The Best NES Emulator for Windows
If you want old-school NES nostalgia with HDTV quality and simplicity, an emulator can take you far. If you want the perfect NES experience, you’ll want to use the Nestopia UE core in RetroArch.
RetroArch (with Nestopia UE Core)
Platform : Windows / Mac / Linux Price : Free download page
Functions
- Plays games from the Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom Disk System as ROM.
- Play games with virtually any USB gamepad and customize button layouts
- Save and load your state anywhere in the game
- Rewind the game in real time
- Adjust many video settings, including shaders that add old-school effects or anti-aliasing to your graphics.
- Record walkthrough videos or record button presses to BSV file
- Play online with friends using Netplay
How to set it up
RetroArch is a little more complex than Install, File> Open. We’ve got a complete tutorial on how to use RetroArch , but here’s a quick guide to setting it up with Nestopia UE:
- Download the latest version of RetroArch from the download page . It comes as a 7z file, so you need to install 7-Zip to unpack it.
- Open the 7z archive and extract the files wherever you want (I recommend C: \ Program Files \ RetroArch).
- Double-click the RetroArch exe file to run it. You can navigate the interface using the arrow keys, pressing X to select or Z to return. It also supports multiple USB gamepads out of the box.
- To load an emulator into RetroArch, you need to install the emulator “kernel”. Go to Online Updater> Core Updater and scroll down to NES / Famicom (Nestopia UE). Select it to install the Nestopia UE kernel.
- Return to the main menu and select Upload Content> Choose File and Define Core. Select the ROM file on your hard drive to start playing.
You can also tweak a lot of video, audio, and gamepad settings , but this will get you started.
Where is it best
The biggest advantage of RetroArch is the sheer amount of customization. This can be overwhelming for some users, but it allows for a near-perfect NES emulation experience that other emulators cannot. With the right settings, you can get flawless graphics with cool shaders to bring back the old look of CRTs and minimize input lag (a serious problem for many emulators). I highly recommend taking the time to set up RetroArch as described in this forum post for the NES – it should give you a near-perfect experience.
Where it fails
RetroArch is pretty darn complicated and has almost no documentation (don’t worry, we’re working on our own tutorial). Installing kernels and tweaking settings is really confusing if you’re not familiar with RetroArch, and since there aren’t many tutorials on it, you’ll have to google a lot to figure it out, especially if you’re using it for more than one emulator. But it’s the only emulator we’ve found that can eliminate annoying screen tearing and play with the lowest input lag possible, which means it’s the best choice for NES gaming.
Competition
Nestopia and Nestopia UE can be downloaded as separate emulators and are fine if you don’t want to go through the hassle of setting up RetroArch. However, they have one glaring problem: you have to make Sophie’s choice between terribly slow input lag (with vsync enabled) or nasty screen tearing (with vsync disabled). RetroArch has something else that fixes this problem, so you can play with vsync without lag. If you don’t mind screen tearing, I recommend Nestopia with vsync disabled.
The popular FCEUX has many features, most of which are available from RetroArch. FCEUX allows you to tweak the emulation speed to make it faster or slower, which is a nice touch. It’s a little easier to use than RetroArch, but it has a very inaccurate color palette by default and has a crackling problem with vsync enabled. Because of this, we prefer other emulators on this list. RetroArch has an FCEUmm core that performs about as well as the Nestopia UE core, albeit with the same wrong colors as FCEUX. (You can correct colors using a .pal file, but Nestopia colors are accurate right out of the box.)
Jnes doesn’t have a ton of features, but it’s probably easiest to run right out of the box. It doesn’t have the horrible input lag with vsync enabled, and it has a one-click option for accurate color rendering (although it’s not enabled by default), so you can get a decent experience pretty quickly if you don’t want me or want other advanced features …
There are tons of other NES emulators out there (seriously, much more than you’d expect), but these are the most popular, and the vast majority of people should be easily covered by Jnes or RetroArch.