Windows 7 and emulator compatibility

[juksu]

Hi.

I'm not sure what operating system I would put in my mame cab. Most of console emulators are made to XP, so do they work in windows 7 64bit and does it have to be the Pro version which has XP emulation called "XP Mode"?
So lets collect here what emulators work, do you have to use XP mode and do you use 32 or 64 bit windows.

[nick3092]

I use windows 7, 64 bit with no issues in my cab. I have pro, but I am not using the xp emulation/virtual machine. Off the top of my head I've used:

MAME (64 bit compiled myself)
MESS (64 bit compiled myself)
Zsnes
Daphne
Fusion
Nestopia/FCEUX
Visual Pinball
Project 64
NullDC

And a few I'm forgetting. A while ago some one ran some benchmarks on MAME and it performed better on several games in a 64 bit environment over 32 bit.

Sorry for typos. I'm using my iPhone, and it doesn't play nice for posting.

[Endaar]

There's absolutely no reason to use XP mode. You are literally emulating another PC that runs XP; it runs a full XP installation inside of a VirtualPC session, and will slow things down considerably.

The general consensus is that x64 builds of MAME are faster than their 32-bit counterparts. Since x64 driver support for XP is rather lacking, Vista or 7 x64 are your best bets. I'm running Vista x64 without any problems, but if I was starting from scratch now, I'd use 7. I haven't come across any emulators that won't run on x64.

Endaar

[juksu]

Thaks. That's a big list allready. Has anyone tried Dolphin, ePSXe and PCSX2?

[jimmy2x2x]

Dolphin and PCSX2 work great

The only ones that will give you any trouble are relics and have been superseded by newer more capable emulators.

[nick3092]

ePSXe works. As does PCSX2. Those were 2 I forgot on my list. I haven't used them extensively, but I've booted several games on them with no issues.