While it’s good that there is options to choose from I think too many of the same system can be too much.
I think a lot of users is confused with all alternatives and what the differences are, just take the NES for example and most of the time it all boils down to how accurate the emulators are.
We got Nestopia, FCEUmm, bnes, QuickNES and now Mesen, that’s 5 different NES emulators as of today.
If you’re like a user like me that have been around emulation since 1999 and is familiar with most emulators and know about accuracy then you wouldn’t be confused and the choices would be easy.
I’m in for accuracy so Nestopia is good for RetroPie on my Raspberry Pi and Mesen is good for my desktop PC since these two are the highest ranked in terms of accuracy.
However if you are an inexperienced user that haven’t been around much and isn’t familiar with these emulators then you probably would have picked bnes since you might probably think it’s the best and why wouldn’t it be since you might have heard that bsnes is the highest ranked accurate SNES emulator after all.
I think the Libretro team should start label the cores in terms of accuracy so users have a reasonable fair chance knowing what they are trying to run.
Cycle, High, Mid and Low is enough to label them with.
Nestopia (Cycle accurate), FCEUmm (Mid accurate), bnes (Mid accurate), QuickNES (Low accurate), Mesen (Cycle accurate)
There, I labeled them based off accuracy tests and grading and now users would have known what to expect from these emulators.
What do you guys think of labeling emulators based off how accurate they are?