The Best NES Core RetroArch Has

If you’re wondering what the best NES core RetroArch has is, this is just the article for you. RetroArch has a few different cores available to play your NES ROMs.

At the time of writing this post, RetroArch has the following NES cores available:

• FCEUmm
• Mesen
• Nestopia UE
• QuickNES

With four different cores available to choose from, it can be a bit confusing when trying to figure out which you should use. We’ll be breaking down each so that you can easily decide which is right for you to play your NES retro games.

What Is the Best NES Core RetroArch Has?

Keep in mind that ultimately, the best NES core will depend on multiple factors. It depends on your setup and what you’ll be playing these games on. Some of these emulators require your machine have more resources than others. If at anytime you find that the emulator you’re trying is running slow, the games aren’t smooth, or the timing seems off, it’s advised that you instead try another one of the 4 available emulators.

Often, while one of the NES cores might not work well with your system, one of the others likely will. Emulation is often a matter of trial and error and finding which of the console emulators works best for you.

1. Mesen Core

Mesen ended up as #1 on our list for the best NES emulator for good reason. It’s highly regarded as being the most accurate and compatible open source emulator available for Nintendo Entertainment System ROMs. Do keep in mind that Mesen can be a bit demanding on your machine. So while this emulator is known for its high level of accuracy, it also comes at the price of being a bit of a resource hog in order to run optimally.

Features

Some notable features for Mesen are the following:

• A high accuracy emulator: A lot of effort from the development team has gone into making Mesen as accurate to playing on original hardware as possible.
• High Compatibility: Mesen is compatible with all licensed NES games
• Mesen currently can emulate the following systems: NES, Famicom, Famicom Disk System, Dendy, VS System, NSF and NSFe.
• It has the ability to use save states, rewind your games, record gameplay, overclocking, and you can even use cheat codes.
• Mesen has a ton of different video filters available to choose from and support for HDNes’ HD packs.
• Solid audio options including stereo effects, per-channel volume and panning, equalizer, and more.
• Netplay is available to play online with friends, ROM can be in the 7z/zip format to save space, IPS/BPS patch support, and automatic updates via the RetroArch online updater so you’ll always have the latest version installed.

The following file extensions are allowed for ROMs:

Content that can be loaded by the Mesen core have the following file extensions:

• .nes
• .fds
• .unf
• .unif

The RetroArch Mesen core supports the following devices in the controls menu:

• NES controllers
• NES Zapper
• Power Pad
• Arkanoid
• SNES controllers
• SNES mouse

Mesen is a user friendly emulator that does its job well. It has a lot of different features available to level up your NES emulation.

2. Nestopia UE Core

The Nestopia UE (Undead Edition) core’s development is interesting because it was forked from the original emulator’s source code and members of the community have added to it over the years. These days, it features additional support for other consoles and tons of bug fixes.

Nestopia UE is ranked a bit lower on the scale of accuracy tests for NES/FDS emulators. That being said, these test results might be a bit misleading and that doesn’t mean that it’s not a high accuracy emulator after all. Nestopia UE holds up pretty well, but the UI can be a bit clunky at times so do keep that in mind.

3. FCEUmm Core

FCEUmm originally began as a combination of several FCE Ultra forks and was designed to combine all the different features spread out across branches. This is a rather customized version of the emulator and has support for a ton of new mappers, including some pretty obscure ones.

FCEUmm can play unlicensed NES games and there are some seriously awesome fan games out there that you should consider checking out. This also means that this core can emulate NES bootleg games along with original NES games.

4. QuickNES

QuickNES is also a highly accurate NES emulator with tons of features. It was originally released back in 2004 as a very straightforward simple emulator, but over the years has grown and improved substantially. It can replicate the analog signals that the NES console would output to the TV.

The LibRetro core of QuickNES is still actively being maintained by the community and many developers have rolled out some awesome updates to it.

Summary

Of all the NES cores available on Retroarch, the Mesen core is hands down the best core you can go with in regards to original hardware accuracy. That being said, this also depends on your setup that you’ll be using to play these games because Mesen can be pretty strenuous performance wise. If you find that Mesen isn’t performing well, you can take the time to tinker with your device’s settings a bit, or you can simply try out one of the other 3 NES emulators RetroArch has to offer.

Our second best choice performance wise would be NEStopia UE. While it may not feature the same level of accuracy as the Mesen core, it is still a very solid emulator and can be used on machines that aren’t quite powerful enough to run Mesen.

If you’re someone who really wants to try out cheats for your NES games, FCEUmm is definitely the core for you. Not only does it allow cheats, but it also can play fan made NES games and bootleg games as well.

You can read more about the available cores on the official RetroArch website.

How To Install RetroArch NES Core?

You can install any of the currently available RetroArch NES cores by going to Main Menu > Load Core > Download a Core. From there, scroll down until you find the list of NES cores. You should find 4 NES cores available to choose from.

If you’re an Android user, be sure to check out our list of the best NES emulators for Android as well.