Unlike Mednafen and Mesen, ares can load PCE CD games from compressed .chd.
For SNES, ares is better than Mesen at cropping border areas, at least in Mr. Do, the game I compared in ares and Mesen.
ares doesn’t have Mesen’s per-color palette control for GB and border control for NES (which is a huge but NESessary pain as NES games vary wildly in their bordering, and flashing border areas), so I’m going to stick with Mesen for those.
Update: Buuuut ares does leave borders on PCE games, dang. Mednafen doesn’t; guess I’m stuck with uncompressed bin and cue files in Mednafen hrm. Then again there are only like 3 PCE CD-ROM-ROM games I might want to have on hand to play regularly so probably no biggie; also, according to its docs Mednafen has a sprite-flicker reduction option for PCE, that could be real handy.