Emulators

RPCS3 is an emulator of the Sony PlayStation 3 developed in the C++. Although the emulator has become globally stable, there are still missing features, sometimes insufficient fluidity and some display problems. At the start of 2020, out of more than 3,000 games, the emulator made it possible to arrive, with good performance, at the end of around 50% of them. It remains, however, the most advanced PlayStation 3 emulator at this day.

Yuzu is an emulator of the Nintendo Switch developed in C++. The emulator is made by the developers of the Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra and share an important portion of his code.

Cemu is a Wii U video game console emulator developed by Exzap who serves as the core and GPU developer, and Petergov as the core and audio emulation developer. Though it is still under development, it is able to run certain games smoothly.

Citra is a Nintendo 3DS emulator started in early 2013, developed by Citra and contributors and written in C++.

Citra can run almost all homebrew games and many 3DS games. Citra's name is derived from CTR, which is the model name of the original 3DS. Citra does not work well with older PCs and needs to be run on a decently powerful x64 or ARM64 CPU.

m64p is an open-source, plugin-based Nintendo 64 emulator maintained by loganmc10. The project bundles Mupen64Plus with GLideN64(an open-source graphics plugin), as well as its own frontend, input plugin, and netplay support.

DuckStation is an simulator/emulator of the Sony PlayStation console, focusing on playability, speed, and long-term maintainability. The goal is to be as accurate as possible while maintaining performance suitable for low-end devices. "Hack" options are discouraged, the default configuration should support all playable games with only some of the enhancements having compatibility issues.

Dosbox-X is a fork of the DOSBox project, a cross-platform emulator. It focuses on greater accuracy in DOS emulation and its hardware environment, and adds support for Windows 9x (Windows 3.x, 95, 98, ME). The goal is to provide a complete and accurate emulation package covering all pre-2000 hardware scenarios. It will allow retro-programming with the certainty that the program works well on real hardware. It supports the mouse, provides menus and internationalization (keyboard localization for example).

DOSBox ECE (Enhanced Community Edition) is a fork of the MS-DOS emulator DOSBox that has been enhanced with numerous features (better material performance, sound, scalling, controllers support, etc.).

DOSBox is an emulator program which emulates an IBM PC compatible computer running a DOS operating system. Many IBM PC compatible graphics and sound cards are also emulated. This means that original DOS programs (including PC games) are provided with an environment in which they can run correctly, even though the modern computers have dropped support for that old environment.

VBA Link by denopqrihg is a modified version of GBA Emulator VisualBoy Advance. VBALink now supports GBA/SP multiplayer link cable emulation and linking of up to 4 gameboy emulators.

Reicast is a Sega Dreamcast emulator primarily aims for speed and to run on PC and Android. It is derived from the nullDC codebase.

Supermodel emulates Sega's Model 3 arcade platform, allowing you to play a number of ground-breaking arcade classics on your PC. It uses OpenGL and the SDL library, and can run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Model 2 Emulator, formerly Nebula Model 2, is a Sega Model 2 arcade emulator for Windows, developed by ElSemi.

There is support for increasing the internal resolution, force feedback and GPU hardware acceleration. It is for most titles, the only way to play Model 2 games.

Mupen64plus-gui is written in Qt5. It provides a user-friendly interface over Mupen64Plus and supports everything you'd expect from a mupen64plus frontend (plugin selection, configuration editing, save state management, screenshots, pausing, etc).

bsnes-hd (formally "HD Mode 7 mod, for bsnes") is a fork of bsnes that adds HD video features, such as:

HD Mode 7

Rendering the rotated, scaled or pseudo perspective backgrounds at higher resolutions. This does not involve new custom imagery or upscaling algorithms. It is a higher resolution version of the process the SNES uses.

Widescreen

Mostly for Mode 7 scenes, but also works for some other scenes/games here and there. Some setting tweaking required...

Nestopia UE (Undead Edition) is a fork of the original Nestopia source code. The purpose of the project is to enhance the original, and ensure it continues to work on modern operating systems.

Yaba Sanshiro (originally uoYabause) is an unofficial port of the SEGA Saturn Yabause emulator. This project is focused on the Android version of yabause using OpenGL ES 3.x.

Dolphin is an emulator for two recent Nintendo video game consoles: the GameCube and the Wii. It allows PC gamers to enjoy games for these two consoles in full HD (1080p) with several enhancements: compatibility with all PC controllers, turbo speed, networked multiplayer, and even more!

Snes9x is a portable, freeware Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulator. It basically allows you to play most games designed for the SNES and Super Famicom Nintendo game systems on your PC or Workstation; which includes some real gems that were only ever released in Japan.

Snes9x is the result of well over three years worth of part-time hacking, coding, recoding, debugging, divorce, etc. (just kidding about the divorce bit). Snes9x is coded in C++, with three assembler CPU emulation cores on the i386 Linux and Windows ports.

MAME is a multi-purpose emulation framework.

MAME's purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important "vintage" software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source code to MAME serves as this documentation. The fact that the software is usable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation (how else can you prove that you have recreated the hardware faithfully?). Over time, MAME (originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) absorbed the sister-project MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), so MAME now documents a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers, video game consoles and calculators, in addition to the arcade video games that were its initial focus.

Nestopia is an open-source NES/Famicom emulator developed by Martin Freji and designed to emulate the NES hardware as accurately as possible.

bsnes is a standalone SNES emulator, utilizing the higan SNES core, but with a much faster multi-threaded PPU renderer.

The bsnes project is also going to focus heavily on ease of use, providing support for direct ROM file loading, automatic gamepad mapping (where possible), soft-patching support, etc. The goal is to provide all of the recent higan SNES emulation improvements and the SNES preservation project work to a wider audience.

BlastEm is a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive emulator developed primarily for Linux (though it's also available for macOS and Windows). BlastEm aims for cycle accuracy while also hitting lower system requirements than Exodus; it is one of the only emulators to properly run Overdrive 2, a demoscene production by the group Titan meant to showcase the capabilities of the Genesis through digital art. The first Overdrive demo runs perfectly which only Genesis Plus GX can also claim. Commercial game compatibility is close to, but not quite at, 100%. It is the only emulator other than Exodus that can properly display direct color DMA demos and to pass all of the tests in Nemesis' VDP FIFO Testing ROM.

Play! is an attempt at creating a PlayStation 2 emulator for the Win32, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android platforms. The compatibility is, for now, only around 17.93% (2021-01-15) but Play! is currently the only available emulator for Mac.

Redream is a work-in-progress Dreamcast emulator, enabling you to play your favorite Dreamcast games in high-definition on Windows, Mac and Linux.

DeSmuME is a Nintendo DS emulator developed by YopYop156 for Mac, Windows and Linux. He has stopped working on it in the beginning of April 2006 and passed the torch to Yabause team of developers.

mGBA is a new generation of Game Boy Advance emulator. The project started in April 2013 with the goal of being fast enough to run on lower end hardware than other emulators support, without sacrificing accuracy or portability. Even in the initial version, games generally played without problems. mGBA has only gotten better since then, and now boasts being the most accurate GBA emulator around.

VBA-M is a fork from the now inactive VisualBoy Advance project, with goals to improve the capatibility and features of the emulator.

Yabause is a Sega Saturn emulator. It currently runs on FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and Dreamcast.

melonDS is a work-in-progress Nintendo DS emulator aiming for better performance than DeSmuME and to emulate Wi-Fi and local multiplayer capabilities. It's developed by Arisotura (formerly know as StapleButter), a former contributor to DeSmuME.

DEmul is a Sega Dreamcast, NAOMI, NAOMI 2 and Atomiswave emulator for Windows, developed by Wind, DreamZzz, MetalliC, ajax16384 and CaH4e3.

Project64 is a Nintendo 64 emulator written in the programming language C for the operating system Windows. This software uses a plug-in system allowing third-party groups to use their own plug-ins to implement specific components. Project64 can play Nintendo 64 games on a computer reading ROM images, either dumped from the read-only memory of a Nintendo 64 ROM cartridge or created directly on the computer as homebrew.

ePSXe (enhanced PSX emulator) is a PlayStation video game console emulator for x86-based PC hardware with Microsoft Windows or Linux, as well as devices running Android. It was written by three authors, using the aliases calb, _Demo_ and Galtor.

pSX (psxfin) fully emulates the Sony Playstation. Compatibility is fairly high. An R3000 debugger is contained which may be of interest to people working on translations. An interesting emulator when it was released.

Mupen64Plus is a cross-platform plugin-based N64 emulator which is capable of accurately playing many games. Included are four MIPS R4300 CPU emulators, with dynamic recompilers for 32-bit x86 and 64-bit amd64 systems, and necessary plugins for audio, graphical rendering (RDP), signal co-processor (RSP), and input. There is 1 included OpenGL video plugin, called RiceVideo. There are 3 other excellent video plugins being maintained by wahrhaft, called Arachnoid, Glide64, and Z64.

XEBRA is a Japanese Playstation emulator coded by Dr. Hell. It focuses on accuracy and only outputs in native resolution.

PCSX2 is a free and open-source PlayStation 2 emulator for Windows and Linux that supports a wide range of PlayStation 2 video games with a high level of compatibility and functionality.

Mednafen is a portable, utilizing OpenGL and SDL, argument(command-line)-driven multi-system emulator.

PPSSPP can run your PSP games on your PC in full HD resolution, and play them on Android too. It can even upscale textures that would otherwise be too blurry as they were made for the small screen of the original PSP.

NO$GBA (pronounced "no cash GBA") is a Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance emulator for Windows & DOS. It is one of the first Nintendo DS emulators to successfully run games, as well as being the only known DS emulator for DOS. NO$GBA was developed by Martin Korth.

Genesis Plus features very accurate emulation of the original Sega Genesis, even to the point that some software which has problems on the real hardware (Sonic Crackers, for example) exhibits the same behaviour under emulation.

higan is a multi-system emulator that is known for emulating its underlying hardware very accurately. It can run every SNES title ever released. It started as a SNES emulator but currently supports over 10 systems.

VisualBoyAdvance (commonly abbreviated as VBA) is a free emulator of the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance handheld game consoles as well as of Super Game Boy and Super Game Boy 2.

nullDC is an open source Sega Dreamcast and NAOMI emulator for Windows, developed by drk||Raziel (currently under the nickname skmp) and ZeZu.

Gens is a win32/unix Sega Genesis / Sega CD / Sega 32X emulator.

Kega Fusion, also shortened as Fusion and initially named Kega II, is a multi-system emulator for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X developed by Steve Snake. It is the follow-up to Kega Lazarus, and is the last in Steve Snake's Sega emulators after KGen, KGen98, Kega and Lazarus.

A 3DO open-source, low-level emulator based on the FreeDO source code.

ZSNES is an open-source Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulator written in x86 assembly, C, and C++. Bleeding with cutting edge SNES emulation, ZSNES is easily comparable to other leading SNES emulators, such as Snes9x, SNEeSe, Super Sleuth, and bsnes.

Special thanks to the Snes9x team for all of their help and also for the excellent SNES emulator they have developed. We wish them the very best of luck!