Best netplay emulator

Recently a couple of my friends have got into emulation and we are looking to play some games using the netplay feature a lot of emulators have. After spending about 3 hours yesterday playing about with Snes9x and Gens I had to go do something else and hence we gave up for the time being.

We got a jumpy game of Mario Allstars on Snes9x and nothing on GENS except into the same server chat area.

Just wonder which emulator (for snes or megadrive) you find easiest and most reliable for netplay across the internet. Cheers

ZSNES and Snes9x mostly. NNNesterJ is a good one too for NES games.

I'm not sure ifr it was Gens, or Fusion that me and my friend played a net game on, but there were some sync issues for sure..

It's really hard to develop code made for something as inefficient as the Internet, with something as bandwidth intensive as 2 emulators needing to stay in sync.. Emulators need practically frames, whereas PC games tend to do better because they can use algorithms and smaller momentary update packets to keep servers and clients updated and in-sync.

I'm not sure if we'll ever get truly good, smooth netplay as if we were playing 2P on a console in the same room with each other.

MAME in general seems to do the best over a broad range of games