Which Emulator?

[Dogface]

I'm just getting into this and was wondering what, if any, are the benefits to some of the other emulators out there as opposed to MAME.  Raine, Daphne, etc.  I don't know if these are just different emus that do the same thing or if they are written for specific things.

[TalkingOctopus]

Nebula and Kawaks emulate neogeo and cps emulation and are run much faster on a slower machine (like a pentium II).

[Sephroth57]

and daphne is for laser disc games, dragons lair & space ace in particular.  with arcade emu MAME is the only thing youll need, choosing a front end is the part youll need to figure out on your own. they are all made for different purposes. if youre just playing on a normal PC not in a cabinet i find MAME32 is fine

[Dogface]

I would eventually like to build a cab so I take it most people use DOS MAME with a frontend?

[Tiger-Heli]

I'm just getting into this and was wondering what, if any, are the benefits to some of the other emulators out there as opposed to MAME.  Raine, Daphne, etc.  I don't know if these are just different emus that do the same thing or if they are written for specific things.

Ok, where do I start with this - in some cases these emulators will do different things, in some case, they run better on slower computers, in some cases, they just were developed separately.

Daphne is for laser disc games - Space Ace and Dragon's Lair, but also Cobra Command, and I think Firefox.

MAME is for arcade games - but there are also Nebula, Kawaks, RAINE, System16, Final Burn, Modeler, Vivo Nonno, and Zinc.  In general these play the same types of games, however, some of them might play a few games that aren't in MAME, and some are better on slower systems.  Historical note: there used to be a lot more Emulators (stand alone emu's for Space Invaders, Shark for Flying Shark, Tiger-Heli, etc.), but most of these have been swallowed up by MAME.  One thing worth noting is that MAME is not really about playing the games, but about re-creating how the original game worked (there is a subtle difference).  What this means in reality is that MAME does not use shortcuts (graphic calls, mainly) that would speed up emulation at the expense of accuracy, so it tends to be slower and want faster hardware than other emu's.

There are also emulators for the console systems - I am just starting to investigate this myself -

MESS - the MAME of console emulation.

Z26 - for the ATARI 2600

Gens - for the sega Genesis

Nesticle or VirtualNES for the original Nintendo (Famicon).

ZSNES for the Super Nintendo

There are also PlayStation, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and other emulators, but I am not familiar with them.

And for the Nintendo 64, there is Project 64, 1964, Daedalus, Uhle 2064, and Nemu.

One neat trick I've found lately is that most of the arcade games that are terribly slow in MAME had ports for the N64.  So while California Speed will need a 4 Ghz P4 in MAME (in a couple of versions, when they get it loaded, I can play it on a Duron 850 in Project 64.  Same goes for Hydro Thunder, Cruisin' series, Blitz series, NBA Jam, NBA Max hangtime, SF Rush, etc.

[TalkingOctopus]

I would eventually like to build a cab so I take it most people use DOS MAME with a frontend?

Actually, I think that most people probably use windows with a frontend.  There are many excellent frontends available for windows and there are only a few for dos.

[Sephroth57]

i use MAME32 on my PC and i plan on using windows MAME with arcade FX frontend

[Jakobud]

I would eventually like to build a cab so I take it most people use DOS MAME with a frontend?

Nope Windows is more common.  DOS is only good for old computers (Pentium and 'maybe PII's).

[Howard_Casto]

as of this writing these are the emulators you need to play every avialable ARCADE game.  


mame:  it'll run pretty much everything

daphne:  it'll run the ld games

vivanono: a very glitchy and cumbersome emu, but at this point it's the only way to play the ridge racer series

zinc:  The namco games are emulated in mame, but the capcom ones still need work... also you'll get a decent framerate in zinc while mame is slow as dirt.  

All other arcade emulators can be ignored.  That is unless you have a really crappy pc in which case you might need:  

u64:  For Killer Instinct and KI2

nebula:  For Neogeo/Capcom games

Mame emulates these three systems, but realitively slower.  Only use these emulators as a last resort.  

If I didn't mention an emulator then don't worry about it, it's either horribly outdated, too glitchy to worry about, or badly suited for a mame cab due to a mouse-only gui, ect.