The BEST Emulators of 2023

so we are fast approaching the end of 2023 and today on the Channel I want to do something a little bit different we're going to talk about the best emulators I've used this year there's certainly been some huge advancements in emulation and we've covered some of them over the year but with handhelds like the steam deck becoming so popular for emulation I wanted to give you my take on the ones that I've been playing and of course I'll leave links to all the various emulators in the description below if you use any of these please consider supporting the emulation authors via their respective patreon pages and donations they've set up these guys are the true saviors of video game preservation make no mistake and without emulation it would be a much different world to live in and let me tell you one that I wouldn't be a huge fan of so let's go ahead and Jump Right In take a look at the best emulators I've used in 2023 and my recommendations but first a quick word from today's sponsor 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description below to get a free oneyear supply of AG vitamin D3 plus K2 2 plus 5 ag1 travel packs with your first purchase of ag1 once again big thank you to ag1 for sponsoring today's episode okay so we have to talk about rpcs3 which is the multiplatform open-source Sunni PlayStation 3 emulator written in C++ for Windows Linux Mac OS and this thing is an absolute monster emulator I think rpcs3 is the most impressive emulator that I have been messing around with over the last couple of years its compatibility continues to improve I think the last time I talked about rpcs3 was in the middle of the year and we were looking at maybe about 67% of all games as playable and every time I go back and look at the compatibility list that playable list always improves now it doesn't improve significantly but there's always some type of fixes that are in place that just unlock lots more games to be playable so right now we're sitting at about 68% of all PlayStation 3 games as playable and what we mean by that is playable without any game breaking glitches that can be completed from start to finish now of course emulating the PlayStation 3 is very very complicated and we've talked about this on the channel over the years it's something that really has no business being emulated yet here we are and rpcs3 now is at the point where it is a serious emulator that a lot of people are looking at to get their fix of PlayStation 3 games now to be completely honest if you want to run the best you need a pretty beefy PC to get good performance but don't let that discourage you because even with a mid-spec PC and without any type of resolution upscaling and just kind of leaving things stock you can still get good levels of performance with many many games but the great thing about rpcs3 is that it will scale to your system so if you have a high-end gaming PC then you do have the ability to start unlocking frame rates and getting games that were never meant to run at 60 frames per second running at a smooth 60fps games such as Grand Theft Auto 5 I mean playing it at 60 FPS is absolutely transformative here and having these games running at 4K such as metal GE Solid 4 which technically is still a game that is not in the playable category you do need to run some patches uh to get this game running at with some stability in mind but overall having these games running and looking better is really just amazing to see and we are talking about the PS3 of course and there's been so many rumors and things about PlayStation 3 backward compatibility and whatnot look I've said this so many times before PlayStation 3 back compatibility on current PlayStation 5 hardware and Beyond doesn't seem likely to me that it will it will ever happen I do feel strongly that the only way we're ever going to play PS3 games going forward is via emulation you can run PlayStation 3 games on the steam deck but just know that you're not going to get the best level of performance it will work for many of the smaller games such as Demon Souls and Puppeteer and you know games that don't rely heavily on the spus which is the kind of custom co-processors that are found in the PlayStation 3 but you're not going to be able to run something like Metal Gear Solid 4 on your steam Deck with any level of performance that is considered acceptable now the last thing I want to say is if you want to get behind one emulator if you want to donate or jump on a patreon for just one of these emulators that I'm talking about today I think I think rpcs3 is the one that you want to throw your money on because this is the most important emulator that is being developed right now the PlayStation 3 is just such a closed environment it's tied to a power PC cell-based architecture that there's really a not an easy way to get that off of that Hardware onto you know modern consoles the PlayStation 5 doesn't seem like it's ever going to get PlayStation 3 back with compatibility and Beyond and I think this is really going to be the savior of PlayStation 3 preservation if you want to play games that are locked on the PS3 and you don't have the hardware or the games themselves are too expensive then rpcs3 is definitely in the move I will leave a link to it in the description below and check it out for yourself I think if there's one emulator that has has really seen some significant performance updates in 2023 it has to be pcsx2 the Playstation 2 emulator now pcsx2 has been around for a very long time and it has a good reputation and it's always had a good level of compatibility but let's go ahead and look at the the latest compatibility data here you can see that 97.92% of all PlayStation 2 games are considered playable and 1.23% of those are perfect so if you can combine those were at over 99% compatibility with only a very small handful of games considered to be either ingame or getting to the menus no games are not playable or don't boot up so this is significant now some other really interesting things about pcx2 is that it's had some really big Updates this year for example the Vulcan renderer backend has been implemented Mac OS has the metal renderer back end there's also the change of the user interface that went from just an existing type of uh Windows 32 you know UI to the QT interface which is really cool and what I love about the new pc sex2 and I'm talking about the PC version here is that you can simply adjust things on the fly so once again like Duck station you have the ability to just tweak the settings to the way that you want to and the one that I really love to kind of mess around with there's two that I really like to to play around with the first one is the internal resolution upscale and you can see here we're running at 4K internal resolution upscale and games just run Rock Solid on my PC here and the other option that I really kind of play around with are the widescreen hacks sometimes you can get some really interesting and great effects from the widescreen hacks as well and it was only a few years ago I feel like the emulator was getting a bit of a reputation for not being the most accurate not being the most compatible but there's been some serious work to update download this emulator with confidence and if you have a beefy enough PC where you can bump up the internal resolution scale then I definitely recommend you do that because some of these games look so much better than what they originally look like and this is one of the great things about emulation for me where it transforms these games into something that it was really never meant for it was never meant to to look like this but it transforms the games in a really great way so the last thing about this I want to talk about is steam deck compatibility it runs great on the steam deck so if you do have a steam deck and you want to take your Playstation 2 games on the go with you then look no further than PCS X2 it's an absolute beast and credit to the pcsx2 development team for really stepping up and continuing to bring us some some quality features to this emulator now the next emulator that I definitely want to talk about as one of my picks of 2023 and one that I've been using quite a lot is xmu when we talk about original Xbox emulation it really got a late start when you compare it to something like PC s X2 PlayStation 2 emulation and there was CX BR reloaded which is still in development and is still a fine emulator but I think it's fair to say that xmu has really overtaken it as the number one Premier Xbox emulator original Xbox emulator in recent times some of the improvements that I've seen over the last 12 months have really been significant for example I remember trying to play outrun to Coast to Coast or 2006 coasta Coast about 12 months ago and I was never able to get performance that look like this we're talking a very very smooth 60 frames per second here and this was a game that always had issues running at a good frame rate so that's just one example but overall original Xbox emulation while there is still a lot of work to do xmu is certainly the one that I recommend it also allows you to set up the emulation as a development kit so with a debug Xbox bios and a Xbox debug dashboard as a hard drive image with the networking capabilities you can effectively turn this into a development kit and write code and write Homebrew on it without even having to own any original Xbox Hardware at all and that's really awesome it also means that it works with the Insignia Xbox Live replacement so there are people out there that are running xmu and Insignia together without the necessary Hardware but most of all the coolest feature for me of xmu is the built-in resolution scaling and this is something that a lot of of the emulators that I'm talking about in today's video have but xmu allows you to significantly enhance the visuals and take a look at this Halo Graphics here from Halo 1 we're running at at 6X internal resolution scaling so we're talking a significant enhancement in terms of internal resolution scaling I mean there are going to be artifacts as you can see some of the texturing has the kind of texture edges that are quite noticeable but this is an absolutely stunning image and I'm not getting any slowdowns here at all so definitely recommend xmu and for those people that do have a steam deck and are interested in knowing how original Xbox runs on the steam deck well it runs really really well I'm certainly I mean you're certainly not going to be getting 6X internal resolution scale but you you can you can bump it up to 2 3x and get a really good experience and for me if you own a steam deck xmu is an absolute must so look I'm very excited about the future of original Xbox emulation xmu is definitely the pick of the bunch for me and I can't wait to see where we go from here I mean I'm expecting compatibility to improve over time but overall I definitely do recommend xmu and it's one of the emulators that I've been using a lot this year and definitely one that I recommend that you guys should check out now we can't talk about 2023 emulation without talking about the Nintendo switch and Yuzu the very popular switch emulator has seen some significant enhancements in 2023 I think the biggest one is the introduction of the Android support which is gone from strength to strength now I don't have a modern Android device but I have heard that the Android build Yu the Nintendo switch emulation is seeing rapid enhancements and improvements pretty much with every single iteration and I think when you basically see Day One releases for the switch immediately run on Yuzu without any type of updates required you know that you've got something really special here and I think a lot of people are using Yuzu and the thing that that I really love about the emulation itself is that it's scalable very very nicely you can have a high-end PC and you can run switch games and make them look better you can make them run at 4K with unlock frame ratees so they look it's just so superb I mean take a look at this this capture here I'm running Hollow night at 4K and you can see just how beautiful this game looks links Awakening looks absolutely incredible at 4K here on my system but even if you have a steam deck you'll get a very good level of performance I know a lot of people out there are running switch emulation on their steam deck and they're having a great experience and even those with Android devices are now starting to get some really good levels of performance there is a lot of iteration going on with this emulator it seems like every day or every other day there is a new drop of the emulator and I will say for those people there are two versions of the emulator that you can download there is the free version and there's also the the patreon version which is kind of locked behind a patreon uh you know payall that will give you access to the Early Access builds but I think eventually those Early Access builds will make their way to the free version so for all intents and purposes it doesn't really make too much difference which one you download first I think the only real difference would be is if you're expecting some fixes to come for a game that's just come out then you want to jump on the Early Access version and grab that version but eventually all those updates will see themselves getting kind of merged over over to the the free version which is what a lot of people actually use but if you look at the last whole months the progress reports that are on the Yuzu website the blog page you can see there's a lot of work that's being done with fixing GPU there's also improvements that have been made there's also been a lot of work being put into General stability issues but overall it's really about getting an accurate representation of the switch on another device and once again just like all the other emulators that we've covered on this episode It's All About improving the experience improving things to make them run better and I think if you do have a powerful enough system where you can boost your resolution internally and basically you know have a good experience then you know these games themselves start to be become more transformative over time now there are some other people out there that may be asking them M themselves or mvg why aren't you talking about Ryu Jinx which is another Nintendo switch emulator which to be completely honest sits side by side next to Yuzu I think really it it's it's a coin toss I think both of them are excellent emulators in their own right and they both work extremely well and really the difference for me is that Android version the development team is starting to Branch out and bring the emulator to different hardware systems and that is a really cool thing of course both Yuzu and Ryu Jinx are open source and look if you want to get a fantastic Nintendo switch experience pretty much anywhere on a high-end PC on a potato on a steam deck on an Android device then Yuzu is definitely the emulator that you want to check out just know that look everything that's come out this year all the kind of the the new release games have run on USU pretty much since day one and that is a testament to the work that's being done on the emulation and I don't see really any signs of this emulator slowing down it's an absolute Masterpiece check out Uzu and if you have a beefy enough system crank up those resolutions uncap those frame rates and you will have a amazing experience I guarantee you now if there's one emulator that has seen significant compatibility Updates this year one that kind of stands out from pretty much everything else it's the PlayStation VA emulator known as vaita 3K now VA 3K is basically a PlayStation V emulator that has been around for a long long time and it was considered experimental for many years and it still technically is but we're starting to see some really great strides with compatibility now I covered this emulator back in June of this year so not even 6 months ago really or just around 6 months ago and it was a total of if you look at this video here 641 playable games the green column which is games that can be played from start to finish with playable performance and no gamebreaking glitches now I just checked the website just a few moments ago and that number has now increased to 1136 so you can really get a sense for the work that's being put into the PlayStation VA emulation and now we're starting to see games really start to become a lot more playable now as a great example of this check out Wipeout when I was running it back in June on the same PC that you're going to see here shortly you can see that while it runs it doesn't run at any decent level of performance now if we go back and run it again with the modern update or with the latest update I should say we're getting a locked 30 frames per second and this is the kind of improvements that I'm slowly starting to see with VA 3K now I think that this emulator for me is the one that shows the most Pro us where we're starting to really kind of break those barriers of the vaita emulation which has really been very difficult to crack for many many years but we're seeing greatly improved compatibility with games and this list really can't keep up because there are updates to VA 3K being done almost every single day so even the kind of development authors kind of encourage you to go back and retest everything so I've been actually going back and retest testing a lot of these VA games and I'm seeing a lot of improvements uh you know just with the games that I've been testing and this is really really awesome to see the the frame rate increases the improvements there's also two different backends you can pick from there's the openg GL and the Vulcan renderer you can also do internal resolution upscaling just like all modern emulators these days I think internal resolution upscaling is like a given you know when it comes to Modern emulation and even these games now that never ran at 60 frames per second are slowly starting to hit that Mark another Improvement that I've noticed is that playing street fight across Tekken now displays the fiall graphic where in the June version when I was testing previously did not and look and it's these types of improvements that really make this emulator very very impressive now of course there is still a lot of heavy hitter PlayStation VA games that still are struggling running under VA 3K the biggest one is tear away which I know is a game that a lot of people are expecting to be playable on VA 3K there's really no real update to report at this time but going back and running kind of through my list of V games that I was testing out earlier this year I am very very impressed with VA 3K I think you know if we are giving awards out this year in 2023 for the most improved emulator over a short period of time it's definitely V 3K I love this emulator and I'm so happy that we're seeing PlayStation vaita emulation really starting to break through and become a lot more common and something that you know isn't really considered as experimental and as kind of home brew as it used to be and of course for those people that are interested to know how it runs on handhelds like the steam deck it runs great uh I would definitely check out VA 3K on the steam deck of course there are native Linux build that you can check out for VA 3K there's also other versions available for to 3K you can get Windows of course Mac OS Linux and Android just like Yu Android is definitely something that is really awesome to see and just like rpcs3 VA 3K is going to preserve PlayStation VA games forever so VA 3K is definitely the move I love this emulator check it out download it support the guys and have a wonderful experience because it's awesome last but not least is duck steak the amazing PlayStation 1 emulator this emulator I feel like is the one that really transformed emulation to become more modern and updated I think there obviously has been some great emulators over the year but duck station offers some of the best visuals best improvements best post-processing effects that really can transform some kind of average looking PlayStation 1 titles into something that doesn't even resemble play PlayStation 1 games and there are so many amazing and unique features of duck station that I simply can't talk about all of them look I have covered duck station on a previous episode A couple of years ago and the emulation has continued to improve but for those people that may not be aware duck station is a PS1 emulator and look PlayStation 1 emulation has been around for a long time and there are some great emulators out there that do a fantastic job of emulating the PS1 but if you want an emulator that really really can transform the visuals to make them look so much better and really clean up a lot of the imperfections when it comes to Playstation One games then duck station is definitely the one not only once again you can boost internal resolutions like to a significant amount even up to 8K on my system there's also the down sampling which looks absolutely incredible I think the modern upscale look the dithering is something that still want to see but there's all sorts of amazing scan line options there's shaders you can get some really cool CRT effects but overall it's a fantastic emulator if you have a powerful enough system you can also enable the perspective correction which does help a lot with the kind of warped textures that you find on PlayStation 1 games now personally I love the PlayStation one look and I like to keep things as stock as possible I do like to give it a nice upscale however but having all these features at your disposal and so much more including rewind and save states and just everything that you know you would expect with a modern emulator really rounds out duck station as probably the most impressive emulator that I've used in a very long time it really does transform Playstation One games and makes them become something else I think you know when we talk about old games that deserve remasters honestly I feel like you could run some of these games through station upscale them add some cool postprocessing effects maybe some widescreen hacks you know uncap the frame rate or overclock the system to make the games run at 60 frames per second and you're just about there without really anything else and this is what makes the emulator so powerful and so loved I I'm a big fan of duck station and for me it's one of my favorite emulators and it just keeps improving every single year now of course I do want to add some honorable mentions because there are some emulators that have been around for a long time that continue to receive updates including dolphin and of course the Xbox 360 Emulator Zenia which I'm definitely going to revisit here at some point because I think Zenia is a really interesting emulator that still has compatibility issues but it continues to improve over time and it's definitely something I do want to revisit and of course I also want to talk more about the new batch of PlayStation 4 emulators that are starting to hit the scene we're slowly starting to see commercial games running on PlayStation 4 emulation and while it's not something that I would consider anything that most people really need to take a look at it's really more meant for the hobbyist right now just keep in mind that PlayStation 4 emulation is rapidly improving and I think it's probably another one to two years before we start to see some really important breakthroughs in that particular system and I'm very excited about it but look we're going to leave it here guys overall emulation in 2023 has seen significant strides and I'm very very much here for the ride I love all the things that are being done with modern emulation The Gauntlet has been thrown down to emulation authors to really kind of provide a good modern quality of life experience with emulation and I'd just absolutely love to see I hope you guys do as well and look before I do go here I know that this video has been very long and if you are at the end of this episode I do commend you for sticking around once again I am going to leave links to everything that I talked about in this episode Get Behind These emulation authors because they are the true Kings of video games they are preserving video games but I also want to mention if you do have a favorite emulator that you use definitely leave it in the comments below there's probably some people that are going to want to talk about dolphin and M and and some of these more classic emulators that have been around for a long time let me know what your favorites are and let me know what your system of choice is whether you're running on a PC Mac on your Xbox series via you know the dev mode or on Android or of course the steam deck or any other handheld device that is quite popular these days when it comes to emulation I want to hear what you guys have to say what is your favorite emulator your top favorite emulators of 2023 let me know in the comments below we're going to leave it here for today's episode thank you so much for watching if you liked it please don't forget to leave me a thumbs up and I'll catch you guys in the next episode bye for now

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 281,880

Keywords: emulators, emulation, best emulators in 2023, steamdeck, pc, rpcs3, vita3k, xenia, dolphin emulator, xemu, xbox, playstation 1, ps1, ps2, ps3, ps4, playstation 2, pcsx2, duckstation, yuzu, nintendo, nintendo switch, switch emulator, mvg, modern vintage gamer, best emulators, why are emulators legal?, linux, macos, android

Id: sVPot6-YbsM

Length: 28min 53sec (1733 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 09 2023