The options screen is where all of the important stuff can be tweaked for better/worse performance.

For the optimal playability framerate, disable the sound, then put the framerate at:

E-125@180MHz 2-3 skip frame

E-125@150MHz 4-5 skip frame

E-115@168MHz 5-6 skip frame

E-115@131MHz 5-7 skip frame

Jornada@131 MHz frameskip ? - suggestions welcome

iPAQ@206MHz frameskip ? - suggestions welcome

iPAQ@236MHz frameskip ? - suggestions welcome

The smoothest, best sound playback I could get out of this thing was by entering 480 in the sound buffer line. If you want to play at a decent framerate with the slow (but smooth) sound, keep the 480 and add 1 0r 2 to the frameskip you are currently using. Obviously, this depends on the device and the game you are using.


Emulation Speed/Playability:

Decent, which makes many games playable at an okay framerate, even if it doesn't look real pretty or smooth. As with many emulators, during some games; if you are pushing a small amount of pixels at one point (like your character moving around a stale screen, e.g. Zelda), the game runs pretty nicely until the game has to push many pixels/sprites (like when the entire screen is moving), which slows down the emulator quite a bit. This makes a game like Ninja Gaiden run super slow at frameskip set to 3, while at the same setting a game like Zelda runs fine. 


Compatibility:

This emulator plays most games that are well known, but there are still quite a few, well known and unknown, that don't.


Sound:

Slow but Smooth. While the emulator is mostly unplayable with sound, it gives a nice uninterrupted (not choppy or stuttering) sound. Although it is slower than the NES original speed. This emulator does play most sound effects, even some that PocketNES does not.


GUI and Usability:

The GUI isn't complicated, but it does have a bugged up Help/About menu along with a standard File/Open/Options menu. The options are pretty self explanatory. The button remapping on the first screen is very easy. The problem comes when you want to open up another game, or your finished with the emulator entirely. It is almost impossible to open another game after you've already opened one, and trying to exit the emulator cleanly is a pain also.

It is possible to change the Framerate and Sound Buffer Size while in the middle of a game, but it's so difficult that it's not worth it. And, along with the lack of save state/ram, the emulator itself doesn't save any of your previous option settings once you exit. So, if you want to use it again, you have to re-enter everything that you already entered the last time you used the emulator.

The main menu screen is really nice. It has the most recent NES controller depicted in the center of the screen, which acts as a button re-mapper. As the screen says, just tap on the button you want to remap, and tap the hardware key you want it to be mapped to.


Things that BUG me:

The Help menu will usually kick you out of the program, to the Today screen. If this happens, don’t panic - the program is still running but somehow it opened up another window and automatically went into the background. Just tap on the little Mario icon on WIS Bar and you’ll be taken back to the About screen. It’s kind of blank and doesn’t help much. Tap on the screen to get the OK icon back on the Taskbar, and tap OK to make the About screen go away.

Many times (most of the time for me), the emulator freezes when trying to exit a game back to the main menu (menu/start button). The only way around this is to actually use the help menu to your advantage and kick yourself out of the program and them use your task switcher to close all programs. Another thing to do is just to close the application using the task closing utility whenever you’re done playing. Or you can try just using the file menu at the bottom to go to the options screen and then exit.

The emulator does not support save states or ram saves. Which means that you save your game progress and pick it up at a later time. Once you close this emulator, it's over. So you might as well stick to playing action games on this emulator, which are the least playable on this.

More than enough, under the graphics options, you have auto skip frames (turn off), skip frame skip, throttling, black and white mode, scaling, and show more than 8 sprites. For the best performance:

E-125@180MHz frameskip 2-3

E-125@150MHz frameskip 3-5

E-115@168MHz frameskip 4-6

E-115@131MHz frameskip 5-7

Jornada@131 MHz frameskip ? - suggestions welcome

iPAQ@206MHz frameskip ? - suggestions welcome

iPAQ@236MHz frameskip ? - suggestions welcome

As far as the other options, I’ve found that turning on/off throttling doesn’t change much with performance, but turning it off will improve it a minuscule amount. Black and White Mode is just for nostalgia’s sake, for people like me who played their NES games on a B&W TV because that’s all they could afford.

Scaling is a really cool feature that stretches the game to full screen in portrait mode (instead of landscape, allowing you to still use the buttons normally), but if you select this, it’s pretty hard (although it still works) to use the virtual pad.

The "Show more than 8 sprites" option allows the emulator to show more than 8 sprites on the screen smoothly at one time, as opposed to when on the original console, the sprites would start to flicker. This doesn’t affect performance at all, until when there actually is more than 8 sprites at a time, at which point it slows down a bit, but it’s nothing to cry about.

Under the sound options you have the ability to enable or disable sound. On the E-125 and the iPAQ, sound doesn’t seem to affect the framerate, so you can turn it on or off depending on your preference. On the E-115 (131 or 168MHz), disabling the sound seems to give you a small boost in performance, so if you are going for speed, and hate that jittery sound anyway, disable it and raise your frameskip a notch; go on, you deserve it.

The controller option takes you to the button remap menu. It’s simple, tap the button you want to remap and then press the button you want it on. Pretty simple.


Load/Save state:

To save your game state in this emulator, all you have to do is pause the emulator (using the menu button) and then open up the file menu and tap the "Load/Save State" option.

This will automatically save your game state into a file named after the ROM file (e.g. MARIO2.NES would be MARIO2.SAV), and you never have to worry about it… unless you want to have more than one save state for the same game. Then you have to rename the save state file, and save again, and then swap back and forth whenever you want to save/load that save state. I know, it’s a pain. To load you state back up (make sure you have the game running that you want to load the state for), simply tap file, load state.


Emulation Speed/Playability:

Excellent, every game is playable at a very good framerate, with a good compromise of speed, fluidity, and sound. Emulation speed does not speed up or slow down according to how many pixels are being moved. A perfect example would be Zelda (again). When on the static screen moving around and then changing to another screen which moves everything, the speed does not change.


Compatibility:

Very good. Almost all games work on this emulator. However, some games that use special chipsets (such as Castlevania 3) will not work, but they are few and far between.


Sound:

Very good, sound effects that are played are flawless, even if some sound effects will not be heard. Music is very close to in time/sync with the game, but on the Casio it has a bad stuttering/choppy effect. This choppy effect can be overcome by merely turning down the volume a bit, it’s still there, it’s just not as noticeable. On the iPAQ, as far as I could tell, the music and sound were almost flawless, no stuttering, and almost all sound effects were heard.


GUI and Usability:

Clean and efficient, nothing fancy, gets the job done and is easy. It’s very easy to change any of the options. The strange thing about separating the sound and the graphics options menu is kind of odd because of the sound menu only having the option to enable it or not.

The controller remapping screen isn’t as pretty as NesCE, but it works (and saves your settings), so there’s nothing to complain about. Pausing the emulator by simply pressing the menu button is easy (only surpassed by PocketSNES’s tap screen method), allowing you to save/load your state etc. There’s even a menu option to exit the emulator... how nice. Only one minor bug, and it’s reported that this is only on the Casio version. 


Things that BUG me:

The Casio version has a strange bug when changing between emulation and the main screen. The virtual pad disappears 50% of the time when returning back to the emulation The only way around this is to keep switching back and forth until the pad re-appears (but if you have a Casio, why do you need the virtual pad anyway?).

Also, on the E-115, the menu button seems to be tricky and switches back and forth between the menu and emulation rather quickly (if you hold down the menu button, it will just cycle back and forth between the two), which can be a pain; so you have to tap the menu button rather fast and check to see if you are back on the main screen or vice-versa. These are minor bugs.

Another thing that really isn’t a bug, but which could have been improved is the save state system. While it is super easy, and stupid-proof, if I want to have two save states for the same game, I have to rename the original one (which is the name of the ROM with a .sav extension.) to another name, and then if you want to load that state later on, you have to rename it back to the original and change the second one, etc.