I personally had deal breaking crashing issues. I played through the first two discs of Shenmue 1 on nullDC and every so often I would get a crash for seemingly no reason. I say "seemingly no reason" because, doing the thing that caused the crash in the first place wouldn't crash it a second time. Now given that the game was very playable I would've muscled through it like any other crash prone game. You save often and if it happens you repeat what you lost.
Therein lies the problem with Shenmue. To do a standard in-game save you have to walk all the way home, to your room, and save on your bed. You have the option of a quick save, but the quick save doesn't let you proceed without rebooting the console, and loading the save causes it to be deleted.
So in-game saves are out. Then what about savestates? nullDC doesn't have them... Well then what about a different emulator? The next best emulator is Demul, which supports save states, but runs pretty bad. Also, savestating is very buggy, and frequently will crash when you try to load the state.( yay lost progress!)
The best solution I found was running nullDC, and using the quick save feature. After quick saving I would duplicate the memory card file on Windows to have a backup. This method involves a solid 3-4 minutes of effort every time you want to create a "save state".
In the end I watched Shenmue the Movie on YouTube and the GT playthrough of Shenmue 2.
