Magic Engine - This is the most well known emulator but from what I've read it is not the most accurate and it is shareware. It also exhibits a weird video issue (along with a few other emulators) where it looks like there are vertical bars across the screen that cause movement to have this weird wavy/rippling effect. I couldn't figure how to get rid of it. Compatibility of most card based games worked great but I couldn't get ME to recognized a cd drive. I can run this emulator in the console's native resolution and it has a great user interface and is a breeze to configure inputs.
Ootake - This is the best emulator I've found as far as what I'm looking for. Many people recommend it as one of the top emulators for this console but a few point out some flaws with its accuracy. It has a funky introductory menu (see green image above) and it was a bit of a pain configuring my controller because when I would push the d-pad it would configure that one press (up for example) for three different directions. Otherwise it runs fine. It has lots of features, runs in the native resolution, and can load both card games and cd games just fine. Also if you try to load a rom and it is messed up Ootake will fix the file to get it working again. It is converted from Japanese so some of the text is awkward. It does not exhibit the weird video effect noted in the Magic Engine section.
MedGUI - This is a gui for Mednafan which many are calling the most accurate TG-16 emulator. However Mednafan is command prompt only which won't do on my HTPC. So I checked out the GUI and it emulates a number of other consoles. I am not familiar with this emulator but it emulates other systems such as Gameboy Advance, Genesis, NES, etc and appears to have TG-16 emulation thrown in using the Mednafan core. It attempts to present a "simple" interface but in doing so it presents its more advanced and necessary menus kind of awkwardly. Configuring the inputs was a pain and a half requiring a keyboard command in game and then running through all the many inputs such as turbo buttons and misc button presses each time you want to just set one button. I got card games and cd based games running just fine and you can run this emulator at the TG-16's native resolution. However it exhibits the weird video problem mentioned in the Magic Engine section. I tried a combination of video settings to no avail.
Pcejin - Another Mednafan GUI. This one is pretty sparse offering little in the way of menus. It doesn't have an option to run in full screen at native resolution but I couldn't really test it because even after setting up a hotkey to switch to full screen it still wouldn't do it. I could only get card based games to run on this. CD games failed to boot.
Turbo Engine - I heard good things about this emulator but there is little to no documentation or discussion about this. Searching for anything related to it is a pain because of it's name. It looked promising but it only offers very basic resolution option so the lack of a native resolution was a no go for me. Defining the inputs is pretty easy but I could not get cd based games to load up in this emulator.
So thats what I messed around with and my preference at this point in time is Ootake. If I could fix the weird video problems a few of these TG-16 emulators exhibited I might go with MedGUI instead but I'm at a loss as to how to fix that problem. I also want to say again these are just observations from me downloading a bunch of emulators and seeing which one ran the most accurate, was easy to set up, and ran at the console's native resolution.
