The History of NES Emulators - Family Computer Emulator, Famicom For Mega Drive and Pasofami

The first part about the history of NES emulators, starting with the prototypes Family Computer Emulator and Famicom For Mega Drive, and the pioneer Pasofami.

Family Computer Emulator (1990)

The first NES and console emulator was the Family Computer Emulator, developed in 1990 by Haruhisa Udagawa. Udagawa was a developer who worked for Namco, Sonic Team and KAZe. For Sonic Team, for example, he helped program Sonic Jam in 1997. Released on December 12, 1990, the Family Computer Emulator only ran a few games, such as Donkey Kong, Xevious, Famicom Tennis, Mario Bros and Space Invaders (these were games that Udagawa tested). Despite this feat, the emulator ran slowly, without sound and required specific ROM size, pixel and graphic quality to run. Something very primitive. It also only ran ROMs in .bin format. The version released in December 1990 would have been 0.35, which leads us to believe that there were many other versions of the emulator before this stable version. The system only ran on the Sharp 68k computer. Other sources say that it ran only on a Japanese computer called FM Towns. The author said that it ran on FM Towns and MS-DOS. The project was not taken forward.

Famicom For Mega Drive (1991)

The following year, a NES emulator for the Mega Drive began to be developed. It was one of the first video game emulators in the world and the first to run on another console. The person responsible for the emulator was Yuji Naka, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog. Yuji's intention was simply to show his peers what he could do. The project never went ahead. Yuji has a long resume. He programmed the four Sonic games for the Mega Drive, as well as the two Nights for the Sega Saturn, and the two Phantasy Star games for the Master System. Space Harrier, OutRun and Black Belt for the Master System were also programmed by him.

Pasofami (1993)

The third NES emulation project, and what is officially considered the first, was developed in 1992 by a Japanese man, Nobuaki Andou, and released in April 1993 for the FM Towns computer and MS-DOS system. It required 2MB of RAM to run. Despite its history, it was also a very deficient emulator, with MIDI sound and limited instrumentation on each channel, which resulted in low sound quality, and only sprite emulation that limited the quality of the games. Over time, the emulator was improved, but very slowly. In addition to being a paid program, with a free game time limit of 5 minutes and all in Japanese, it also required technical knowledge to run the games. In conclusion, his system was pirated and distributed worldwide. In return, Nobuaki allowed sales only to Japanese people, and installed malware in the program to format the hard drive of anyone who obtained the program illegally.

Around 1996, it began to support Windows 3.1 and 95. One of the first versions of this phase was 2.6b from July 1996. This version included the ability to record images in BMP and sound in MIDI. Around 1997, it began to support DirectX. One of the first versions was released in February 1997 as 1.1a. From the DirectX versions onwards, thanks to the support of DirectSound, it began to make sound channels available in PCM as well. The releases continued until version 2.8e in October 1998.

In December 1998, Pasofami '99 was released. This version became 32-bit, unlike the previous one, which was improved to 32-bit thanks to DirectX. It runs on both Windows and FM-TOWNS. Also in 1998, version 0.0j was released, which accepts ROMs compressed in ZIP and LZH with extensions .NES, .NEZ (with Z) and .PSO. In January 1999, version 1.0a was released with support for Windows NT and the English language, although the documentation and part of the menus were still in Japanese.

The following versions released throughout 1999 and early 2000 also added several improvements, such as improvements in sound, execution speed, improvements in MIDI sound, with the possibility of saving sound files in .MID, improved save state and expanded to 10 recording slots, player for playing NSF files, which are sound files from NES games, support for Famicom Disk System, improvements in the front-end, display of 16 sound channels, support for netplay, as well as several improvements in menus and ROM folders.

One of the emulator's distinguishing features was that it had ROMs in its own formats created by Nobuaki. They were divided into two files, usually .PRG and .CHR, but there were also .PRM and .700 formats. These were the first NES ROM extensions created.

In March 2000, it began to support loading save states from the famous NESticle emulator, in addition to the possibility of saving sprites in BMP format. In June 2000, it introduced the possibility of setting the volume of each sound output channel in real time, as well as mixing the outputs of MIDI and PCM sound channels. In July 2000, it began to support recording video in AVI and support for the function of extracting/sucking NES cartridges and saving them in .NES format to be played in the emulator. All the user needed was a converter for this. This support for extracting ROMs, the famous ripping or dumping, became one of the main tasks of the emulator over the years.

In September 2000, it released its latest version as Pasofami 99 and in December 2000 it went back to being called just Pasofami, and began to preliminarily add Gameboy emulation. Around September 2001, it began supporting the Super Nintendo, four years after discontinuing its Super Pasofami emulator. In February 2002, it stopped supporting the English version. In June 2002, it created another player, now with the ability to play sound files (non-NSF) in WAV, MP3 and MID formats.

In December 2002, he developed Pasodisk, a floppy disk for the Famicom Disk System to rip games from the Famicom add-on, costing 2,900 yen including shipping. This service was limited to users with a Pasodisk registration. In February 2003, he added support for Chameleon USB, a device created in January 2002 by the company Optimize that allowed games to be extracted from cartridges. Over time, Nobuaki was able to detect cartridges from different consoles and rip them via Pasofami. By 2003, the emulator was able to extract (the famous rip) cartridges from SFC, GG and MD in March, SMS in April, PCE, GB, GBC, GBA and MSX in May, 32X, Sega Mark III, SC-3000, SG-1000, MSX2 and Neo Geo Pocket in August and Nintendo 64 in September. Over time, the ability to rip cartridges with larger ROM memory, as well as special Super Nintendo cartridges and others, has also increased. In March 2005, the NSF player recording output was saved in MIDI, MP3 and WAV formats. In April 2005, cheat codes were added. The emulator has its own extension, .XTM. In February 2007, it began supporting ripping games from the WonderSwan and WonderSwan Color handhelds. In September 2010, the Chameleon USB drive was updated for 64-bit systems.

From 2010 onwards, updates were basically about the function of extracting NSF sound from ROMs and the cartridge ripping process and fixing bugs related to this. At a certain point, the emulator had compatibility with more than 2,000 NES titles.

The emulator was continuously developed until 2018, with the last version released on March 25, 2018. Nobuaki Andou passed away on May 5, 2018, from stomach cancer, a disease he had been battling since August 2017. After his death, his son Kouji Andou ended the emulator's services and left the website active in honor of Nobuaki's work.