MAME vs Console Emulation

[acjgoblu]

I was wondering people's thoughts on emulation preferences for games released to the arcade but with good console ports. Mostly fighters are coming to my mind (think MKII on Genesis, Virtua Fighter on Saturn, etc), but also arcade sports games like NBA Jam and Blitz and even classic arcade games like Space Invaders (MAME vs Atari emulator). It would seem to me that, if you're going to build an arcade to play these games, that emulating them through MAME would be the more satisfying way to go.

Are there situations where it would be more advantageous to emulate through a console emulator? For instance, I have heard of many people mention that nothing but the best current PCs would be able to run Blitz 2000 on a MAME emulator. But even most basic systems can run an N64 emulator, so why not just run it through that? What are the main elements that you would be losing by doing so?

This is likely a super newbie question, and if it's been answered before, please just feel free to direct to that thread...thanks for the input!

[DudeRegular]

Blitz maybe on Dreamcast. Not much on the N64 will hold up vs an arcade version. Go take a look at MKII on Genesis or SNES and then look at it on MAME. It is a pretty big difference in my opinion. For the SNES/Genesis era the arcade version will be quite a bit better in most cases in my opinion. There were some decent ports of titles in the dreamcast PS2 era, but its just not the same to me. I personally just choose not to run a title on my cab that doesn't run well on an arcade platform rather than mess with a console game. I will probably bust out a gamepad and sit at my pc to run a console game.

[Frank Drebin]

The more I play my cabinet the more I feel the same way about console games.   They just don't work right on a cab but I do like to have SNES and Genesis available for nostalgia reasons, a lot of guests I have are my age and grew up with those consoles so its nice to play a game even if it means standing up with a controller in my hand. 

PC games are a different story.  A lot of them work great with arcade controls.

[vwalbridge]

Blitz maybe on Dreamcast. Not much on the N64 will hold up vs an arcade version. Go take a look at MKII on Genesis or SNES and then look at it on MAME. It is a pretty big difference in my opinion. For the SNES/Genesis era the arcade version will be quite a bit better in most cases in my opinion. There were some decent ports of titles in the dreamcast PS2 era, but its just not the same to me. I personally just choose not to run a title on my cab that doesn't run well on an arcade platform rather than mess with a console game. I will probably bust out a gamepad and sit at my pc to run a console game.

+1 on all of this.


99 out of 100 times the arcade version of a game is going to be the superior version. After all, they are called PORTS for a reason. Now some ports are better than others but you can't beat the "cab-friendly" aspect of a mame version.


I don't want to hijack your thread getting into a debate about what platform had the better version of a game. However, I understand your question about some ports playing better on a console emulator on older PC hardware.

Off the top of my head, here are a couple console ports better than their arcade version:

Contra on NES

Puch Out on NES

Ninja Gaiden on NES

Battletoads on NES

(It's funny because one could argure the above are not even ports because they are so vastly different from their respective platforms. Ninja Gaiden for example might as well be a totally different game on the NES)

[haynor666]

Atomic Runner (Chelnov) got better port on Genesis.

Besides any game from Naomi cannot be played in mame so either use real Dreamcast (many games has very faithfull port, almost identical) on use DEmul. The same goes to ST-V (playable but in most cases too slow and with bugs), either use real console (just like Dreamcast, ports are very faithfull) or SSF.