/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10583218
Thing is, epsxe was first released in 2000. The latest version is from 2016, so the codebase has 16 years worth of hacks and fixes to make it work well with the most popular games. Duckstation follows a different philosophy and aims for accuracy with the original hardware instead so the kind of quick and easy fixes that epsxe employs is frowned upon. The end result is that epsxe is great for playing mainstream games while using very little resources but is sometimes not so great for playing more obscure titles. I tend to play mainstream titles, so epsxe's approach works well for me.

The exact same situation exists in the gameboy advance emulation community. VisualBoyAdvance (and VBA-M) works well with nearly all popular gb/gbc/gba games (e.g. pokemon, mario) but it employs lots of "ugly" shortcuts and workarounds to achieve this impressive level of compatibility. mGBA is more hardware-accurate but it achieves this at the cost of speed and compatibility.

When epsxe and vba were released, the 90s felt too recent to be worth preserving. People just wanted their games to play as well as possible on their old Pentium 4s. Now the original systems are old enough that people think they're worth preserving and our computers are beefy enough that sacrificing some performance is a suitable trade-off. And frankly, I think it's awesome that emulators like Duckstation and mGBA exist. But if you just want to play Pokemon Ruby or Final Fantasy and not some obscure game that only sold 400 copies in japan or you don't have loftier goals like historical preservation in mind then the old approach to emulation is perfectly fine (if not better).