The History of Sega Genesis Emulators - Megadrive Emulator, GenEm and Genecyst

Today we will talk about the first Mega Drive emulators: Megadrive Emulator, GenEm and Genecyst; the latter being the first popular emulator for the console.

Megadrive Emulator (1994)

Megadrive Emulator or simply Mega Drive, was the first Mega Drive/Genesis emulator developed. It was released in 1994 for MS-DOS. Its creators were Steve Riddle, The Careless Gamer (]TcG[), as the main programmer, and Baalzamon, Berzerker and Stegg, as secondary programmers. The emulator was in its initial state, and only ran Sonic, and even then with deficiencies, such as slowness, problems with sprites and no sound functionality. The project ended when the source code was lost in a hard drive failure. The last version released was dated July 1994 as 0.5 Version 2. There is information that the emulator would have had a last version in July 1996, but there is no confirmation about this. Megadrive Emulator is considered one of the first console emulators, being among the first five known.

GenEm (1996)

GenEm was developed by German Markus Gietzen in 1996. It was the second Mega Drive emulator to be released, around mid-1996 for MS-DOS, but it also had several problems. It ran several games, but only Sound Blaster could play most of the sounds. The Z80, which was a microprocessor used in the SMD as a sound coprocessor, was only available with commands from the DOS prompt. Games that did not have sound emulation on the Z80 worked with very slow sound. In fact, this was one of the biggest complaints about emulators at the time: the sound was only stable on expensive sound cards. Despite this, even with everything favorable for playing sound, some games simply had no sound. Also in 1996, the GenNew executable began to be released along with the emulator, for slower computers, running at twice the speed of the regular GenEm. In September 1996, Airds released a front-end for GenEm, called GenEm Loader, for Windows, which had the help of Markus in some information displayed in it about Mega Drive. In October 1996, a version for Windows 95 and NT, called GenEm95, was released. This version came without sound, but with the option to enable sound emulation through the Z80. The last version of the emulator was released in May 1997, for DOS and Windows. In the same month, the last version of GenEm Loader was also released. In July 1997, GenEm was ported to PowerPC (running on MacOS) by Brian Verre, and in 1999 to UNIX/Linux by Magi under the name XGenEM. This was the first port of an MD emulator to UNIX, and one of the first to Linux, alongside Generator in November 1998 and DGen in June 1999. Five versions of the emulator were released in total. Markus also became known in 1996 and 1997 for creating the Atari 5200 emulator, XL-It!

Genecyst (1997)

Genecyst was created by Icer Addis of Bloodlust Software in 1997, and released in June of the same year for MS-DOS. It followed the same interface and menus as the NES emulator, NESticle, from the same company. The emulator was the first to actually run a large list of NES games, and without the problems found in previous projects. It implemented, among others, save state, sound recording (with the option of recording general sound and FM sound) and conversions of SMD games to BIN. In addition, it also supported pause, reset, snapshot, various video resolution sizes, frameskip, Vsync, two controls (with support for both keyboard and joypad), support for various technical information, such as palette colors and the ability to change layers (between background, sprites and parallax), choice of game region (USA, JP and EU), in addition to emulating all sound chips, such as FM, PSG and DAC, and giving the ability to play the sound at up to 44,100 Hz. The emulator was also a pioneer in recording audio in the .GYM format, which is the original SMD audio. GYM is the abbreviation for Genesis Yamaha, because it records the sound directly from the 2612 chip, providing a clean sound with digital quality. Other SMD emulators later supported this function. In addition to the DOS versions having more memory and processing at their disposal because they did not share them with the operating system, the emulator also used little of each of these. It only required a Pentium 1 with 8 MB of RAM to run the games. The emulator also had good support from the emulation scene, such as Ishmair with information and help about the YM2612 sound chip, Neill Corlett with his 68k emulator, Merlyn LeRoy with his Game Genie, as well as help from Marat Fayzullin from the MasterGear Master System project and the legendary emulator website, Zophar. For some time, Genecyst was considered the best Mega Drive emulator out there. The emulator had seven updates from June to September 1997, when it went on hiatus. It returned with the latest version in August 1998, bringing loading of games compressed in ZIP format, sound recording in WAV format and support for stereo sound. Despite being closed in 1998, Genecyst was widely used until the early 2000s.

The History of the Sega Genesis - Its Games, Competition with the SNES and Add-ons

A little bit of the history of the Mega Drive, with its arcade-inspired hardware, its launch, its add-ons, its competition with the SNES and its games.

Mega Drive

The Mega Drive, or Sega Genesis in the US, was released in 1988 in Japan, and was a competitor to the Nintendo and the newly created PC Engine. Its hardware was based on the Sega System 16 arcade system created a year earlier, which used the Zilog Z80 and M68k processors. In the MD, the Zilog Z80 was used as the sound coprocessor and the 68k as the main CPU. Its 68k processor was 16-bit and had 7.6 MHz and its Zilog Z80 coprocessor had 3.5 MHz. It also used the PSG SN76489 sound chip, based on the SG-1000 and Master System versions with 4 channels of PCM sound and a Yamaha 2612 chip with 6 channels of FM sound. Its GPU (video processor) was a VDP called Sega 315-5313 or Yamaha 7101 at 13.4 MHz, based on the Sega VDP of the SMS, which in turn was based on the TMS9918 of the MSX and SG-1000 (that is, the graphics part of Sega consoles was always based on that of their predecessor consoles). It also provided 512 colors with 64 simultaneous. And finally, it had 136kb of total RAM, 64 for the main system, 64 for video and 8 for audio.

The console had some peripherals, such as the Sega CD, released in 1991, which added games with modern digital sound and dimension and rotation, similar to the Mode 7 games for SNES, and the 32X, released in 1994, with games with more colors and polygons. Both used the MD hardware to enhance themselves. The MD also took advantage of them, such as acquiring better sound with the Sega CD and better colors with the 32X. The console also provided access to the network through the Mega Modem, which was connected to the back of the console and which allowed the download of some titles to the console through the Network System service. The accessory was released in 1990 in Japan, and made 24 titles available for download, most of which were games that were never released on cartridges. These were games of a maximum of 128kb, due to the network limits of the time. A game took on average eight minutes to download. The accessory and service were also launched in Brazil in 1995, both under the name Sega Mega Net. Unlike the original version that required a modem connected to the back of the console, this version worked with a cartridge that connected to the console's main input, with a cable to connect to the telephone line.

The success of the console, which was known as an arcade at home, given the various ports it received from these hardware, was soon consolidated. Regarding its cartridges, there was a difference between the Japanese and American ones, not in the board that was identical, but rather in the plastic casing, but they fit easily into any Mega Drive. However, there was a region lock in the console's hardware, unlike Nintendo consoles that had a physical lock, preventing games from other regions from working on their consoles made in other countries. In the US, the console was released in 1989, as Sega Genesis, because the name Mega Drive was already registered in the country. In Brazil, it was released in 1990, by TecToy, which already brought the Master System console to the country. The model and region were based on the American console. The second model of the console was released in Brazil in 1992, being the same device, but now, with Sonic The Hedgehog in memory, and no longer Altered Beast as in the first version. The third version of the console (inspired by the second American version) was compact and was the best-selling in the country from 1993 to 2001. The console with the Japanese system was never released in the country, but as most Japanese games were recreated in the West, few games remained unknown to Brazilians.

With the arrival of the SNES in 1990 and its success from 1991 onwards, competition with the MD became frenetic. Franchises such as Mortal Kombat, Fatal Fury and Street Fighter became one of the biggest battles between consoles, with ports that were sometimes better for one console, sometimes better for another. Other games competed with the SNES, such as DC Comics' Batman Returns, Marvel's Wolverine Adamantium Rage and Captain America, Disney's Aladdin and The Lion King, Warner's Animaniacs and Taz Mania, the Aero Acrobat, Aerobiz, Bubsy, Earthworm Jim, Double Dragon, Power Rangers, Robocop 3 and Terminator franchises, as well as Battletoads, Pitfall, Pit-Fighter, Rock'n Roll Racing, and countless other games.

As for its games, franchises such as Sonic The Hedgehog, Simpsons, Strider, Shining Force, Phantasy Star, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Jurassic Park and Shinobi were very successful on the console. Other specific niches were also part of the console, such as racing games, such as the Road Rash, Super Monaco GP and Top Gear 2 franchises; sports games, such as the World Cup, FIFA Soccer and NBA Jam franchises; fighting games, such as Samurai Shodown, Art of Fighting and Primal Rage; RPG games, such as Wonder Boy in Monster World, Beyond Oasis and Dungeons & Dragons; simulation games, such as Urban Strike, After Burner II and Populous; Run and Gun games, such as Contra: Hard Corps, Alien Soldier and Zombies Ate My Neighbors; platform games, such as Comix Zone, Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Alien 3; and beat'em up games, such as Alien Storm, Tomjam & Earl and Altered Beast. Puzzle games, such as Puyo Puyo, Columns and Lemmings. Shmup games, such as the Thunder Force franchise, Darius II and Sub-Terrania. Anime games, such as Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z and Yu Yu Hakusho. Disney games, such as several Mickey games (such as Fantasia and Castle of Illusion), Mogli and QuackShot. Warner Bros. games, such as Bugs Bunny and some Tiny Toons and Taz Mania games. DC Comix games, such as the Superman and Batman franchises (such as Batman and Robin and Batman Forever) and the Justice League Task Force game. And finally, Marvel games, such as the Spider-Man franchise (such as Maximum Carnage and Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin) and X-Men franchise (such as Children of the Atom), as well as The Punisher. The Mega Drive had almost 900 games released in its nine years of life. The console was discontinued in 1997 with 30.75 million units sold.

Simulator: Aerobiz, Jungle/Urban/Desert Strike, Populous, After Burner II, King Salmon

RPG: Shining Force, Phantasy Star, Gauntlet IV, Light Crusader, Landstalker, Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun, Wonder Boy in Monster World, Beyond Oasis

Puzzle: Columns, Puyo Puyo, Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, Lemmings, Zoom, Blockout, Pac-Attack, Puzzle & Action

Run And Gun: Contra: Hard Corps, Alien Soldier, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Ranger-X, Gunstar Heroes, Mega Turrican

Platform: Alien 3, Strider, Comix Zone, Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Shinobi, Judge Dredd, Sonic The Hedgehog, Simpsons, Jurassic Park, Pitfall, Battletoads, Robocop 3, Earthworm Jim, Terminator, Aero Acrobat, Bubsy

Beat'Em Up: Double Dragon, Tomjam & Earl, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, Altered Beast, Power Rangers

Racing: Out-Run, Road Rash and Super Monaco GP, Virtua Racing, Top Gear 2, Rock'n Roll Racing

Sports: World Cup, FIFA Soccer, NBA Jam, NHL (Hockey), WWF (Wrestling), NFL (American Football)

Fighting: Mortal Kombat, Fatal Fury, Street Fighter, Samurai Shodown, Eternal Champions, Art of Fighting, Primal Rage and Virtua Fighter II, Pit-Fighter

Shmup: Thunder Force, Darius II, Musha, Truxton, Sub-Terrania, 

Animes: Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Maruko Chan, Shin Chan, Hokuto no Ken, Patlabor, Slam Dunk, Yu Yu Hakusho

Disney: Aladdin, Lion King and Mickey Mania, Mickey (as Fantasia and Castle of Illusion), Toy Story, Mogli, Goofy, Pocahontas, QuackShot, The Little Mermaid

Warner Bros: Bugs Bunny, Animaniacs, Taz Mania, Tiny Toon, Taz Mania

DC Comix: Superman, Batman (as Batman and Robin, Batman Forever and Batman Returns), Justice League Task Force

Marvel: Spider-Man (as Maximum Carnage and Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin), X-Men (as Children of the Atom), The Punisher, Wolverine Adamantium Rage, Captain America and The Avengers, The incredible Hulk

The History of NES Emulators - Squeem, Nintendulator and Nestopia

Today we will talk about the Squeem, Nintendulator and Nestopia emulators, as well as other less famous emulators for NES.

Squeem (2000)

Squeem was released in February 2000 for MS-DOS by Dead Body, and already came with its own interface (GUI) created by the author. Squeem was one of the pioneers in adding sound, video and control plug-ins to NES emulators. According to its creator, Dead Body, who was only 15 at the time, did not know that the Pretendo emulator had done the same thing a year earlier. The creators of Pretendo later ended up helping him with the project. Dead created everything from scratch, taking inspiration from the plug-ins of the first PS1 emulator, PSEmu Pro. At first, it ran without sound, was accelerated, had bugs and had few compatible games. Also in February, its second version was released, this time for Windows. Dead alternated between releases, sometimes with a version for Windows, sometimes with a version for DOS. In March, it added support for plug-ins, along with its own video (Glide) and joystick plug-ins, as well as full-screen mode. In April, it began supporting save states, Famicom DiskSystem, sound plug-ins, frameskip, and rewrote its mapper system and created its own 6502 emulator, called Dead6502. From the beginning, it used Neil Bradley's m6502 emulator, which it continued using for a while until it implemented its own. In May, it added scanlines mode and Game Genie. In December, it completely rewrote the emulator. Its last version was released in April 2001. It came with support for netplay and several video and sound modes, mostly DirectX plugins (remember that the plug-ins were downloaded separately). Another of its differences was the choice of CPU cores. It made available three of its Dead6502 cores, in addition to Matt Conte's Nes6502 and Shu Kondo's s6502 cores. It also allowed you to choose the APUs, which were audio processors, with those from Matt Conte and Xodnizel and palettes from Chris Covell, Matt Conte, Kevtris and Roni available. For a better experience, you had to test the plug-ins, processors and palettes with each other and see which one was the best compatible. Sometimes certain combinations would change the game or speed it up, for example. The project also supported screenshots in .BMP format and pause (in the first versions), reset (in the latest versions) and screenshots in .PCX format (in the latest version), among others. Squeem was a very promising emulator, with a project for a Linux version started after its last release, but never released. Dead Body created another NES emulator in 2002 called Marijuanes, which only had one version released.

Nintendulator (2002)

Nintendulator was a project started by Quietust using a recently bankrupt emulator called NinthStar NES by Akilla as a base, with only one version released in January 2001. NinthStar initially wanted to become a multi-console system, but the idea ended up being abandoned along with the project. Quietust reworked several things in the emulator. It also used mapper DLLs from the NESten emulator until April 2003. Among its many options, it ran well-known NES game formats of the time, such as NSF, UNIF, iNES and FDS, the latter belonging to Disk System games. It also supported Game Genie, four controllers, save state and video recording. Throughout its existence, it has had very few releases, being released in June 2002 for Windows, and having another nine updates in March 2005, January 2006, June 2009, January 2010, August 2014, January 2019, March and July 2022 and July 2024. Nowadays, it is considered, alongside Nestopia and FCEUX, one of the three most popular NES emulators.

Nestopia (2003)

Nestopia was developed in mid-2002 by Martin Freij in C++. The first version was released in June 2003 for Windows, and its distinguishing feature was its CPU requirement, with a minimum processor requirement of 800 MHz, which was not a small feat at the time. This was due to its high emulation accuracy. It was also known as one of the emulators with the greatest game compatibility. All of this made it considered the best emulator of all time, and it is still used today, even after its discontinuation. The emulator supported the main tools of the NES and its competing emulators, such as CPU/PPU synchronization, netplay kaillera, image filters, support for VS System and Disk System, games in UNIF, FDS, NSF, INES and other formats, Game Genie, save state, video and sound recording in AVI and WAV, screenshot, as well as support for various controls and keyboards. It also allowed sound customization, with changes in multiple channels, noise, bit, hertz, between mono and stereo, and allowed choice of sound driver to use. And video customization, with changes in resolution, filters, bits, palettes, brightness, saturation, color, hue, and also choice of video drivers. Other features included having an NSF file player, which were the original NES sound files, and a ROM editor, with modifications between NTSC, PAL, RAM and ROM memory, for console or arcade, horizontal or vertical screen, among others. Like many other projects, it had help from many influencers in the field, such as Marat Fayzullin from iNES with documents, Matthew Conte with audio processing information, CaH4e3 from the FCEU-MM project with mapping information, Xodnizel from FCE Ultra also with mappings, Yoshi with the nestech.txt documentation, among many others. The MacOS X version was released in December 2003 by Richard Bannister, a leading name in ports and emulators for Macintosh, who continued to update it even after the original project ended. The last update to the Mac version was released in May 2021. There was also another version for MacOS X around July 2007 by Deamoncollector. The Linux version was released in May 2007 by Richter Belmont, who had left the Emuhype project, which developed emulators for arcades. The last version of Nestopia was released in June 2008. The emulator had 32 updates in total. There was an attempt to port it to the Nintendo 3DS called Nestopia3DS in 2006, but this never came to fruition. Nestopia was ported to the Xbox in 2010 by Nes6502 under the name NestopiaX. It was also ported to the PS3 under the name NestopiaPlus, also running on Linux and Windows, and to iOS as just Nestopia, both in 2013. Also in 2013, it was added to the OpenEmu multi-system emulator for MacOS X. Nestopia has always been open source, which has led to the creation of several ports and forks of it. In March 2010, a hack of the emulator was created by Keith Kelly, known as Nestopia 1.41.1 Unofficial.Its purpose was to fix a joypad lag in the original emulator, which consisted of a delay when the VSync option was activated. In May 2011, it was updated by Geestarraw, adding full-screen support for secondary monitors on PCs with more than 1 monitor. The same author created another update in September 2012. In January 2013, notBald modified the Geestarraw version, adding several image filters. He created versions 1.41.2 and 1.41.3 in the same month. A little earlier, in late 2012, Dan Brook created a fork of Nestopia, called Nestopia Undead Edition (something like a living-dead edition), known as Nestopia UE. This project combines updates from the versions by Geestarraw, Keith, notBald (more below), and Bannister's version 1.40 AH for MacOS X. The emulator was released for Windows and Linux (it also runs on Open/Free/NetBSD, as well as Ubuntu) in 2012, and in January 2016 it was ported to MacOS X, among other systems. The project added, among others, a new interface (GUI), fullscreen mode with native resolution, OpenGL rendering and save state in SRAM (i.e. for read-only devices). Its main updates were optimized versions for several different systems. Nestopia UE was ported around February/March 2013 to libretro/RetroArch by themaister (creator of RetroArch) and twinaphex. In 2020, Rupert Carmichael joined Nestopia UE, helping Brook on the project. The last update of Nestopia UE was made in March 2024.Nestopia EU will be last updated in March 2024.Nestopia EU will be last updated in March 2024.

The History of NES Emulators - Darcnes, Pretendo, JNes and Nester

Today we will talk about the emulators Darcnes, Pretendo, JNes and Nester, the latter being one of the great NES emulators. Check it out.

Darcnes (1998)

Darcnes was created in 1998 by Alastair Bridgewater, aka Nyef. Its first version is dated December 1998 for Linux, based on the NES documentation, Nes.Doc, and the 6502 emulator, both by Marat Fayzullin, and the NES documentation called Nestech.txt by Jeremy Chadwick, aka Yoshi. Right at its launch, Alastair made it clear that the emulator would be multisystem, considering later launching support for the PC-Engine and Master System consoles. From 1999 onwards, the emulator began to support the Game Gear, PC Engine/TurboGrafix 16, Master System, ColecoVision, SG-1000, Apple II PC, PC Engine CD (only on UNIX), Famicom Disk System, SC 3000 and MSX PC systems, added respectively in January, March, May, June and November 1999, January, February and June 2000, and March 2001 (the last two systems mentioned, SC and MSX, were released in this same version in March 2001). Its DOS version (the best known) ran on command line, with only additional functions of volume control and frameskip. It supported both keyboard and joystick control. The games, specifically NES, SMS and GG, performed well, without bugs and with great sound. PC Engine ran well, but without sound and ColecoVision and FDS did not work. The Windows version was very simple, with a menu just for loading ROMs and no other additional functions. It was controlled only by keyboard. The games performed well on NES, SMS, GG and SG-1000, but the buttons didn't work on GG and SG-1000. On the PC Engine, not only did the buttons not work, but the emulation was also very fast. And ColecoVision and FDS didn't work either (at least in the tests I performed). It was also another prototype project with a great future ahead. In addition to the UNIX version, Darcnes was also ported to several other operating systems, such as MS-DOS in January 1999, Amiga in March 1999, BeOS in June 1999, Linux in August 1999, Windows in January 2000 and NetBSD in April 2001. Some of those responsible for the ports are famous people in the field, such as AmiDog, who ported emulators such as Handy, Frodo, MAME, MESS and FPSE to the Amiga, Abazan who ported DOS and ZX Spectrum games and the DGen emulator to the BeOS, the Brazilian Rafael Rigues, Sephiroth, who worked in companies that spoke of Linux, such as Conectiva and Revista do Linux, with the ports of the emulator to DOS and Linux, and the creators of the Japanese system NetBSD, as well as Vector with the Windows version. Alastair also made two official ports, for Windows in January 2000 and for BeOS in May 2000. The latest version of the emulator was released on April 1, 2001, the same day as the NetBSD port mentioned earlier.

- MS-DOS by Sephiroth in January 1999 (Also a version for Linux in August 1999, and for Power PC later. Sephiroth is a Brazilian named Rafael Rigues, who worked at Conectiva, a Linux sales and technical support company, and was a columnist and editor for Revista do Linux in 2000)

- BeOS by Abazan in June 1999 (Also responsible for porting to BeOS arcade games such as Arkanoid, Breakout, and Columns, DOS games such as Nibbles, Sokoban for the ZX Spectrum PC, and the DGen emulator for the Mega Drive)

- Windows by Vector in January 2000 (along with Alastair's official version)

- Amiga by AmiDog (also converter to Amiga for emulators like Handy for Atari Lynx, Frodo for Commodore 64, MAME and MESS for Arcade, FPSE for PS1, and others) in March 1999

- NetBSD by The Japan NetBSD Users' Group (creators of the operating system itself) in April 2001

I intend (1999)

Pretendo was an emulator written by Evan Teran and Eli Dayan, known as Proxy and Delta, in April 1999, with versions released for Windows from December 1999 onwards. A Linux version was due to be released, but I don't know if this ever happened. Its distinguishing feature was the addition of video, sound, control and CPU plug-ins, being the pioneer in using this function on the NES. Regarding its CPU plugins, it used versions inspired by the emulators of Neil Bradley, used in NESticle, Shu Kondo, used in fwNES and TNSe, used in the NESten emulator. It also used color palettes from several authors, such as Matthew Conte, from Nofrendo, Alex Krasivsky, from LandyNes, as well as palettes from LoopyNES, DarcNES, Pasofami and even the multi-emulator MESS. Without a doubt, it was a very complete emulator. Its sound plugin was reasonable, but with some flaws. Its emulation and speed were good and it had good graphics. Other than that, it had other features, such as joypad support, save state, pause, reset, snapshot, game genie and IPS patcher. It also read games in .zip format. It was one of the few NES emulators that allowed free window adjustment, despite already coming with three predetermined zoom sizes. It had four public versions, the last one being released in June 2000. Also in June, Delta created a port for BeOS.

JNes (1999)

JNes was programmed by American Steven Rellinger, known as Jabo, in March 1999, and is considered one of the best NES emulators for Windows. It was first released in October 1999. At its launch, it recommended the use of a Pentium 133 MHz, DirectX 5 and a 2MB video card. This was an average computer for the time. Initially, it came with two window sizes, fullscreen with four different sizes, stretch mode (to stretch the image horizontally), audio, support for two joypads, game genie, save state, pause, reset, snapshot and audio recording in WAV. It also used DirectX for video, audio and control input. The emulator initially supported mainly American and European games, and gradually supported Japanese games. In the following years, it added support for kaillera in April 2001, external palettes in June 2001, super 2xsai and scanlines in July 2002 and support for other languages ​​from December 2005, giving support to the Portuguese language in February 2008. By the end of the project, it had supported 20 different languages. In December 2007, it began supporting video recording in JMV format. Among the people who were part of its team is Gent, being a tester and cheat creator, as well as Smiff, RadeonUser and TrotterWatch. Jabo was also influenced by some people in the scene, such as Nyef from Darcnes, Akilla from Nintendulator, Yoshi from the Nestech.txt documentation, among many others. Regarding its interface changes, it changed its logo in the first beta release of the emulator in January 2001. In February 2005, the front-end had some more changes, among them the display of the ROMs in the center of the interface. There were some other changes over time, but only aesthetic, changing the logo in December 2007. In December 2016, it changed the icon again and the appearance of folders in the central part of the interface, for a better choice of ROMs. From January 2013, it began developing its Android version, which led to the release of updates to the Windows emulator from January 2017. Between 1999 and 2017, it had only 7 non-continuous years of hiatuses, 2003, 05, 09, 11, 12, 14 and 15. Right from the start, it was on Google Play, being removed from the platform in December 2015 and returning to it in February 2017. It also had hiatuses in the release of the Android versions in the years 2014, 2016 and 2018. Its last version for Android came out in December 2021. JNes is considered one of the NES emulators that has been updated the longest, as well as being updated the longest by the same person.

Nester (2000)

Nester was created by Darren Ranalli in early 1999 and released on August 7, 2000 for Windows. Influencers Sardu from NESticle, Marat Fayzullin from iNes, Yoshi from nestech.txt and Nyef from Darcnes helped the project in some way. Nester uses the CPU (nes6502) and audio emulators from Matt Conte, creator of the NES emulator Nofrendo. Speaking of the sound part, Nester also supports DirectInput, which brings great sound quality. It also supports the execution of songs in the .NSF format, which is the standard music format of the console itself, ported from the Nosefart plug-in for Winamp, also created by Matt Conte. The support for save state in the .SNSS format is compatible with other emulators, such as Nofrendo, LoopyNES and others. Starting in November 2000, in the third update of the emulator, Darren began to release its source code. The emulator had three releases in total, the last one in January 2001 with the Public Beta 4 version. In February 2002, a small update was made to this last version, but only superficial changes, without actually changing the executable. After that, several fork projects and ports of the emulator began to appear. The first was the Unofficial Nester (also known as UONester), by the Japanese Toshiya Takeda, which began to be developed in September 2000. The emulator had some improvements in speed and in all the main functions of the console, in addition to support for Game Genie, Disk System, games from the PlayChoice-10 and Unisystem arcades based on the NES hardware, support for several original controls and keyboards of the console, as well as recording and playback of videos and netplay via TCP/IP. Its latest version was released in July 2001, following the November 2000 release of the original Nester, Public Beta 3. The second project is the well-known NesterJ created by Japanese developers Screw and Mikami Kana, also starting around September 2000, and with its first public versions in November 2000 in English, and in January 2001 in Japanese. The project is nothing more than the fusion of the original Nester with Unofficial. The latest version of the emulator is dated July 2003. NesterJ was also ported to the PSP by Chinese developer Tensai Wang in December 2009, and known as NesterP. The third fork was NNNesterJ in early 2001 by Japanese developer R1, a modified version of NesterJ. It adds a different interface, more practical joypad configuration, video recording in AVI format, and netplay through Kaillera. Its last version was 0.23 in December 2002. The emulator also had Japanese and English versions. All three forks were for Windows. Nester was also ported to the Dreamcast as NesterDC by Ken Friece in 2001, and had further ports in 2001 by Fumihiko Takayama, 2003 by Warmtoe, 2005 by Scherzo, and 2008 by Christuserloeser. In 2002, it was ported to the Xbox as Nester X by Hikaru, who is responsible for several emulator ports for the Microsoft console.It was also ported to Gamepark 32 in 2003 and 2004 and Nintendo DS in 2005. In October 2007, the original author, Darren, registered his emulator on SourceForge, and unexpectedly updated it again in February 2009, using the Beta 4 version from February 2002 as a base. This same version received other updates, such as in February 2011, April 2013, October 2015 and August 2018. In this new phase of 2007, he had Chris Brunner at his side as project administrator.

NesterDC was a port of the emulator for the Dreamcast console, made by Ken Friece. In late 2001, Fumihiko Takayama (another Japanese guy taking care of a version of Nester lol) took over the project, and added savestate for the Dreamcast memory (for the VMU, Ken had already added it), GameGenie, bilinear filtering, NNNesterj cheatcode, and better compatibility, making the emulator the best for the NES for the Sega console. In December, he released the latest version of the emulator, 7.1. Ken released three versions of the emulator and Fumihiko five. After that, NesterDC got a port in early 2003 by Warmtoe, called Nester DC 7.1+. In late 2005, Scherzo also created a port of Nester DC, called NesterDC Special Edition (or NesterDC SE). And finally NesterDC SE is updated by Christuserloeser in December 2008 to version 1.1, correcting an error in the rom directory listing.

The History of NES Emulators - FwNES, FCE, RockNES and FCEUltra

Today we will talk about the emulators FwNES, FCE, RockNES (forked from xNes) and FCEUltra (originated from FCE), the latter being the most famous and forked NES emulator. Check it out.

fwNES (1998)

FwNes was released on February 24, 1998 by Chinese developer FanWen Yang and Japanese developer Shu Kondo for MS-DOS and Linux. Fan worked on the main core and Shu on the sound core. In addition to being one of the oldest NES emulators, it is also the pioneer in emulating the Nintendo Disk System, the famous Famicom floppy disks. The emulator runs the .FDS formats for Disk System games and .NES and .NEZ (with z) for NES games. In addition, it is a great emulator for sound, emulating the five sound channels of the NES, and the extra sound channels of the Disk System, with compatibility with several cards besides the Sound Blaster, a drama from the 1990s, which suffered with sound compatibility mainly in emulation. Despite this, some games had problems with sound emulation.

The emulator worked well on a 586 with 16Mb of RAM. However, on PCs later than those recommended for running it, it worked extremely fast, making it impossible to play. This happened so that the emulator could adapt to the low performance of older PCs. fwNES also had a great front-end, with ROM selection by folder, language selection, color, theme, save state, reset, screen, sound and joystick adjustment, palette adjustments, speed, as well as choice between Shu Kondo's and Marat Fayzullin's 6502 cores, among others. fwNes also used Neil Bradley's 6502 emulators and the NESticle NES emulator throughout the project. Also at the time, it was considered one of the best NES emulators for Linux. The emulator's latest version was released in November 1998.

In 1998, Shu also created his own NES emulator called BioNES for Windows, which only had two versions released, ending in the same year. The project was quite promising. It's a shame it didn't go ahead.

FCE (1998) FCE or Family Computer Emulator, was created in 1998 by the Japanese Bero, with its second version released in April 1998 for PC-98. The emulator uses Marat Fayzullin's 6502 processor emulation, Yoshi's NES documentation, and Sound Blaster support for DOS achieved in Reki Murakami's MSX2 PC emulator fMSX98-AT, among others. It was an extremely beginner project, with a very fast emulation speed, very poor sound, low compatibility and many bugs. The project was discontinued in 1998.

Despite its shortcomings, it inspired several other NES emulation projects, such as FCE Ultra (with its various derivatives) by TrelaneQ and NextFCE (and its PlasticNES variation) by grugru, both around January 1999 for MS-DOS. The emulator also gained a port for UNIX, as xfce by eggman around May 1999. Bero also developed other emulation projects, such as FPCE for PC-Engine and FPSE for Playstation 1.

RockNES (1998)

RockNES is a fork of the xNES emulator created by Brazilian Fabiano Lopes, known by the pseudonyms Zepper and Fx3 in 1998. RockNES was released in June 1998 for MS-DOS. Initially it was titled xNES (as a continuation of the project that ended in January 1998), changing its name in August 1998.

Initially, it used the xNES source code, but some time later it was completely rewritten. During 1998, it added save state, screenshot, and joypad, until December, when it supported the console's 4 sound channels. RockNES was one of the most functional emulators of its time. In January 2000, it released its first front-end, still in DOS mode. This front-end changed its color and size over time.

In March 2000, Alexandre da Veiga created the Windows version of the emulator, called RockNES X, a name given due to the use of DirectX required for its execution. The Windows version was released until April 2002. RockNES was only released for Windows again in October 2004, when Zepper ended the releases for DOS, which had occurred until August 2004. This version was known as RockNES/Win32, and used the same front-end as the DOS version. This front-end also changed its color, size and word spacing over time. Around the year 2000, the released versions of the emulator required a Pentium II 300Mhz processor with 128MB of RAM, and sound and video quality cards, a medium-high configuration for the time.

Regarding ports to other systems, the famous Richard Bannister ported the emulator to MacOS around October 2000, discontinuing it in October 2005, keeping only the Nestopia port that he had been working on for some time. Before RockNES, Bannister had also ported its predecessor, the xNES. Chris Vallinga ported the emulator to Linux in March 2001, discontinuing it in July of the same year. There was only one more Linux port of the emulator in July 2004, by Matheus Villela. RockNES is one of the oldest and longest-running NES and video game emulators.

Its updates occurred between 1998 and 2021, being continuous from 1998 to 2008, and with hiatuses in the years 2009, 2015, 2018 and 2019. Among the various updates it received in all these years, the one that stood out from 2010 onwards was the launch of two versions of the emulator simultaneously, one for more current technologies, and another for i586 and i686 computers, which are based on Intel processors from the 1990s. The latest version of the emulator is dated May 2021.

FCEU (1998)

FCEU, Family Computer Emulator Ultra, or simply FCE Ultra, was created in November 1998 for MS-DOS by TrelaneQ, Zaik, based on Bero's FCE emulator created in April of the same year. Trelane worked closely with Bero, and developed the Linux version of the emulator at the time of the project's release. The emulator was largely rewritten by Trelane, which resulted in a much more stable and compatible emulator. In version 0.17 for MS-DOS in September 1999, it was the first NES emulator to support Nintendo's arcade game, UniSystem (or Nintendo Vs.).

The emulator supported sound through Sound Blaster, making it one of the best NES sound emulators at the time. In addition, it also supported 5 video modes, joypad, Game Genie, save state, snapshot, among others. It also had good speed, so a fast PC was recommended to run it, and it had good compatibility due to the number of mappers it supported. In late 1999, the Linux version was released on top of version 018. The project had the help of several influencers, such as Nobuaki Andou from Pasofami, Yoshi from nestech.txt, Marat Fayzullin from iNes and Matthew Conte from Nofrendo, who provided various information about the console, among many others. It was recommended to have a Pentium 233Mhz, with 16MB of RAM, a 512KB video card and a Sound Blaster-compatible sound card to run the emulator more smoothly. The emulator also had synchronization between CPU and PPU (central and mathematical processing), which was poor in most emulators. The emulator also supported the NSF player, and the iNES and fwNES NES format ROMs and the FDS Disk System format ROMs. The emulator was closed in September 2000, when the Windows version was also released. It was a simple version, with no front-end, with only the menu to select games.

In November 2000, it was ported to Pocket PC. Also in November, Trelane released the source code, and Xodnizel became interested and began developing the emulator from then on, continuing with the DOS, Windows and Linux versions released in the same month. Around the beginning of 2001, a front-end for Windows was released, with several video, sound and joypad settings, among others. Around July 2001, it was ported by Caz to BeOS as FCEU Ultra/SDL. In mid-2002, it was ported to Xbox as StellaX. In early 2004, a version for MacOS was also released. All versions worked via the command line, except for the Windows and Xbox versions, which had their own interface. The project has dozens of versions, with graphic and sound corrections, added support for several games, and support for the Zapper gun via mouse. The last version was released in May 2004, with a correction in October. The emulator gained ports for the portable WonderSwan in 2000, GP2X in 2006 and PSP in 2006 and 2009, and for the Playstation 2 consoles in 2007 and Nintendo GameCube and Nintendo Wii in 2008. It also received a port for the portable PC, Pepper Pad (unfortunately we do not have its release year).

Because it has always been open source, several versions of the emulator have emerged, including while it was still being developed, such as FCEUD (FCE Ultra Debugger) in 2002 by Parasyte, FCEU-MM (FCEU- Mappers Modified) in 2003 by CaH4e3 going until 2016, FCEUXD (FCE Ultra eXtended-Debug) in 2004 by bbitmaster and DahrkDaiz, FCEUXD SP (FCE Ultra eXtended-Debug Sebastian Porst) in 2005 by Sebastian Porst going until 2007 and FCEUXD SP CE (FCE Ultra eXtended-Debug Sebastian Porst Championship Edition) in 2006 by UglyJoe. It also had a version with recording support, FCE Ultra Rerecording, made by blip in an unidentified year, and updated in 2006 and 2008 by Nitsuja and other influencers in the field.

In March 2006, the initial FCEU project was brought back by Anthony Giorgio and Mark Doliner, but due to lack of time they did not continue it, nor did they release any version of the emulator. Zeromus and Sebastian Porst then thought of merging all the unofficial versions and forming FCE Ultra X, or just FCEUX. The project was started in 2006, and several authors of old ports of the emulator participated, such as Parasyte (péurasait), Cah4e3, bbitmaster and Uglyjoe, as well as many other contributors. The first release was in August 2008. FCEUX played both Famicom and NES ROMs from all regions. The emulator also allows the creation of videos for the ROMs, the famous Tool-Assisted Speedrun, a feature coming from the Re-Recording version, in addition to also allowing changes to ROMs, a process known as Rom-Hacking. In March 2009, it modified the logo of its front-end. In June 2021, it released its 64-bit version, called QFCEUX, with several modifications and extensions to the front-end. FCEUX has had versions for Windows, MacOS X, Linux, UNIX and BeOS since its launch. The project had twenty-two versions released from 2008 to 2013, and in 2018, 2021 and 2022. The last version released was in March 2022. The emulator was added to multi-system emulators such as RetroArch in 2011 and OpenEmu in 2013.

Evolution of Games - Ranma ½ (1990-1996)

Today's Evolution of Games brings you the Ranma ½ anime game franchise, with its games released between 1990 and 1996, for Gameboy, PC Engine, SNES and others, of fighting, adventure, puzzle and RPG. Check it out.