higan
higan is a multi-system emulator that began development on 15 years ago! Consoles include but are not limited to Nintendo Famicom, Nintendo Super Famicom, Super Game Boy / BS-X Satellaview / Sufami Turbo, Nintendo Game Boy / Color / Advance, Sega Master System / Game Gear / Mega Drive, NEC PC Engine / NEC SuperGrafx, Bandai WonderSwan / WonderSwan Color and much more!
Last Stable Release:
110
Dated:
25-07-2020
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Windows: 7+
Linux: 3.2+
MacOS: 10.7+
FreeBSD: 10.0+
bsnes
bsnes is a Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super Famicom) emulator that began development in 2004 and is currently a fork of higan which focuses on performance, features, and ease of use. It has True Super Game Boy emulation, HD mode 7, MSU1 support, Low-level emulation of all SNES coprocessors, Multi-threaded PPU and a lot more features.
Noteworthy Forks
bsnes-hd originaly brought HD Mode 7 (rendering the rotated or pseudo perspective backgrounds at higher resolutions) but now it differentiates itself with Widescreen Mode 7, true-color (24bit color), some high resolution features, and much more..
bsnes-plus (or bsnes+) is a fork of bsnes (v073) intended to introduce some new features and improvements, though mostly aimed at debugging.
bsnes-mt is a modified bsnes version aimed to improve it in terms of image quality, user experience, and other non-emulation quality-of-life features.
Last Stable Release:
115
Dated:
25-07-2020
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Windows: 7+
Linux: 3.2+
MacOS: 10.7+
FreeBSD: 10.0+
Snes9x
Snes9x is a portable Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulator with high game compatibility and is a good choice if you can't run more demanding alternatives. Ports and forks of Snes9x exist for many platforms. It is also available as a libretro core for RetroArch. There also a French version available here.
Last Stable Release:
1.62.3
Dated:
2/2/2023
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Windows: XP+
Linux: 3.2+
MacOS: 10.7+
Retroarch
BSNES cores (Performance/Balanced/Accuracy)
Snes9X core (less accurate & demanding than BNES)
RetroArch is a frontend for libretro emulator cores, game engines and even media players. It enables you to run classic games using Libretro on a wide range of computers and consoles through its unified graphical interface. Settings are also unified so configuration can be done once and applied and applied to all. It has advanced features like shaders, netplay, rewinding, next-frame response times, and more.
Consoles covered include but are not limited to PlayStation 1, Super Nintendo, Nintendo Entertainment System, GameBoy/GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance, Arcade, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Virtual Boy, Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, Sega Master System/Sega Game Gear, Sega CD/Mega CD, PC Engine/PC Engine CD, WonderSwan Color/Crystal, Cave Story, Doom(s) and much more!
It can run on the usual platforms like Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, but it stands alone in that it can support far more platforms beyond just that.
Ludo - A smaller libretro front end by only implementing the core features and by targeting less platforms but definitely shares a lot of the same core values.
Lakka - lightweight Linux distribution for small computers like Raspberry Pi
RArch - It incorporates Kaillera to offer the possibility to play games online.
Last Stable Release:
1.17.0
Dated:
04-02-2024
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Windows: Vista+
Linux: Please follow their instructions
Mac: Apple macOS High Sierra+ with Metal2
Mesen-S
Mesen-S is a cross-platform SNES emulator for Windows & Linux built in C++ and C#. It's early in development and some features are still missing compared to its NES sibling but progress is coming along quickly to rival other similaire emulators.
Noteworthy Forks
Mesen-SXPublic is a homebrew development oriented fork since the author has currently archived the main branch.
Last Stable Release:
0.4
Dated:
26-04-2020
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Windows: Nothing reported
Linux: Mono 5.18+ (package: mono-devel) / SDL2 (package: libsdl2-dev)