The History of NES Emulators - NESticle, xNes and Nofrendo

This is the third part of our article about NES/Famicom emulators, now talking about the first free emulator and the most famous NES emulator of the 1990s. We also talk about the important xNes, which later inspired the creation of the legendary multi-console emulator, MESS, and Nofrendo. Follow along.

NESticle (1997)

It was released on April 3, 1997 for MS-DOS by Icer Addis, from the Bloodlust Software team. It is simply considered the greatest emulator of all time, and the most used in the 1990s. It is the first free playable NES emulator. The emulator had many interesting functions for the time, such as save state, online play, editing game graphics and recording audio and videos of the games. Another difference of the emulator was the possibility of running on simple computers of the time, such as a 486, for example. NESticle used NES.DOC, which was the console hardware documentation created by Marat Fayzullin for the creation of the iNes. In addition, Y0SHi and other influencers of the scene helped the project with the sound part. Other people in the field also helped with the project, such as Neill Corlett, Neil Bradley, the website Zophar, among others.

The Windows version of the emulator was released in August 1997, known as NESticle 95, as it ran on Windows 95, Microsoft's most recent system at the time, and had three updates in total, the last one in September 1997.

An interesting fact about its name. It was a combination of NES (Nintendo Entertainment System, the little Nintendo) and testicle, from the English testicle (believe it or not). The name is as bizarre as the trashy visuals used in its emulators.

A cracker named Donald Moore stole the emulator's source code, and since then Icer Addis decided to discontinue the project, which ended in August 1998, with the last version of the emulator in DOS mode, known as x.xx.

In a survey conducted by the famous emulator website, Zophar in May 1998, it was found that 26.6% of the users who participated had had their first experience in the world of emulation through NESticle, followed by 20.7% by others and 20.5% by Virtual GameBoy.

xNes (1997)

xNes began to be developed in 1997 by Nicolas Hamel, aka Shin Gouky, alongside Robert Rosario, aka Skeletor, and Brad Oliver, aka Bradman, who helped with the emulator's coding. David Michel from Magic Engine was not a permanent member, but he also helped with the project, being one of those responsible for creating the source code and one of the most important for the first operation of the emulator. One of the first versions of the emulator was released around September 1997 for MS-DOS. In October, a version for Linux was released by Chuck Manson and in November for MacOS by Richard Bannister. Both were also part of the xNes team. Another who was also part of the team was Jeff Mitchell, from the Retrocade and Mame projects, most likely trying to port the emulator to the UNIX system. xNes used Marat Fayzullin's 6502 emulator.

Its emulation was good in terms of colors and had good compatibility, but it did not support sound and the emulation was accelerated (like most emulators of the time), so that it could run at a speed considered normal on very slow computers. It ran well on a Pentium 1 computer with 8MB of RAM. On current PCs, it is almost impossible to play due to the speed of the games. It was based on line code, but promised a GUI in the future, as well as sound support. Regarding the ROMs, it ran in the .NES format of Marat's iNes emulator. Its last version was released in November 1997. In January 1998, they announced the discontinuation of the emulator and released its source code. Despite this, the Linux version continued and was released in October 1998.

The project had help from important people. In addition to Marat, Shawn from the Allegro library, Yoshi with his nestech.doc documentation, Loopy for the color palette, and Zoop from the Meka SMS project for hosting the project website.

After the end of the project, Brad Oliver and Richard Bannister joined forces to create the MESS project for multi-emulation of computers, consoles and portables. The emulator was released in March 1998, and the first system emulated in the project was the NES, born from the old xNes code brought to the project by Brad and combined with Matt Conte's sound code. The xNes also had a fork released in June 1998 by Brazilian Fabiano Lopes, known as Fx3, called Rocknes. Bannister also ported this fork to MacOS.

Nofrendo (1998)

Nofrendo was released by Matt Conte on February 8, 1998 for MS-DOS. In late 1997, Matt contributed to the XGS projects for Apple II and PCAE for Atari 2600. That's when he had the idea of ​​having his own project. Developed in partnership with DripWare Software, Nofrendo featured Neil Bradley's 6502 processor, .STA format for save state, compatibility with NESticle (and changed to .RTX format in the latest version of the emulator), gamepad and keyboard support, digital sound, volume control, five video modes, two types of selectable color palettes, screenshot, reset, frameskip, among others. Its distinguishing feature was its sound emulator, later used in other projects, such as MESS and MAME in 2000 and Squeem, Nester and UONester in 2001. Its palettes were also used in the Squeem emulator in 2001. In addition, the emulator had good speed and compatibility, and worked well on slow PCs, such as Pentium 1. Despite this, it had several buggy problems with the background images of some games.

The creation of the project was quite unusual. Matt just wanted to show himself that he could create a NES emulator. His friends liked it so much that he was forced to make it available to the public. Matt always aimed for precision, trying to make the emulator as faithful as possible to the original console. Its unusual name originated from the term No-Friend-o known to refer to Nintendo addicts.

The project had help from several influencers in the scene, such as Neil Bradley, Sardu from NESticle, Marat Fayzullin from iNes, Jeremy Chadwick, Yoshi from Nestech.txt, John Dullea from PCAE, Paul Robson from A26, among others.

In March 1998, he released his last version, but continued working on the project. Around June 1998, he was rewriting the project, and still released some updates during 1999. In 2000, he officially decided to close the project. In May 2001, a pre-version for Linux was released, known as Nofrendo SDL, created by Neil Stevens in partnership with Matt. It also came with its source code to be ported or forked. Because it was SDL, it allowed ports to several systems.

Matt was also known for utilities from the NES scene, such as NEStoFAM for the .FAM format exclusively for the Famicom.exe emulator and CajoNES, the continuation of the same program expanded for the PRG/CHR formats of the Pasofami emulator, both respectively in February and July 1997, in addition to the NES music player in the .NSF format, called Nosefart released for DOS and Winamp in May 1999, and which also used his sound emulator.

In addition, he also helped with projects such as the Apple II XGS and A2600 PCAE in 1997 and the NES, LoopyNES, JNes and FCE Ultra projects in 1999. Around April 2001, he also created the Nes6502 (known as the fast 6502 core), an emulator of the NES CPU, used in the Squeem, RockNES and Nester emulators in the same year of its creation. This processor was never used in his Nofrendo.

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