Apples and oranges??

[Shieldwolf]

I was just wondering how do you tell which emulator is the better? I used to use final burn and callus raine and all sorts of other emulators, but I've never found a a site that describes why I should use this emulator over another. I'm sure it breaks down to preference, but I would like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

[crashdmj]

emuxhaven.com (i think) provided a good opinion as well as zophar domain. Unless my memory is shotty.
Derek

[Howard_Casto]

i had a review up here at one time but it's badly outdated.....

gamelauncher is basically for a nice, clean, simple fe....

Aos is for dos users that have an arcade monitor

emuloader is for people that don't care that their fe looks "windowsy" and wants to be able to configue game settings withint he fe.  (and much much more in terms of configuration)  

mamewah, and all of the gdi (read no hardware acceleration) fes are for setups running windows that want a lot of options, both graphically and configuration wise with moderate ease of setup.  


DK, EmuTron, and 3DArcade are for the "big boys"

This is not to say they are better, but they will require a slightly beefier pc and are noticably more difficult to setup than the rest.  

They are not for beginners (unless they are VERY dedicated), but the reward is a fe with far more options and prettier graphics.  Also all 3 will take advantage of your computer's video hardware, which may or may not mean anything.    What it usually means is you need a decent video card to run them well.

EmuTron can do more than any other 2d fe graphically speaking.  It uses a scripting language, so you can do a TON of stuff, but you have to figure out how to "code" your options for now.   It's hard to setup but that's the price you pay for all of those options.  


Dragon King Is mine (so I'm baised and you can ignore this section if you wish)  

Right now it's in the very early stages, but I hope for it to become the 2d version of 3darcade.  You will find the configuration files to be moderately hard at first, but as they are well commented it's easy to find stuff once you get used to the files you need to edit.  It doesn't have as much "event driven" graphical freedom as emutron, but  it's much easier to make skins for (at least currently, pacmanfan tells me he is working on some cool tools to help users out.)  Dk supports better filtering options and multi-emulator support than emutron for now, but I dont' know how much longer I can make that claim at this rate.  

3dArcade is in a class all by itself and is totally different than all the others.
3dArcade is also hard to setup, but your reward is the only 3d front end of the bunch.  If you want flashy then you can't go wrong.  It also has a 2d front end (what used to be called emulaxian) included so it is practical as well.  


Hope that puts everything into perspective.  Again these are just my opinions, but those who have used all of these fes would probably give you similar comments.  

[Shieldwolf]

lol, I was actually just talking about emulators and not front ends, but I will thank you again for all the Im help you gave me last week. Your FE works like a charm now.

Now that we have opened pandoras box. I want a front end that will show you one emulator then all you do is push a button on your joystick and now its the same menu, but new emulator and roms are listed. Am I dreaming can you do this? and make it pretty?

[Howard_Casto]

lol, I was actually just talking about emulators and not front ends, but I will thank you again for all the Im help you gave me last week. Your FE works like a charm now.

Now that we have opened pandoras box. I want a front end that will show you one emulator then all you do is push a button on your joystick and now its the same menu, but new emulator and roms are listed. Am I dreaming can you do this? and make it pretty?

doh read that wrong sorry....  

In response to your original question....  Everybody uses mame.  If a game runs on mame then you generally don't bother with other emus that run the same game.  The only time you do is if :

A.  The games of that emulator are exclusvie to it and thus mame can't do it.  

B.  Mame plays said games waaay too slow on your system and thus you need to use an alternate method.  

Mame always has more accurate emulation, so you try it first.  The others are a last resort.  Hope that helps.


In response you your other question nearly all of the fes I mentioned will do what you ask.  A common way of making seperate lists is to sort by emulator.