In a THC fuelled moment of inspiration I decided to compare the Xbox emulators to the real deal. However my camera ran out of batteries too quickly so i'll rely on words instead. I'm pretty reliable when it comes to this as all my connections are RGB and I have a good eye for these things ^^
XSNESX - The picture quality on this emulator used to be very poor but now it's finally been sorted out with point filtering which is still not quite 100% faithful (about 95%). For control I use a playstation ds2 pad which is fantastic. The right thumbstick can pressed at any time to bring up options. It saves games, save states and be settings to the Xbox hard drive. Being able to play Japanese RPGs (Seiken Densetsu 3, Shin Megami Tensei etc) that have been patched to English is truly brilliant. Overall I give the emulator a score of 95%. The colours need to be a little brighter and the image a touch sharper. Great emulator.
GensX - This even runs 32X and Mega CD games. The menus are all in Japanese which is ok for me but I guess most will have problems. Configuring the pad is easy, I use a Saturn pad for this so the control is even better than the real deal. Image wise it's too soft, the colours almost drip into each other. It looks ok but it's not nearly sharp enough. The author (Hikaru) really needs to add point filtering to remedy this. Some roms wouldn't work but it could just be that it didn't like those dumps (although they worked on the windows version). This one gets a 90% from me due to those image issues. Apart from that it's almost flawless.
Final Burn Alpha X - XMen COTA, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Strider, ESPrade, Dimahoo, SFZ3 etc all on one disc. This is perfection... almost. No 3:4 support just yet for the shooters but the bordered versions are great, ESPECIALLY ESPrade. Donpachi looks and sounds like shit compared to the PSone version but then that port is better than the PCB parent so that's an unfair comparison. For control use any arcade stick you like. I'm sure most of you would just use a Saturn pad though. The image is great thanks to point filtering. Next release will have Neo Geo support so this is an exciting piece of software. 99%.
MAME-X - Compatibility with roms is fairly good but progress on the development of this emulator is very slow sadly. The image is too soft though and not bright enough. R-type LEO looks fucking amazing on it however Newzealand Story doesn't. 80%. Great foundation but that image needs to be sorted out, as do the compatibility issues. The menus are ass.
Hope this helps :) Emulation on Xbox has come a long way, once the authors overcome the brightness and sharpness issues they will be 100%. I'll take photos if I can find any batteries.
