"Best" emulator for Neo Geo games (specifically the Metal Slug series)

Before I go on with my post, I'll just say that I have Googled the subject, but most of the threads I found were over a decade old.

When I say best, I'm referring to smooth and non-buggy play. There are a lot of heavy action parts in the Metal Slug games that slow the emulators down heavily. I started Metal Slug on the Wii, which (Metal Slug Anthology) has a mostly smooth emulator.

I have tried Kawaks, Nebula, FBA, and MAME. Kawaks segfaulted before I could start playing and was showing flashing lines just from loading the Neo Geo screen at the start of Metal Slug, so I said no immediately. FBA was okay but the sound was clicky at times and seemed kind of slow in general. Nebula was good, but I'm hesitant since the last update was 2007. MAME was okay, but seemed slow. Also tried NeoRAGEx but it couldn't identify the ROMs. I think I'm up in the air between Nebula and MAME.

Anyway, any advice would be appreciated, e.g. settings to try, other emulators to try, etc. Thanks.

your findings are a decade old because the games and emus for it are a decade old, and almost all newer system can probably run any old games near max settings anyway without issue(excluding application incomatability). . on older hardware tho, newer isn't always better. often things run optimally when the application time period matches the generation of the hardware or software in question.

conserning running the smoothest with least amount of system resources for low power pc's. I always found winkawaks to work the best / optimally.

so your findings aren't scewed, its a good idea to verify your stuff isn't corrupt before jumping to conclusions if you haven't checked already. . i can explain bellow. .

roms especially in past i noticed capcom/neogeo rom sets would change sometimes as things progressed, so if you have a old rom version, a newer emu version may not recognize it correctly, or vise-versa. The latest version of winkawaks will mimic the latest version of Mame's rom sets. so you can use mame to verify the rom sets arn't corrupt first. . .

this will do it in command prompt
"neogoe" is just for example, but will work to verify the neogeo Bios, replace neogeo with any Rom Name exclude the zip extension

Quote:

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"C:\path\to\mame.exe" -rompath "C:\rom\path" -verifyroms neogeo

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winkawaks ran smooth for me (any game including mslug) even on a crappy system with virtually no gfx capability, with the bellow set in the winkawaks.ini ,changing to fullscreen after loading rom.
. . . these are the same settings you can change in the GUI

Quote:

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HorizontalFullScreenWidth=640
HorizontalFullScreenHeight=480
VerticalFullScreenWidth=640
VerticalFullScreenHeight=480
FullScreenWidthNeoGeo=640
FullScreenHeightNeoGeo=480
ZoomWindow=200
WindowCorrectRatio=0
FullScreenCorrectRatio=3
TripleBuffer=0
UseVRAM=1
FrameSkip=0
AutoFrameSkip=1
VideoEngine=0

SoundFreq=22050
SoundSegs=6
SoundSegLag=5
InterpolateSound=0
LowPassFilter=0

TaskPriorityLevel=128
MultiTaskFriendly=0

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almost any system can run with these basic enhancments tho, but if you encounter the flickering border in fullscreen with the bellow settings, its because the FullScreenCorrectRatio was changed to SMALLER(1) in the GUI, changing it back to STRETCH(3) will remove the border, I only recommend trying Smaller first because it makes the Ratio perfectly perportional so theres no aliasing on enhancments such as Scanline effects, . tho not critical to mess with it at all an could leave it at (3) some people Im sure don't notice.

i think i could be wrong people may sometimes shy away from kawaks because the strange fullscreen resolution behavior. . I might be able to explain this also, if you use higher resolutions than 640x with image enhancments but your screen isn't large enough to handle the Res+Enhancment, it creates a larger fullscreen border basiclly shrinking the fullscreen play area nearly by a factor of 2x. If this happens put resolution back to *640x or disable the enhancment causing the issue.

Quote:

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FullScreenCorrectRatio=1
TripleBuffer=1
VideoEngine=13

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Neo Geo games? i have never play it before :( can you explain more?

only one emulator is best far i know neogeoragex5.0 (dos work on xp on vista and 7 also should) eventualy you can use 5.4 but there is one thing work only on windows closed source i was play in all metal slugs and end every one also work perfectly kof i have all those roms with garou mark of wolves and samurai shodawn im higly recomend but i was play on keybord im dont know you can use "real" pads you also should try mess i never use it but project is emulator of all even neogeo (fork of mame)
eventually test new/oldmame revisions with gui