> Here's the thing - I made an NESPC (stuck a PC inside of a busted Nintendo for
> those who don't know) for my girlfriend for Christmas. To do it cheaply and keep
> it cool, I used a $10 embedded PC with a 233mhz Cyrix MediaGX processor that I
> got off of EBay. I figured this should be good for anything up to a Sega or so.
> The last time I played a lot of emulated NES games, after all, was back when I
> had a 486 and used Nesticle95. Nesticle95, of course, runs fine on the thing.
> The problem is that I wired up the original controller ports to the parallel
> port using PPJoy and one of the controller buttons won't seem to work in
> Nesticle. Most Windows emulators nowadays (as I recently found out) are written
> in C or C++, so they're all too slow. The only one I could get to work at a
> decent speed is the original Nester, but at full screen mode it shrinks a into a
> square and loosing 30% of the screen to this really sucks. Does anyone have a
> solution to this? I can't find a setting that will change it. What other Windows
> assembler-based NES emulators do you think I should try?
>
> My other issue is that I love to play Genesis games. With most of the Windows XP
> services disabled to keep the CPU free, Gens will emulate most Sega games.
> Sonic, however, always gives it some problems. Is there a faster Windows Genesis
> emulator out there? I can't believe I'd be having so many problems emulating a
> console with a clock speed of under 10hz.
>
> If I replace the video card, will that help with any emulators? Will faster RAM
> help? It'd also be nice if there was a way to automatically shut down
> explorer.exe when I'm emulating a console and then turn it back on afterwards,
> because that does free up a decent amount of CPU power for me.
>

Windows XP has got to be taking up a hell of a lot of resources. If you can find emulators and controller drivers for (e.g.) Windows 98 (or even DOS), the freed-up memory and CPU power may help. It may even be worth looking into Linux-based emulators...
I used to have a Cyrix 300Mhz processor (onboard graphics ... can't remember how much memory - 16, maybe 32Mb), and was able to run Finalburn (with a bit of frame-skipping). I had at least one Genesis emulator working (can't remember which). Never tried any NES emus though. This was all under Windows 98.