What are your Emus of choice?

GreenHawk84

Hello, just curious on what everyone uses on their Retropie and why.

I like Mame2003 for only a handful of games such as Mortal Kombat series/Rampage World Tour/NBA Jam (all Midway).

I like FBAlpha for most everything: Capcom CPS games (Street Fighter), Sega System (Golden Axe), 80's vertical games (Pacman), Neo Geo games (Metal Slug), Konami (TMNT), many of the various shmups as well.

Mame2010 is used for a couple problematic ROMs: Tapper, Battletoads arcade.

This is off the top of my head so I may have missed something. But these are the 3 emulators I use for Arcade.

What do you like to use for the crazy Arcade category and why?

rbaker

@greenhawk84 Ever since I read this...

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/1035/how-to-make-vector-arcade-games-look-their-best

By @caver01 I use adv mame for these vector games. The level of customisation that you can achieve is mind boggling once you start

pjft

I also run AdvMame for games that are too slow on MAME 2003 or lr-fbalpha. Golden Axe 3, Bubble Symphony, Bonanza Bros and Crack Down from SEGA.

caver01

@greenhawk84 I use Arcade for ROMs and my default emulator is lr-mame2003. I have not yet gone all-in like you have with FBA as my majority default. One reason is mainly because of the ease of remapping I get out of the TAB menu in MAME. My system is a 4 player cocktail design which allows me to play 2 player vertical games from the players 3 and 4 positions on the short sides. This means full screen vertical gaming (which is basically 'tate' mode, although I don't enable that) and setting the cocktail DIP switch for almost all of the classics so the screen flips around for player 2. It may have changed, but I don't get the same cocktail mode flexibility with FBA, and I certainly can't remap controls when using it as easily. I have to build special per-ROM .cfg files to remap vertical games I try to use in FBA.

I do, however, use FBA for everything I know about for horizontal games. That seems to be mostly fighters and NeoGeo, but I admit I don't have a full account of what I am maybe missing by using MAME for FBA capable ROMs.

I also like lr-mame2003 for its analog support. My box has a trackball and two spinners, so splitting x/y for games like Blasteroids, racing games, and a personal one for me: Off The Wall (Sente) is perfect in 2003. AdvanceMAME used to be King when it came to analog, but 2003 is really making strides with new core options.

I think I am running a couple games with lr-mame2010 that don't run in 2003, as I like the libretro cores for the CRT-PI shader over AdvanceMAME, but for all vector games, it does not make sense to use anything but AdvanceMAME 3.x. Vector requires no shaders (although you can do some triads to make a color vector shadow mask look more authentic) so using AdvanceMAME and missing the shaders is a good option. Making fine, crisp vector lines looks way better on high resolution displays than any of the libretro options, especially since you can tweak transparency, flicker, intensity, etc.. There is an open issue in the libretro github repo for 2003 that could get some love someday and make me switch, but for now, libretro is stuck at 640x480 for vector which looks horrible unless maybe you are on a minty-pi.

Anyway, that's my answer.

GreenHawk84

@pjft is there an Arcade version of Golden Axe III? I always thought that was a Japanese Sega Mega Drive exclusive. I play that Sega ROM on the GX emulator.

GreenHawk84

I use lr-genesis-plus-gx for Sega Genesis. I noticed it was smoother when the default emulator revealed choppy motion in Sonic games. Not sure if that has been corrected but GX seems to be the best for MegaDrive/Genesis on Pi3.

pjft

@greenhawk84 you're absolutely right, apologies for the mistake. It's actually technically 4: The Revenge of Death Adder.

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/golden-axe-revenge-of-death-adder/