Emulator Compatibility Reference

What to Look for in an Emulator

Accuracy is how faithfully the emulator replicates the original hardware. High-accuracy emulators like bsnes and Mesen cycle-accurately replicate every CPU instruction, producing perfect audio and video — but they require more processing power. For casual play, a medium-accuracy emulator like Snes9x runs beautifully on any modern hardware.

Speed refers to how much CPU headroom the emulator needs. A "heavy" emulator may require a fast PC to run at full speed, while a "light" emulator runs on a Raspberry Pi or old laptop. Speed is especially important on mobile devices.

Save states and rewinding let you save and load progress at any point — a huge quality-of-life feature for retro games that had limited or no save functionality. Most modern emulators include this.

Shader support lets you apply CRT scanline filters, phosphor glow, and other retro display effects to make games look like they did on original hardware. RetroArch provides a unified shader library used across many emulator cores.

Netplay allows multiplayer over the internet as if you were on the same couch. Emulators like ZSNES pioneered this, and modern tools like Parsec complement emulators that lack built-in netplay.

Legal note: Emulators themselves are legal software. ROM files are a grey area — you technically need to own the original cartridge. Many classic games are available through official channels like Nintendo Switch Online, PlayStation Plus Classics, or GOG.