Exactly what the title says.  I have a collector acquaintance that is ready to sell me the rest of his collection (already bought his NES and SNES stuff), yet just wants a good N64 and PS1 emulation system before he sells the rest to me.

Any help from the community would be greatly appreciated as I don't know anything about emulators.

I don't know about PC but for me on a Mac I sometimes use PCSX-R for PS1 and Mupen64 or sixtyforce for N64. For some reason OpenEmu (multi-console Mac emulator) acknowledges my games but I still have to use those emulators seperately for N64 and PS1. Everdrive 64 is another great alternative for N64.

 

Have you suggested a N64 everdrive?

I've used project 64 before, it was good.

As a guy who spent like 3 years doing practically no gaming aside from emulation:

ePSXe is honestly the best, except when you have to swap disks.For that you rename your memory card file, then load your game up in PSXeven to do the disk swap and play to the next savepoint. I find ePSXe has been around longer than most and has the best compatibility. Don't forget to source yourself a PS bios file or none of the emulators will work. JoyToKey is a great utility for plugging in a 3rd party controller and keymapping it. If you have a PS2 btw, they can play burnt games if you do the swap trick. Also, the best PS2 emulator is PCSX2... it's excellent for PS2 title compatibility.

And don't forget to spend a good 90 minutes configuring each emulator, seriously. You'll regret it when your game crashes if you use default settings on some games (MGS1... grr) Special MGS note, play through to the helipad on PSXeven before switching to ePSXe, for some reason the first 3 codec calls can crash the game, but everything else (except disk swap) is smoothe sailing.

Havn't done much emulation for n64 unfortunately, but I have got it working. It's pretty straightforward compared to PSX

I hope this helps

Love me some joy2key.  I used it to map commands for dosbox games that didn't support gamepads, and to add the extra "keyboard only" controls to gamepads in Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst. Cause, fuck playing games the way people tell you you're supposed to. 

ePSXe definitely! And absolutely set up properly before trying to play any of the games. It's not perfect,but ePSXe is really good.

No clue about N64 emulators. I have one,just have never used it. Guess I need to.

Newer ePSXe versions have been released so the disc swapping issues might be fixed by now.

I recommend using the software renderer plugin for graphics. It's not as pretty, but it's more accurate and has fewer issues.

Thanks much for the input!

Project 64 is easily the best N64 emulator but I still find its emulation of certain titles a bit iffy. I feel like N64 emulation is still not up to par yet. Nothing beats playing on the original hardware for Mr though. Project 64 should be of good use to you though.

The issue with N64 emulation is that it's so high level that you can't expect much in the way of accuracy. It's more like an N64 simulator. Even accurate SNES emulation requires a decently fast PC, and true N64 emulation would be much more demanding than that. Plus the N64 hardware might not be understood well enough.

Well I do know that N64 was notoriously difficult to code for back in the day, as was Sega Saturn. But what's ironic is that Project Dolphin runs Gamecube and Wii games perfectly - far better than any N64 emulator runs N64 roms. And GCN and Wii are more advanced. But it could be that GCN and Wii were easier to code for.

Yeah, it's probably that the N64 has weird hardware that is difficult to program for and difficult to emulate, much like the Saturn.

The system requirements for Saturn emulators is higher than system requirements for comparable Playstation emulators.