Recommended Emulators

Welcome friends, to the world of the games of Yesteryear! There are many programs to play your old games, known as Emulators, each with their own features. However, not all are created equally, and over the years I've tried quite a few of them for myself. This below is my opinionated list for which emulators I personally use for each system.

If you want a more up to date and comprehensive list, then the Emulation Wiki has a lot of great pages with comparisons between programs.

Multi-System Emulators

• All of them programs I've described below are mainly targeted towards Desktop computers. If you're playing on a Steam Deck (or other controller-focused device), then these might not be the best choice, as they're more mouse focused. Many products instead use a suite called Retroarch (or a version of it) to play their games. Retroarch itself isn't an emulator, it's a frontend program which installs other emulators as plugins to play. This is nice, as it's an all-in-one stop for all your emulation needs. However, I personally don't use it as I hate their UI. It tries to be a jack of all trades to support everything under the sun, but that makes everything overly complicated to use.
• tl;dr - Use Retroarch/Emudeck/EmulationStation/whatever if you can only control via a controller. Otherwise, use one of the below.
• If you're on Mac, OpenEmu does something similar to Retroarch but has a fantastic UI. You can just run OpenEmu alone and have everything you could need, but as I said, it's Mac-only.
• For Windows/Linux, there's also Ares, which supports many different systems, and is cutting edge on several of them. Their UI can be a bit clunky to use, but I would still recommend it over Retroarch if you want a single program.

Nintendo Consoles

• NES - There are many, many NES emulators out there, with Ares having a solid example if you don't wish to install other programs. However, if you want one with a few more features, I've found puNES to have a really good UI. If you want to do hacking stuff then fceux has better debug support.
• SNES - Ares shares a history with bsnes, which has been one of, if not the best SNES emulator for a while. Either work well, but there is also a bsnes fork called bsnes-hd, which adds support for higher resolution and widescreen Mode 7 graphics (that pseudo-3D effect in F-Zero, Super Mario Kart, Pilotwings, etc). There is even a Super Mario World hack that runs the whole game in widescreen, but only for this emulator
• N64 - N64 emulation has really taken off in recent years, with RMG being my personal favorite. Ares also has an N64 core, which emulates games well but runs really heavy.
• GC and Wii - Dolphin is the only real emulator, and arguably one of the best developed emulators around.
• Wii U - Cemu is likewise the only real Wii U option, and it is a solid emulator, especially since they added Vulkan support. They added an official Linux version as well, but while it runs well for Wii U games, many have Switch ports that run better on those emulators.
• Switch - Now that Nintendo took down Yuzu, Ryujinx is the only top-tier Switch emulator remaining. You can still find the final release of Yuzu floating around, which will work alright, but aren't likely to support newer releases.

Nintendo Handhelds

• GB/GBC - Again, there are many options of varying quality (cough). Ares has a solid emulator, but if you want to branch out one of the best in class is Sameboy. If you're interested in debugging stuff, then BGB is the best option (Windows only, but runs well under Wine).
• SGB - A somewhat lesser known Game Boy product is the Super Game Boy, an add-on to the Super Nintendo. It allowed you to play your Game Boy games on your TV via your SNES, and with the power of its hardware offered some extra features, such as a border to fit the remaining screenspace and additional color support. Sameboy is the easiest emulator to get SGB content working, but Ares supports it as well, and since it can emulate a SNES it's arguably more accurate. To play SGB game on Ares though requires you first to load a SGB ROM file in SNES mode, then a prompt will appear asking to pick your Game Boy game, which makes it somewhat of a hidden feature.
• GBA - mGBA has GameCube support with Dolphin, and consistently adds new features, I like it.
• DS - DeSmuMeis adding new stuff again, but I've switched to using MelonDS which, while it has slowed down a bit, has lots of cool new stuff such as DSi support.
• 3DS - Like Yuzu, the previous gold standard of Citra was taken down by Nintendo. There are a number of forks that have continued development, with Lime3DS being my vote for the best successor. However, since Citra was pretty complete when it was taken down, you can also try to scour the internet archive to find the newest release of it which should work about the same.

Sega

• Sega Genesis / Mega Drive - The accepted best choice is Genesis Plus GX, which is only available as part of Retroarch, but does have a widescreen fork that works well for some games. The best standalone emulator is then BlastEm or one of the CD/32X emulators below.
• Sega CD & 32X - In recent years, Ares has become my preferred Sega CD/32X emulator, mainly due to the plethora of features it has, as well as support for .chd files. For many years I also used Kega Fusion, which hasn't been updated in about a decade, but was so far ahead of its time that it's still not the worst choice today.
• Sega Saturn - The Saturn has a reputation for being difficult to emulate, so its options are surprisingly slim. The best in my opinion is Mednaffen, which is the only Saturn emulator I found usable. It's actually pretty dang good, although I do strongly recommend installing its companion software Mednaffe so you can control it with a frontend GUI.
• Dreamcast - There are a few options here, but my favorite is Flycast. It has a bit of an odd UI, but other than that it's really nice to use.

Sony

• PS1 - I used to use Mednaffen's PS1 emulator, and if you're using it a lot for other things I would still recommend it. However, Duckstation has a really nice UI and QoL features that sets it apart from all the others.
• PS2 - PCSX2 is really the only option. They very recently redid their whole UI, so it should help with an already stellar emulator.
• PS3 - Similarly, RPCS3 is the only real option. PS3 emulation is young, but it's much better than you think it would be.
• PSP - PPSSPP is also the only option, but it has been excellent for years, with a really nice UI as well.

Microsoft

• Xbox - I played about five minutes of Jet Set Radio Future on Xemu and it ran well, which is more than I can say for the others.
• Xbox 360 - Xenia is a surprisingly capable Xbox 360 emulator. It's still recommended to run the canary version for now. While it is possible to compile it for Linux, I've had better luck running the Windows version in Wine.

Others

• WonderSwan/Color - Either Ares or Mednaffen (both mentioned above) are the best emulators for this.
• TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine - Again, either Ares or Mednaffen will be your best bet.
• Neo Geo Pocket/Color - You guessed it, either Ares or Mednaffen.
• Atari 2600 - Stella has been the gold standard for 2600 emulation for many years, although a few other multi-console emulators have decent support too.