Sad but true: near as I can tell, in 2014, there is basically no PC Emulator for the NES that gets you to the quality of, say, ZSNES in terms of emulation smoothness, sound quality, widescreen compatibility, and input lag.
Nestopia: You must choose between horrific input lag or screen tearing, and even an unofficial patch, which has been taken down, only mitigated the problem.
VirtuaNES: Without a doubt, the smoothest emulation experience there is. No lag, no tearing, just buttery NES goodness. Although I have to set it to use a custom palette for accurate color emulation (namely, FCEUX.pal). The problem - if you're on a widescreen monitor/HDTV, and you'd like to play fullscreen, you have to choose between having the graphics fattened/stretched to 16:9, or having "nearest multiple" zooming (usually 3x) which leaves black bars at the top and bottom of the screen.
FCEUX aka FCE Ultra - The FCEUX.pal color palette is the best color adaptation of the old NES colors and is a must-own, it stretches to widescreen with aspect ratio correction in tact, and there's no input lag. There is, however, minor choppiness in the screen scrolling, even with sync turned on. Not tearing, mind you, but what appears to be dropped frames. But even worse is the awful, awful sound crackling. It's really distracting and really awful.
Nintendulator: Seems great all around except for one major flaw: fullscreen mode doesn't even zoom in or enlarge the graphics in any way. In fullscreen mode you get 1:1 pixel mapping, which at 1920x1080 means the NES output is rendered in a ridiculously small box at the center of the screen.
Jnes: About as good as it gets, and what I end up using most of the time, but it has major problems with emulation accuracy, particularly in the sound department. Just the way it mangles some of the timeless music (for example, adding a weird bongo hit at the end of the "death song" in Super Mario Bros), or bizarro sprite overlay issues, it's really too bad. Because it has no lag, scales great, you can use FCEUX.pal to get good color, the sound rendering is high-quality (even though the sounds being rendered are inaccurate), and it's mature enough to have very good compatibility. You basically get a very high-fidelity version of a bad facsimile of the original game.
If anyone knows of fixes for the first four emulators' problems, it would be great to know about them so I can get away from Jnes. Or maybe there's one I haven't mentioned that is worth giving a shot. Anyone else have these problems? What are you using?
Other systems have very good emulators -- MAME, ZSNES, Fusion, I can't complain about at all. Somehow the NES, despite being older hardware, is missing a standard bearer.
Update: The answer is: RetroArch with these settings!
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=102120536&postcount=32
Nestopia: You must choose between horrific input lag or screen tearing, and even an unofficial patch, which has been taken down, only mitigated the problem.
VirtuaNES: Without a doubt, the smoothest emulation experience there is. No lag, no tearing, just buttery NES goodness. Although I have to set it to use a custom palette for accurate color emulation (namely, FCEUX.pal). The problem - if you're on a widescreen monitor/HDTV, and you'd like to play fullscreen, you have to choose between having the graphics fattened/stretched to 16:9, or having "nearest multiple" zooming (usually 3x) which leaves black bars at the top and bottom of the screen.
FCEUX aka FCE Ultra - The FCEUX.pal color palette is the best color adaptation of the old NES colors and is a must-own, it stretches to widescreen with aspect ratio correction in tact, and there's no input lag. There is, however, minor choppiness in the screen scrolling, even with sync turned on. Not tearing, mind you, but what appears to be dropped frames. But even worse is the awful, awful sound crackling. It's really distracting and really awful.
Nintendulator: Seems great all around except for one major flaw: fullscreen mode doesn't even zoom in or enlarge the graphics in any way. In fullscreen mode you get 1:1 pixel mapping, which at 1920x1080 means the NES output is rendered in a ridiculously small box at the center of the screen.
Jnes: About as good as it gets, and what I end up using most of the time, but it has major problems with emulation accuracy, particularly in the sound department. Just the way it mangles some of the timeless music (for example, adding a weird bongo hit at the end of the "death song" in Super Mario Bros), or bizarro sprite overlay issues, it's really too bad. Because it has no lag, scales great, you can use FCEUX.pal to get good color, the sound rendering is high-quality (even though the sounds being rendered are inaccurate), and it's mature enough to have very good compatibility. You basically get a very high-fidelity version of a bad facsimile of the original game.
If anyone knows of fixes for the first four emulators' problems, it would be great to know about them so I can get away from Jnes. Or maybe there's one I haven't mentioned that is worth giving a shot. Anyone else have these problems? What are you using?
Other systems have very good emulators -- MAME, ZSNES, Fusion, I can't complain about at all. Somehow the NES, despite being older hardware, is missing a standard bearer.
Update: The answer is: RetroArch with these settings!
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=102120536&postcount=32
