I’m a bit late to the party, but here’s my evaluation of all of the cores that I can currently download for Windows.
Keep in mind that I have a i5-4690k clocked at 4.0GHz, so my choices tend to gravitate toward the more hardware-intensive cores, given the choice.
2048: A nice little experiment to see what we can do with libretro that doesn’t involve emulation, but honestly, I think that 2048 is best played on phones to kill time, not when you’ve sat down in front of a computer.
3D Engine: I don’t have any idea what this does. I think it might do something with 3D rendering, but I’ve never gotten it to work. Ever.
4DO: Works well enough. If you have any 3DO games you want to emulate, it works about as well as standalone 4DO.
Amiga (P-UAE): This core is absolute garbage compared to WinUAE or FS-UAE. There is no real reason to use it on a desktop. Heck, since UAE4All2 exists, there’s no reason to use on Android either.
Arcade (FB Alpha): There are several versions of this core. I reccomend getting the regular version of FB Alpha, as opposed to FB Alpha 2012. However, you may want to get FB Alpha 2012 Neo Geo if you’re only interested in playing Neo-Geo games.
Arcade (MAME): I’ve generally have had a lot of problems with Retroarch’s MAME, so I recommend a standalone version.
Atari 2600 (Stella): Works well, although I don’t like the lack of rewinding or save-states. It even works with Starpath Supercharger games.
Atari 7800 (ProSystem): Also works well, although there aren’t all that many good 7800 games (compared to other 3rd gen consoles)
Atari Jaguar (Virtual Jaguar): Once you turn on “Fast Blitter” in the options, it runs all games I’ve tested at full speed. However, I can’t find anything in the controls menu regarding the numpad buttons 7-9, so you’d be better of with standalone Virtual Jaguar if you want to play a game that needs them.
Atari Lynx (Handy/ Mednafen Handy): I’ll be honest. I’ve never really found that much of a difference between the two, but that’s mainly because of a lack of testing. I personally choose to download Mednafen Handy, just because I like mednafen.
Atari ST… (Hatari): A lot better than P-UAE, but still not as good as alone Hatari.
Cave Story (NXEngine). I haven’t had any problems so far. I own Cave Story+ on Steam, so I don’t really have a use for this core, though.
CHIP-8 (Emux): I haven’t bothered to ever try another CHIP-8 emulator, but honestly, the quality of the CHIP-8 games I’ve found suggests that you shouldn’t bother with either.
Dinothawr: I guess this is an OK puzzle game. If you want to play it, get the core. If not, don’t get it.
Doom (PrBoom): First Person shooters are meant to be played with a mouse and keyboard. Also, you’ll need .mp3 files of the game’s soundtrack with the correct names in order to get the music working, so I suggest ZDoom or GZDoom instead.
DOSBox: Standalone dosbox generally works better in my experience. It’s come a long way, but I still don’t see any reason to use it instead of normal DOSBox for Windows or DOSBox Turbo for Android.
Dreamcast (Reicast): Reicast seems to work rather well for me. If they can fix the fact that it prompts you to enter the date and time each time you start a game, I’d definitely choose it over the other Dreamcast emulators (although VMU and Dreamast-based arcade system emulation would be nice bonuses).
FFmpeg: Don’t bother. If you want to watch a video on a desktop, VLC is much better.
Game and Watch: I don’t know of any alternative players for these Game and Watch simulations, so you might be stuck with this player. Fortunately, the games can all be downloaded within the Retroarch GUI, and the simulation seems to work rather well, even if some of the games aren’t too great. Now if only they could get Coleco’s home arcade version of Galaxian.
Game Boy/Game Boy Color: Emux doesn’t support the .gbc file extension, so I treat that as not supporting GBC games at all. TGB Dual’s main advantage is that it (supposedly) can emulate two GBC units at once for multiplayer GB/GBC games (i.e. Pokemon). If that doesn’t interest you, Gambatte has a better selection in the options menu, so I’d go with that.
Game Boy Advance: mGBA is supposedly the most accurate emulator of the group, and it also has options to emulate a solar sensor for Boktai, as well as the option to use a GBA bios file. gpSP and Meteor were designed for lower-end machines IIRC, so don’t use them unless you can’t get a game to run at full speed. VBA-M is in second place after mGBA, and VBA Next is a version of VBA-M that is designed to run on lesser hardware. However, keep in mind that VBA-M has been in development for longer than mGBA, and mGBA might have a few bugs here and there.
Game Music Emu: Supposedly this can play native music files from older console games, but I haven’t been able to get it to work.
Imageviewer: It views images. Maybe if you want to look at your screenshots without leaving Retroarch, you might like it. If not, use a regular photo viewer (unless you want to use the built in Windows 10 photo viewer. That’s nasty. Get XnView instead).
Lutro: I’m not sure if this supports regular LOVE games or not. If it does, that would be nice. If not, you’re selection of games is too limited.
Minecraft (Craft): A neat little tech demo, but it’s not much more than that.
MSX: I’ve personally had more sucess with blueMSX than I’ve had with fMSX. BlueMSX also (supposedly) works with the ColecoVision, but that didn’t work when I tried it a couple of months ago, and I haven’t tried since.
MULTI (MESS 2014 and UME 2014): MESS and MAME used to be separate projects, but they were combined in version 0.162. I’m not sure of the lastest version of Retroarch’s MAME comes with the MESS emulators, but even if it didn’t, I’d still recommend that you use the latest version of MAME.
Neo Geo Pocket/ Pocket Color: Mednafen NeoPop works just as well as standalone Mednafen. Standalone Mednafen doesn’t have a GUI. Retroarch does. The better option should be clear.
NES: As far as I can tell, Nestopia UE is the best. It has support for Famicom Disk System games, as well as the best option menu. It also seems to score the highest in emulation accuracy tests that I’ve seen. Failing that, FCEUmm is a close second.
Nintendo 64: I personally prefer Mupen64Plus to ParaLLEl. This is mainly due to the fact that I like my N64 games running at a higher internal resolution. However, if you want to play Goldeneye or Perfect Dark, there’s a Project 64 package somewhere on the internet that enables mouse controls. And Project 64 also seems to have better 64DD support than both Mupen64Plus and ParaLLEl.
Nintendo DS: IN my opinion, you’re better off using stand-alone DeSmuME or DeSmuME X432R. I also like to play the fan-translation of Fire Emblem 12, and that comes with a DeSmuME save file with extra content that doesn’t work with Retroarch’s DeSmuME.
Odyssey 2: This is the type of system that I would have no reason to download a standalone emulator to play it, so you might as well get O2EM on retroarch.
PC-Engine/ TurboGrafx-16/ PCE-CD/Supergrafx: Both the PCE core and SGX core can play PCE-CD games (something that wasn’t true just a few months ago, IIRC), so you might as well get the SGX core, in case you ever want to play any of the SIX Supergrafx exclusive titles. Maybe there’s a difference in emulation quailty for regular PCE games, but I haven’t seen an such examples yet.
PC-FX: I can’t get any PC-FX game to work with the current version of Retroarch. I knew that some of them worked in the past, but the fact that they don’t work now (for me, your results may vary) means that you should probably use Mednafen to emulate them. Fortunately, there were so few good games for this system (and even fewer for non-Japanese speakers) that you should be able to create a batch file each game you want to play for the system within a matter of minutes.
Playstation: Mednafen PSX is MUCH better than the standalone version, mainly due to PBP support , the addition of subpixel accuracy and increased internal resolution. I’d say it’s better than PCSX-R and ePSXe. I’d recommend the regular version Retroarch’s Mednafen PSX over Mednafen PSX HW, as the HW version is still a bit buggy. Once these bugs get cleaned up, I’d definitely recommend the HW version.
PSP: Stand Alone PPSSPP is faster and has better options. I also vaguely remember having problems with .cso versions of PSP games.
Quake 1: Retroarch’s TyrQuake doesn’t have KB+M support nor music support. I recommend DarkPlaces instead.
ScummVM: I keep Retroarch installed on my C: drive, and all of my roms, ScummVM games included on my E: drive. I can’t get Retroarch’s ScummVM to work with games on a different Drive.
Sega 8/16 bit systems. Unfortunately, you’ll need both Genesis Plus GX AND Picodrive. Genesis Plus GX doesn’t support 32X games, and Picodrive doesn’t support Game Gear Games.
Sega Saturn: Retroarch’s Saturn will often simply crash upon loading a game, so stand-alone Yabause is preferred. However, Retroarch’s addition of Mednafen Saturn has made things less clear. Mednafen Saturn is still pretty early in development, but it does seem to work rather well. I’d get Mednafen Saturn, and then try Yabause if a game doesn’t work (although many disc images found in the internet won’t work with any Saturn emulator).
SNES: Oh boy. bsnes is believed to be the most accurate SNES emulator. However there are many different versions of it. Since I have a beefy PC, I use bsnes-Mercury Accuracy. If you don’t’ want to use bsnes for whatever reason, I’d reccomend Snes9x instead.
Vectrex: Vecx works well. I haven’t tested a stand alone Vectrex emulator, so I could be wrong about that, but it looks like it runs well enough.
Virtual Boy: Retroarch’s Mednafen VB is miles and miles ahead of all the other Virtual boy emulators I’ve used. It’s even possible to get it to display in a 3D output with the right shader and a Google Cardboard headset and an Android. Plus, you can change the display color to a color other than a shade of red.
WonderSwan/ Color: Retroarch’s Mednafen Cygne is the only wonderswan emulator I’ve ever used, but it runs games at full speed.
ZX Spectrum: I just tried to play a z80 dump of Chuckie Egg, and it crashed immediately after loading the title screen. I’d stick with the standalone version of Fuse
ZX81: I’ve never used this core nor a standalone ZX81 emulator.
