’t show this behavior with the setting ON.
