I know this is an old topic but it's one of particular interest to me...
I see a lot of hate for emulators, especially also with the resurgence of FPGA with mister and clone consoles.
But for me, I get a better experience with emulation than any other method... especially with retro systems.
In retroarch, I can get zero frame, yes ZERO, response time with my 8BitDO M30 controller in bluetooth mode and Genesis Plus GX and lookahead of 2 frames. Just one example.
It is easily tested by leaving all controls untouched and let the game come to standstill, then press P on keyboard to pause emulation, then press for example jump button on controller for the game and HOLD it down, and then press K on keyboard to advance one frame whilst game is paused, and you can see the action happen instantly, i.e no delay.
Even real hardware on CRT is slower than that!
Same applies for PC engine, Snes, GBA, and anything else 16 or 8 bit.
N64 and Saturn are problematic with lookahead, CPU aren't quite there yet, but on some games at 5GHZ I can get away with 1 frame look ahead on Beetle Saturn.
PS1 is fine, you can use lookahead, and upscale too! PS1 games can be made to look in a way that is downright incredible - all that horrible warping removed, and upscaling. N64 can be made to look beautiful as well, and even Saturn is getting there now with Kronos (but for compatibility use Mednafen/Beetle).
With Dreamcast and higher, almost all the current emulators are responsive enough and allow us to make the graphics in a way that we could only dream of on real hardware! PS2, Gamecube, all look incredible on emulation. AND we have save states! who cares about memory cards for gen 6 consoles and lower!
Since I started using RPCS3, I have never hooked my PS3 up again. Why would I? I can upscale everything to 4K (even though I'm on 1080 screen, that basically removes all aliasing), and make the games look like they never did even on my Sony HD TV.
The ONLY downside is when a game is incompatible, and that you need a PC setup powerful enough for the big emulators, especially RPCS3, you want a lot of cpu cores (preferably 8/16, but if you get something with higher than that you can have free CPU to do other things whilst RPCS3 is compiling game for first time and is using 100% of all 8 cores/16 threads). For Xenia you need a VERY strong graphics card.
For everything else, a 6 or even 4 core PC and an Nvidia 1660 is enough, to upscale and have perfect performance. Gamecube, PS2, OG Xbox, PS1, Sat, N64 etc etc all work great and are a delight to play.
Now to the bit that causes all the contention amongst "purists".. that emulators are not 100% accurate and the games don't look as intended when upscaling etc is used, I say who cares, I prefer it that way! And yes, some emulators and games may not be perfectly compatible, even if they are playable from start to finish.. I am talking about possibly a minor graphics glitch here or there, and this causes the purists to say that FPGA is better. I disagree, and with 16 and 8 bit systems, I do believe current emulation is 100% there. As in perfect.
With PS1 we are almost 100%, N64 with parallel is now close, Saturn with Mednafen is about 99.5%.
In a few years, we are going to have 7th generation at 100% as well and never look back, and PC's will be even more powerful by then..
This is how I see it: I have a cupboard with over 1400 games, and now they are all on an 8TB external SSD on my laptop. Everything. I don't need wires, hardware consoles/FPGA units and mods for LED screens, firmware updates and outdated UI for FPGA options, let alone the original consoles and expensive upscalers which cause problems of their own.
EMULATION RULES - simple as that! I love it so much! My laptop is a one box stop, and for PC gaming too!
PS - the negatives:
Xenia is pretty bad, there is massive audio latency that can't be fixed, dev has to fix it on emulator side, and it's the most unstable emulator of the "big consoles" by far, so the way I do it, for the only 35 physical Xbox 360 games I own, if the game has a PS3 version, I use it in RPCS3 at 4K and it's infinitely better than playing on a real 360 or Xenia. I do have a lot of Xbox live arcade games though, so for those, I keep my 360 hooked up. If you have a large library of XBOX 360 exclusives, I recommend sticking to your console and a HD TV with game mode, as Xenia is truly terrible and requires a ridiculously powerful GFX card and even then, upscaling is too much for even a 2080S to handle on most games. I presume a 3080 would handle it a bit better.
The only other exception is PSP.
PSP emulation has a lot of input lag and even though he's been working on it for so many years, there are still a lot of game compatibility issues. So for me, I DO prefer playing on my PSP just because of response time and the fact that my favourite AfterBurner game of all time works, which is PSP only (and broken on PPSSPP emulator). This is the only emulator I know of with such a bad lag issue.
