Zepper wrote:An inaccurate emulator shouldn't be used for homebrew production/testing. Instead, Nintendulator is the best rational choice.
The term
inaccurate is not a binary yes/no proposition, except when applied to specific cases. FCEUX is completely accurate for a lot of cases, it is inaccurate for some cases. (I think part of its poor reputation comes from the legacy "old PPU" being the default setting, too.)
What matters is whether the emulator is accurate
enough to do the job you want it to.
Once I got past the learning curve of some typical inaccuracy issues (e.g. DPCM bit deletion), I found I could easily spend most of my time testing in FCEUX without fear it was going to fail on the real hardware. I still test occasionally on hardware (and other emulators) just to be sure, but it's been a very long time since I've been surprised by something that slipped past its "inaccurate" emulation.
Overall I think it is really quite accurate for almost everything I want to do. (But not completely, which is why I sometimes need Nintendulator, though even an "accurate" emulator like Nintendulator has its limits.)
You mention that many of these features appear in other emulators, but FCEUX has
all of those features at once, and most of them are implemented well. Nintendulator has a pretty good debugger, but I find it inconvenient in many ways compared to FCEUX's. Also its movie playback, TAS, and lua scripting all can help tremendously with debugging. Being open source is a
huge plus too.
The only debug feature it seems to be missing compared to other emulators is a good OAM viewer, though there are some
good lua script alternatives.