There is a catch however which makes Mess (Mame) kind of suck, certain games have controller issues and this is baked into the emulator until it gets fixed. Mess (Mame) is the next easiest to setup and for the most part it is pretty good, it has good CRT shaders and easy to setup controls. Kat5200 is now my recommended way to emulate the 5200 for most people. While it does have some screen effects to recreate an old TV look that is pretty much all it has, there are no CRT scanlines or anything else. See update #2 below. It also has terrible to non existent shader support. Kat5200 is probably the easiest to get up and running and setup but it is ugly and it changes your monitors resolution when loading and exiting a game which people can find off putting and if you are on a multi monitor setup it moves windows around on the monitors. There are 3 choices of emulators, Kat5200, Mess (Mame) or Alitirra and each of them have their own quirks making each less than the perfect choice. No matter which way you to choose to emulate the Atari 5200 there are going to be issues. Let's get the first thing out of the way.